Introduction
A large desk, a voluntary association, a public address, a young man jotting notes in a composition book, a set of proceedings published in the Bengali language—at first glance, such disparate phenomena might seem to offer an odd frame within which to situate the rise of philanthropy in colonial South Asia. And yet that is the goal of this article, which aims to backfill around these basic material and institutional building blocks using narrative and historical detail to suggest how philanthropy in early colonial Calcutta became regularized, institutionalized, and rendered meaningful by a range of local actors. Following the spirited attempt by the late C. A. Bayly to redeem Indian liberal actors from the stigma of ‘collaboration’, this article also risks rethinking the role of imitation in shaping the performance of public benevolence and acts of general welfare.Footnote 1
Bayly knew well that imitation had been cursed by both Swadeshi activists and contemporary post-colonial theorists, but he encouraged us to rethink dominant assumptions about cultural mimesis, not least by putting imitation in a dynamic relationship with processes of cultural translation.Footnote 2 The present attempt to explore the early articulation of philanthropy in colonial Calcutta proceeds with special emphasis on what Bayly construed as the ‘conjunctural’ quality of change in colonial South Asia.Footnote 3 Such change was shaped through global flows of knowledge and power but was expressed ‘at particular times and in particular places’ in a variety of ‘contingent fragments’.Footnote 4 Bayly did not discount the force of colonial violence, but called attention to moments of ‘epistemic compromise’ through which Indian liberals worked to reframe and repurpose European values and practices.Footnote 5 If the present article attempts similarly to examine the emergence of philanthropy in terms of cultural borrowing, it does so in a deliberate attempt to work through what Andrew Sartori has called the ‘misplaced anxiety’ of post-colonial theory regarding the question of Western influence.Footnote 6
By emphasizing the role of imitation in the emergence of philanthropic behaviours, one runs the risk of appearing to imply that this was a process that was somehow unidirectional, if not fundamentally uncreative. That is not the intention here. Certainly, that perception could be instantly mitigated were we to follow Daniel White and substitute for the concept of imitation Walter Benjamin's notion of citation. As White argues, to speak of citation is to speak more adequately of the recursive ways in which identity is constructed within the ebb and flow of styles, voices, values, and institutions.Footnote 7 The appeal of White's proposal notwithstanding, I suggest it is important to continue using the word imitation precisely to remind ourselves that the process has always been haunted by fears (whether Indian or European) of overt, uncreative, and unidirectional borrowing. Recognizing this anxiety about imitation is one way to accentuate the tension between what White sees as the citational quality of imitation and the various normative or political constructions with which the concept of imitation has so often been freighted.
In order to explore the ways modern South Asian philanthropy arises out of processes of colonial imitation, this article focuses on developments taking place in the first several decades of the nineteenth century in Calcutta. This period witnessed an efflorescence of new voluntary associations. Their founders worked to regularize a range of norms and practices appropriate for associational life—to find the language, rules, and material forms best suited to the conduct of public life, including efforts at promoting the public good that we now associate with philanthropy.Footnote 8 It is commonplace to say that the colonial voluntary association served as the laboratory or ‘training ground’ in which Indians began experimenting with democratic institutions and thus helped shape the emergence of civil society in Bengal.Footnote 9 The present article takes special interest in the idea that the heart of such experimentation might have consisted in ‘imitation of British political associations’.Footnote 10 The work from which this idea is taken is by no means driven by a commitment to theory; indeed, it was published just prior to the rise of post-colonial studies. There is thus a degree of critical naiveté to its invocation of the concept of ‘imitation’; the author harbours no fear of the derivative as we find in the work of a scholar such as Partha Chatterjee, for instance.Footnote 11 But, for this very reason, we are given a chance to step back and reconsider what to make of the concept, the process, and the politics of imitation. This is not to advocate for a return to naiveté, but to seek a way around some of the truisms of post-colonial theory by looking anew at the problem of imitation within a colonial context. We shall return to this below. But first some context.
Two friends at a desk
We can set our inquiry in motion by recalling a short but dense passage from the influential book, Se kāl ār e kāl [Then and Now], composed by the Brāhmo intellectual Rajnarain Bose (Rājanārāyaṇa Basu, 1826–29) in 1874.Footnote 12 Writing in the advertisement to this work, Rajnarain recalls the days when he used to sit across an enormous desk from his friend Akshay Kumar Dutt (Akṣayakumāra Datta, 1820–86) as the two men attended to the official business of the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, a voluntary association of which both were members. This would have been sometime around 1850, since Rajnarain has in mind a time when Akshay served as chair of the Paper Committee for the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā and edited the association's publication, the Tattvabodhinī Patrikā.Footnote 13 Rajnarain remarks that, one day, as they sat working, the two men found themselves thinking back to the year 1827.
The temporality of the text bears noting. The year 1827 represents the ‘then’ of Rajnarain's book—a time almost 50 years distant from the ‘now’ of Se kāl ār e kāl. In between these two temporal markers, Rajnarain conjures the 1850s when he used to sit across the desk from Akshay. In the historical juxtapositions of the text, we might almost detect a register of the narrator's sense of dislocation, registered also through the play of memory. Rajnarain tells us that, when he ‘now’ thought of his old friend, he grew eager to see him, to recover something of their past friendship. As luck would have it, only a day later, he encountered Akshay while out walking with a friend. The three immediately fell to chatting and it seems Rajnarain told Akshay how he had been thinking about their work together in the 1850s and how they used to talk about Calcutta in the 1820s. This prompted Akshay to suggest the need for a work that compared ‘those days’ (se kāl) with the present day (e kāl). Rajnarain immediately saw Akshay's point, commenting that, while there were plenty of books extolling the benefits of English education (iṃrājī śikṣā), few had paused to consider the evils such education had engendered. Such is the genesis of Rajnarain's book, which was first delivered as a short lecture before the Jātīya Sabhā or ‘National Society’ in 1873. One of Rajnarain's pupils was present for the lecture and took notes in a composition book. From those notes arose the published book, Se kāl ār e kāl, edited by Akshay himself.Footnote 14
Rich with anecdotes and clever aperçus, Then and Now conjures a powerful feeling of loss, not least as Rajnarain highlights the dangers of deracination associated with slavish imitation of the British. Through the comparison of dietary habits, modes of dress, public comportment, and linguistic practice, Rajnarain depicts the Bengali people/nation (jāti) of his day as riddled by sycophancy, greed, coarse behaviour, and linguistic confusion. And yet Then and Now is not only about loss. Comparison with an earlier era allows Rajnarain to suggest that, if Bengalis had once been capable of honestly, simplicity, kindness, and generosity, then those virtues might still be revived. But this would only happen if Bengalis abandoned their habits of ‘miserable imitation’ (hīna anukaraṇa).Footnote 15 ‘We love to imitate the British in everything. But can't we see that imitation is no good for us? That it brings no benefit to our country?’Footnote 16 A quarter-century before the Swadeshi Movement would inaugurate the drive to reject all things European in favour of indigenous industry and ‘national’ (jātīya) culture, Rajnarian excoriated Bengalis for their manic adoption of European cutlery and matches, their newfound taste in beefsteaks, and their inability to write poetry that did not carry a ‘whiff of English’ (iṃrājī gandha).Footnote 17
Rajnarain's attitudes were to achieve significant resonance with subsequent generations of Bengali patriots, for whom the project of achieving genuine Indian nationhood could never be one of mere imitation. Imitation smacked of dependence and sycophancy, and thus a kind of immaturity. Similar concerns also appear in the work of Bankin Chandra Chatterjee.Footnote 18 Shortly thereafter, Swami Vivekananda would chastise a lay devotee for coming to see him while dressed in European coat and trousers, telling him: ‘By giving up one's national costume and ways of eating and living, one gets denationalised. One can learn from all, but that learning which leads to denationalisation does not help one's uplift but becomes the cause of degradation.’Footnote 19 This fundamental concern with imitation would eventually colour mainstream Indian historiography and fuel popular derogatory attitudes toward the deracinated Bengali ‘Babu’ with his waistcoat and trousers.Footnote 20 In the end, what began with anxieties over imitation grew into a national creed of non-imitation, expressed in varying forms of radical nationalism, indigenist, and culturalist programmes in the early twentieth century.Footnote 21 This is the moment that marks, as Andrew Sartori puts it, the ‘familiar dismissal of Bengali liberalism as the imitative shadow of an alien civilization’.Footnote 22 As ultimately filtered through such post-colonial authors as Franz Fanon and V. S. Naipaul, there developed among post-colonial intellectuals a kind of consensus that the imitation of Western models pointed to deep and unresolved forms of colonial trauma.Footnote 23
Within post-colonial theory, the work of Homi Bhabha has been enormously influential for its attempt to offer a way out of the dilemma of imitation by both recognizing and denying its force.Footnote 24 In Bhabha's work, the act of mimicry becomes a praxis of resistance wherein the canny reframing of colonial stereotypes predicated on difference ultimately works to undermine the colonizer's own sense of identity. For Bhabha, there is a ‘menace’ within mimicry that serves to reveal or even unsettle colonial authority.Footnote 25 Here, the onus is on bringing resistance and anti-colonial agency to the fore.Footnote 26 And yet one might argue that even Bhabha's view of mimicry is predicated on residual anxiety about imitation. Mimicry may be acknowledged and re-valued but, in Bhabha's account, it must be something more or other than mimicry if it is not to signal failure. Imitation can never simply be imitation, lest it remain derivative.Footnote 27
For the purposes of this article, what bears noting is not the fact that Swadeshi leaders came to stigmatize cultural imitation, but that the stigma lives on within contemporary theory, where discussion of colonial imitation remains fraught with anxiety, not least because the mere mention of the concept seems to necessitate hard choices between slavery and freedom. And yet this article hopes to suggest that what worked well as a tool for political assertion works less well for promoting historical understanding. We need to reframe our understanding of imitation so that we can appreciate what Rajnarain himself seems to have understood, which is that it represents a particular project of self-fashioning that we might say is both ‘imported’ and ‘local’.Footnote 28 This is clear from Rajnarain's book, which, with its temporal fluidity, avoids simple patterns of binary opposition.Footnote 29 For Rajnarain, comparing ‘then’ and ‘now’ served to illuminate not just difference, but also continuity and conjunction. In his understanding, not all that is new is without meaning and even those values that persist betray varying degrees of improvement (unnati) and decline (avanati). As he says, some of Bengal's merchant heroes from the 1820s and 1830s demonstrated noble traits of humility and generosity even though their times were marked by corruption and decadence.Footnote 30 Likewise, Rajnarain may have decried the ubiquity of English, but he was also quick to acknowledge that whatever positive changes were taking place with respect to religious and social values were in part due to the spread of English education.Footnote 31 Thus, his call for the recovery of lost national identity (jātitva) emerges from—rather than despite—the patterns of change he is careful to chart.
Here we might consider a material object such as the desk at which Rajnarain and Akshay Kumar conducted their work for the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, which represents not only a colonial artefact, but a kind of challenge. Both new and indispensable, it poses a nagging question: How does one learn to use such an object? And to what ends? The same might be said of an organization like the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, which, like the desk, poses a challenge: How did Bengalis come to associate in this fashion? Why? And to what ends? We could also explore the lecture format that Rajnarain employed to deliver his remarks, or the notes taken by his young student, or even the norms of intimacy and responsibility that structure Rajnarain's relationship to Akshay. Which brings us, finally, to philanthropy. In what ways does its emergence point to processes of colonial interaction and even imitation? How does it come to expression and to what ends?
Unlike Rajnarain, who ultimately posits imitation as a negative development and barrier to national self-realization, and contrary to anxieties about imitation that structure post-colonial theory, I want to argue that, if we aim to appreciate the concrete ways philanthropy comes into view in this period, we must think anew about processes of imitation, about the ways Bengalis appropriated, translated, and employed a range of material artefacts, intellectual categories, and linguistic tools within new webs of intimacy and friendship.Footnote 32 While we can certainly draw upon Rajnarain's Then and Now in order to do this, we must beware of importing into his text any teleology of the colonial modern. Rajnarain's view of the past may have served to highlight late-colonial anxieties about imitation, but we need not subscribe to the normative framework yoking rejection of imitation to the articulation of national identity. Instead, following Partha Chatterjee's lead, we should bear in mind the significant ways in which the world of the 1820s and 1830s differed from that of the 1870s.Footnote 33 Because Rajnarain views ‘then’ from the vantage point of a ‘now’ that registers the strains of life during the heyday of the Raj, it is important for us to query his particular reconstruction of the past. While he gives us much to see, he also offers us a challenge to find new ways of seeing.
A Society of Friends
For a striking depiction of Bengali philanthropy, we might consider the story of Dīnadayāl Ghoṣa. Dīnadayāl is a landholder with extensive properties outside of Calcutta. He is renowned in the region for his humility, his embrace of Hindu Vaishnavism, and his public acts of charity. Dīnadayāl looks on his tenants as his children. Thanks to his benevolence, they have schools, a hospital, and a dispensary. One of his daily habits is to visit the dispensary, in order to ensure that the premises are maintained in a clean and salubrious state. After this, he makes a round of the villages, where he inquires after the well-being of his tenants. If he finds an ailing farmer or fisherman, he makes sure to cover the cost of their treatment. He has instituted a night school for the labourers so they can improve their technical skills and often visits the local schools to check on the progress of the young scholars. His compassionate nature (dayālu svabhāva) leads him to support the passage of an act to legalize the marriage of Hindu widows.
Dīnadayāl has a good friend, a Brahmin by the name of Abhayacitta Bandyopādhyāya. The two share a love of learning and like to sit together reading newspapers, travelogues, and new books on everything from electricity to railways. Dīnadayāl likes to recite moral maxims from Sanskrit and Persian sources, while Abhayacitta is able to find corresponding sentiments in English works and translate them for Dīnadayāl's benefit. The two are bound by ties of friendship and are always ready to rise to the other's defence if anyone should question their religious beliefs or social habits. So estimable are these men that people express the desire to shake hands with them—a gesture that seems to point to the new norms of civility and public comportment represented by these colonial liberals.
The friendship of Dīnadayāl and Abhayacitta comes to us via a lesser-known Bengali work whose title may be translated as ‘An account of the members of the Society of Friends’.Footnote 34 What makes the work especially interesting is that it is fictional. It purports to introduce us to the members of a so-called ‘Society of Friends’ (ātmīya sabhā), but the group it depicts is imaginary. True, there was an influential society by the same name in early colonial Calcutta, founded by none other than Rammohan Roy (about which, more later). But the Society of Friends depicted in the ‘Account’ is peopled only with allegorical figures, not historical individuals.Footnote 35 The work seems to have been intended as a light piece of social satire, and its title page informs us that in this it followed the model of ‘the English author Addison’.Footnote 36
As it turns out, the author of the ‘Account’ was Rajnarain Bose, who published the work anonymously. We shall see in due course how this impacts our reading of the work, but for now we might point to another reason the ‘Account’ proves relevant for the present inquiry. This has to do with Rajnarain's explicit reliance on—or imitation of—the well-known English literary prototype of Addison.Footnote 37 We are reminded immediately of the impact of the colonial curriculum on a figure like Rajnarain, whose literary and theological writings are deeply informed by the education he received at the Hindu College. Clearly, Rajnarain found in Addison's humorous depiction of sociability in early modern England a useful foil for thinking about associational culture in colonial Calcutta, not least its relationship to new modes of charity and philanthropy.Footnote 38 This is worth underscoring: the very fact that the ‘Account’ bears this relationship to Addison casts some doubt on Gauri Viswanathan's claim that mimicry of Addison's style among English-educated Indians had not the ‘remotest bearing on Indian life’.Footnote 39 Here the facts suggest otherwise. If anything, Rajnarain's ‘Account’ is a richly imaginative work that imitates Addison precisely for the purpose of reflecting on the realities of ‘Indian life’!
Rajnarain begins the ‘Account’ by telling us:
I have a few friends and everyday we get together. For that reason we decided to form a ‘Society of Friends.’ It isn't a ‘society’ in the sense of a formally structured body, since there are no official rules. Members do or say what they please.Footnote 40
In this passage, we note two important categories: those of ‘friend’ and ‘society’. As the case of Dīnadayāl and Abhayacitta makes clear, friendship is something that takes place between like-minded, independent yet caring individuals. Likewise, Rajnarain lets us see that the gathering of such individuals for the purpose of fellowship amounts to a special kind of association, one not predicated on caste, family, or traditional patronage; this is what he calls a ‘society’ and what sociologists today call a ‘voluntary association’.Footnote 41 Rajnarain's rather sophisticated understanding of associational behaviour is indicated by his honest admission that this particular group may not amount to a true society. As he says, if it were a true society, it would have a set of rules (niyama), constituting it as a ‘formally structured’ (praṇālī-baddha) entity. And yet what Rajnarain denies of this association he then curiously reasserts. Not only does he employ the formal title ‘Society of Friends’ (ātmīya sabhā), but he also refers to his friends as ‘members’ (sabhya or sadasya). It is thus clear that, in Rajnarain's mind, what makes for a proper society is the particular conjunction of friendship and formal organization. If Rajnarain appears somewhat ambivalent in describing this society, it would seem to point toward his awareness of the processes of cultural translation and negotiation at work. He seems to be asking, if Dīnadayāl, Abhayacitta, and the rest of his friends like to gather together, does this mean they constitute a society? If so, what should follow from that fact? Toward what end do they meet as a society?
What makes Rajnarain's ambivalence curious is the fact that he writes at a moment in time when one might think that such questions had already been answered. The ‘Account’ was published in 1867 and, by this time, both the practice of associational culture and the constellation of values supporting it were well established in Bengal. Scores of voluntary associations had come into being (and many passed away) by this point; the Bengali press as a medium for the expression of public opinion and active debate was firmly established; and at least two generations of young men had proceeded through the halls of Calcutta's new colonial educational institutions. Indeed, in the span of 40 years, the city had witnessed the creation of the first native educational institution (the Hindu College, established in 1817) and the opening of the first major colonial university in India (University of Calcutta, established in 1857). The ‘Account’ is a product of the post-mutiny era. Far from a tentative early articulation of a new cultural model, it is in fact a consummate bhadralok literary artefact coming from the pen of one of the century's great social observers. Rajnarain's ambivalence is thus something of a calculated posture; his clever imitation of Addison as well as his ability to play with the meaning of a term like ‘society’ both serve to underscore the degree to which educated, urban Bengalis had internalized a colonial curriculum, a set of civic virtues, and an understanding of the organizational practices that were taken to both reflect and express those values.Footnote 42 We will have occasion later to consider Rajnarain's goal in writing the ‘Account’. First, however, we need to drop back in time to explore how liberal norms of friendship, charity, and associational behaviour were first articulated in the early colonial moment.
New societies, new operations
The date often given for the birth of associational activity in colonial Calcutta is 1815, the year Rammohan Roy (Rāmamohana Rāya, 1776–1833) arrived in the city. Because of his open rejection of traditional forms of Hindu religious life, Rammohan immediately found himself shunned by many of the influential community leaders of his day. But he also had his friends and supporters, not least the merchant entrepreneur, Dwarkanath Tagore.Footnote 43 Seeking an occasion and a context for gathering, Rammohan invited Dwarkanath and a handful of others to join him at his garden house in North Calcutta, where they formed the Ātmīya Sabhā or ‘Society of Friends’. Members read passages from the Vedas and sang what would come to be known as Brāhmo Saṅgīt—songs devoted to a non-personal, unitary absolute. There were never more than a dozen who came to these meetings, but the group did last until sometime in 1823.Footnote 44 In creating this ‘Society of Friends’, Rammohan is credited with creating India's ‘first organization for collective thinking, discussion, and reform’.Footnote 45
Rammohan's ‘Society of Friends’ thus appears to be the prototype for future voluntary associations in India.Footnote 46 And it seems likely that Rajnarain in turn modelled his fictional society on Rammohan's original society.Footnote 47 This gesture of recognition points to an apparent irony. As we have seen, Rajnarain expressed some concern (perhaps somewhat in jest) that the fictional Ātmīya Sabhā of the ‘Account’ could not be called a proper society because it lacked the key organizational features of such associations. By contrast, Rammohan's 1815 Ātmīya Sabhā is now taken to represent India's first voluntary association—this despite the fact that it possessed ‘no formal organization, no constitution, and no program for action’.Footnote 48 Yet, what appears as an irony may in fact represent a matter of historical difference, since, when Rammohan founded his association in 1815, the translation of associational activity into vernacular forms remained as yet incomplete. That was ‘then’, whereas Rajnarain's elaborate awareness of associational structures is a product of his late-colonial ‘now’.
Standard accounts of the earlier period focus on the creation of several new societies dedicated to ‘public welfare’ that were established in the wake of Rammohan's new initiative. To these groups fell the task of first fleshing out the norms and structures of Bengali associational life. The list typically includes more than one European–Native joint endeavour focused on civic concerns, including the earliest meetings in 1816 to plan the creation of the Hindu College and two of the most influential associations concerned with vernacular education during the period: the Calcutta School-Book Society (1817) and the Calcutta School Society (1818).Footnote 49 These were important associational milestones, all the more remarkable since the latter two provide evidence of cooperation among East India Company administrators, Christian missionaries, Hindu bhadralok, and Muslim intelligentsia.
We are fortunate to have numerous English-language accounts, letters, and reports that allow us to reconstruct how such groups were structured, how often they met, what rules they passed, the subscriptions they collected, and the results they could boast. As a matter of fact, we would do well to take note of the these structural and operational details; we should not race over them, thinking it is only the spirit behind such activity that counts, as did one contemporary European commentator:
If we would know and feel the genuine importance of these associations, and of the mechanism as distinguished from their operations nakedly considered, we must take into account that drawing of affections, that gradual approximation of ideas, which are the infallible consequences of the union.Footnote 50
This observer distinguishes what he calls the ‘mechanism’ of public welfare (which we might understand as the shared norms of charity and benevolence) from what he takes to be the factors shaping the ‘operations’ of such societies. Because he is eager to find evidence of moral and affective transformation taking place among a colonized public, the author skirts over organizational details. However, it is surely wrong to divorce the apparently lower-level ‘operations’ from the higher-order ‘mechanics’ of benevolence. The two developed hand in hand and only by attending to the processes and decisions that shaped the basic operations of such societies can we really bring into view the kinds of productive ‘epistemic compromise’ shaping the expression of South Asian philanthropy.Footnote 51
Bābu Rāmaswāmi's proposal
The particular contours of such epistemic compromise are thrown into clear relief if we turn from English-language sources like Friend of India to consider evidence from the vernacular archive. In this spirit, we might consider a notice that appeared in the Bengali weekly Samācāra Darpaṇa in September of 1830, alerting readers to the rapid explosion of associational activity in Calcutta. Among the societies explicitly mentioned are the Dharma Sabhā, the Baṅgavāgvicāra Sabhā, Baṅgahita Sabhā, and the Jñānasandipana Sabhā. Each of these societies was seen by the Darpaṇa to be an important organ for promoting the well-being (maṅgala) of Bengalis.Footnote 52 The use of terms like hita and maṅgala to denote the concept of welfare points to the ways such organizations began linking associational activity to the work of philanthropy. To see how such groups tended to arise out of particular philanthropic concerns, we might turn to the case of Bābu Rāmaswāmi.Footnote 53
In March of 1826, a local gentleman by the name of Bābu Rāmaswāmi proposed to the public the idea of creating a series of guesthouses in Calcutta for the use of itinerant pilgrims.Footnote 54 Bābu Rāmaswāmi noted that it was common for Hindu pilgrims on their way to and from the great pilgrimage sites in North India such as Kāśī to pass through Calcutta. However, he also noted that there was currently no facility designated as a rest house for homeless wanderers (udāsīn). This struck him as unfortunate, not least because it seemed to have become quite popular for the residents of Calcutta to form ‘societies’ (sampradāya) dedicated to doing good work. That being the case, was anyone prepared to consider the welfare of the many pilgrims left to sleep on the streets? Bābu Rāmaswāmi proposed that, if the more fortunate (bhāgyavān) residents of the city agreed to subscribe to his proposal, it could be resolved to build three guest houses, one each for Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. To instil confidence in his plan, Bābu Rāmaswāmi assured potential subscribers that John Palmer, a paragon of mercantile success and someone warmly loved for his support of ‘native’ causes, had agreed to serve as treasurer. Palmer would stand as guarantor of the security of all subscriptions.Footnote 55 At the same time, Bābu Rāmaswāmi announced the creation of a ‘committee’ (the English term is used) composed of those who had already pledged money to support this good work (satkarma).
Bābu Rāmaswāmi's proposal reflects a moment when the idea of associational work was beginning to gain ground, even if the terms and structures for such activity remained fluid. In terms of motivation, Bābu Rāmaswāmi seems to have viewed the creation of such a society in religious terms, as evidenced by his reference to satkarma. But his proposal is not predicated on reinforcing existing solidarities of caste or community. He may begin by conjuring the flow of Hindu pilgrims, but it soon becomes clear that he has in mind the welfare of pilgrims from other faiths as well.Footnote 56 He views the problem of indigency as a public one and calls upon those with material resources to contribute toward a solution. In pre-modern Indian society, such responsibilities ideally fell to the king (embodied in the regional landholder or zamindar), who might bestow largess by digging tanks for water and planting trees for shade, but here we see evidence of how the idea of social responsibility was being reconfigured.Footnote 57 Not only did early Calcutta boast a new spectrum of recently wealthy zamindars (who prospered in the wake of the Permanent Settlement), but any number of other wealthy entrepreneurs had also come to prominence—men like the broker Rāmdulāl De (1752–1825), who was famed as both a millionaire businessman and a font of charitable giving.Footnote 58 Bābu Rāmaswāmi hoped to attract not merely the sympathy of such men, but their charitable subscriptions.
The phenomenon of charitable subscription (cāndā, from the Persian) represents one interesting point to attempt to complicate the origins of philanthropic association. The format and practice of modern charitable subscriptions seems to have been in place in Bengal at least by the eighteenth century, when European subscription efforts supported the construction of churches, hospitals, and asylums for soldiers, widows, and orphans within the European community. The creation of missionary societies in Great Britain during the same period also depended upon subscriptions. In Bengal, Baptist missionaries like William Carey, who were active on a variety of educational and charitable fronts, certainly helped promulgate the practice of subscription-based public service.Footnote 59
However, subscription-based activity was not entirely unknown in pre-colonial times. It would seem that village ritual life had long featured the routine collection of funds to support any of a number of calendrical festivals and pujas.Footnote 60 Even if pre-colonial worship traditions were typically oriented in relation to the life of kings and family traditions, these other modes of village-level or community-level contribution speak to the operation of ideas of collective support for activities seen to promote the public good.Footnote 61 Such collective planning is evident around preparations for annual festivals like Gambhīrā, a rural Bengali performance tradition. In his study of Gambhīrā, Benoy Kumar Sarkar detects the operation of a ‘very simple and ancient’ principle through which a community gains both a sense of unity and a commitment to ‘the realization of a common cause’.Footnote 62 Sarkar calls special attention to what is known as the māṇḍalika system, which consisted of a body or assembly (baiṭhak) comprising 36 individuals, whose duties included the preparation of subscription lists.Footnote 63
We find continuing vestiges of such practice in the phenomenon of the modern community puja association. While such associations are usually seen to represent a quintessentially modern phenomenon, their logic may bespeak continuity with past traditions. Today's subscription-based activity takes the form of the sarbajanīn pūjā, a generic phrase used to designate forms of ‘publicly-sponsored worship’ such as the annual Durgā Pūjā.Footnote 64 It appears that the present form of these modern ‘subscription assemblies’ only took final shape in the early twentieth century.Footnote 65 However, the roots of such assemblies can nonetheless be traced back to the early colonial idea of the Barowari (bāroyāri) festival ‘sponsored by twelve friends’.Footnote 66 In these festivals, ‘five to six Brahmans get together, form a committee, collect subscriptions, set up a “temporary shed,” construct an idol, and engage singers’.Footnote 67 The earliest attested performance of such a ‘democratized’ pūjā took place in the town of Guptipara, upriver from Calcutta in 1790. Within 30 years, this mode of public sponsorship was being widely replicated in towns around Western Bengal, not least by the nouveaux riches of Calcutta.Footnote 68 These were the same influential zamindars to whom Bābu Rāmaswāmi looked for assistance with his proposal. That these subscription assemblies were taken to be markers of a new kind of public ritual life should not prevent us from seeing in them the routinization of other pre-colonial forms of charitable activity. We may imagine such practices gradually intersecting with new elements of associational life coming to the fore during the early colonial era—elements such as the paying of dues, keeping of member lists, and electing of officers.Footnote 69
We thus begin to form a picture of a dynamic social, economic, and religious context in which the pursuit of new programmes of personal and public welfare was framed in terms of an emerging constellation of values and practices. Bābu Rāmaswāmi's appeal came just three years after the aristocrat Radhakant Deb (Rādhākānta Deva) had joined a range of prominent Calcuttans, including Rāmdulāl De, in establishing a new ‘Bengal Society’ (literally, the Gauḍadeśīya Samāj). This was just four years before Radhakant would play a leading role in one of the most important societies formed to represent the interests of Bengali Hindu society: the Dharma Sabhā. The latter society, formed to protest Governor General Bentinck's Regulation XVII of 1829 outlawing widow immolation, has long been seen as the ‘conservative’ analogue to the ‘progressive’ Brāhmo Samāj established by Rammohan Roy in 1828. For our purposes, the utility of such labels is beside the point. What deserves emphasis is the rapid adoption by local actors of associational forms in the 1820s and 1830s to pursue varying conceptions of public good.
Translating association
Turning to the way these new organizational efforts were conceptualized and represented, we notice a rapidly changing discursive landscape. Evidence from extant reports of early associations reveals that the vocabulary used to discuss such organizations was actively under construction during the first several decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, a range of pre-modern idioms were called upon to help render key English-language concepts like ‘society’, ‘meeting’ or ‘report’. We notice, for instance, that Bābu Rāmaswāmi settled on the word sampradāya to communicate the idea of an organized group. This is a word typically associated with sectarian Hindu movements such as the Vallabha Sampradāya or the Dāsanāmī Sampradāya. Such sampradāya are best thought of as initiatory in character and focused in one way or another on a particular guru, doctrine, or set of practices. Insofar as Bābu Rāmaswāmi has in mind a project to ease the hardships of homeless wanderers, he may well have found it quite natural to analogize this new associational project to the organizational structures of pre-modern religious orders. He was not alone in this regard. When the Calcutta School-Book Society was established in 1818, the editors of the Bengali periodical Samācar Darpaṇa referred to it as a ‘sampradāya for the preparation of books for local schools’.Footnote 70 Today, such a formulation may look odd but, at the time, sampradāya offered a useful conceptual hook on which to hang a new associational idea.
Despite Bābu Rāmaswāmi's choice, two other Bengali terms proved to be far more popular for rendering the concept of a society or association: the terms samāj and sabhā. We have already seen that Rammohan named his ‘Society of Friends’ the Ātmīya Sabhā. His next and most consequential organizational effort to create a community of ethical monotheists originally went by the name Brāhmo Sabhā before shifting to the now well-known designation Brāhmo Samāj.Footnote 71 This shift may reflect Rammohan's desire to suggest that his new organization was a ‘society’ with a lasting social base as opposed to a merely contingent gathering of individuals. While, in pre-modern usage, a sabhā connoted an ‘assembly’ of individuals (such as paṇḍits in a ruler's court), a samāj suggested something like a localized and perduring community, as in the learned samāj of a locale like Bhātpārā, whose paṇḍit families and local schools transmitted curricula and scholarly traditions from generation to generation. Rammohan's first ‘society’ seems to have represented the former—a group of like-minded friends who gathered as a sabhā. In creating the Brāhmo community, he established a society of the latter kind—a samāj that cohered around a set of core theological and moral values and was meant to endure over time.Footnote 72
The case of Rammohan aside, both terms—sabhā and samāj—proved equally attractive to the founders of new societies. The 1823 ‘Bengal Society’ was designated the Gauḍadeśīya Samāj, whereas, in 1830, the association formed to protect the ritual prerogatives of śāstric Hinduism was given the name Dharma Sabhā. Radhakant Deb played a leading role in both societies. The best possible explanation for the discrepancy in naming may be that, in the former case, what united the members was their perceived sense of belonging to a Bengali samāj—what we would today think of as ‘Bengali society’. In the latter case, under the patronage of Radhakant's Shobhabājār family—and in pursuit of the religious status quo favoured by that family—one could speak of an ‘assembly’ (sabhā) gathered in the name of a powerful Calcutta leader. In this respect, the Dharma Sabhā was not radically different from the ‘assemblies’ found in the royal courts of pre-modern India.Footnote 73
Like ‘assembly’, the word sabhā could be used to refer not only to an organized social entity, but also to a specific gathering of individuals at a particular time and place—what we might call a ‘meeting’. This is the sense in which the term is used in the published report of the first ‘meeting’ of the Gauḍadeśīya Samāj, which was held at the Hindu College on 8 March 1823. Here we see the distinction between sabhā and samāj coming clearly to the fore, as the published report for this meeting indicates that a decision was taken at the ‘meeting’ (sabhā) to form a new ‘society’ (samāj) by this name (Gauḍadeśīya 1823).Footnote 74
The fluidity of terminology is underscored by the fact that, at the same meeting, when Radhakant Deb moved that a future gathering take place, he used the Hindustani word baiṭhak rather than sabhā.Footnote 75 We have already encountered this word in connection with Benoy Kumar Sarkar's discussion of the village assembly or ‘Royal Court’ that met to plan the annual Gambhīrā rituals.Footnote 76 As Sarkar's usage suggests, baiṭhak is a word that connotes both a space for meeting guests and the act of ‘solemn assembly’; it often conjures the court of a local ruler. It is no surprise that baiṭhak presented itself to Radhakant as an appropriate term, since he represented one of Calcutta's most influential ‘royal’ families.Footnote 77 Here, then, is a concept with roots in the courtly ethos of pre-modern Bengal's landed aristocracy. The transformation of Bengal's zamindars into the movers and shakers of early colonial Calcutta occasioned the transformation of spaces like the baiṭhak khānā (reception hall) not only into the parlours of Calcutta's aristocrats, but also into the formal meetings of new societies.Footnote 78 We thus find the word baiṭhak used to translate such concepts as ‘general meeting’ (sarvasādhāraṇa baiṭhak) and ‘report of a meeting’ (baiṭhak vivaraṇa). We also find its Persian equivalent, majlis, appearing occasionally in literature from this period, along with other Arabic or Persian terms such as tahabil (for ‘fund’), misil/michil (for ‘proceedings’), and ārji (for ‘petition’).Footnote 79
When we consider that Persian remained the language of official East India Company business until 1835, the presence of such terms makes a great deal of sense, underscoring the rich linguistic resources at hand for framing new modes of assembly. But, ultimately, such Islamicate vocabulary would largely disappear from Bengali associational discourse. This is hardly surprising given the predominant role of Hindu bhadralok in shaping the language of public life during this period. Thus, by the 1840s, such Persianate terminology was becoming rare, with a word like ārji being replaced by the Sanskritic prārthanā.Footnote 80 Similarly, we find a range of Sanskrit-derived terms coming increasingly into play, including sabhā for ‘society’, vivaraṇa for ‘proceedings’ and āvedana-patra for ‘petition’. To these would soon be added most, if not all, of the key terms relevant to the structure and operation of a charitable organization: ‘chairman’ (sabhāpati), ‘member’ (sadasya or amśī), ‘rules/regulations’ (niyama), ‘session’ (adhiveśana) and ‘charitable donation’ (dātavya). Such was rapidly becoming the lingua franca of associational behaviour.Footnote 81
This allows us to identify a trend that begins during this period and develops through the late-colonial era, in which the early terminological choices of a polyglot urban culture take on increased force as something like what Bayly refers to as ‘badges of attachment’—symbolic markers that serve to express the shared interests and identities of particular groups of actors.Footnote 82 Bayly suggests that, if ideas prompt or shape action, they do so only within particular contexts. Thus we must attend to the possibility that conceptual tools first employed in relation to associational life in early colonial Calcutta could by the late nineteenth century find themselves yoked to new purposes, not least the assertion of high-caste privilege. In this we confront again the ambivalence of liberalism, which fosters both the flowering of public service ideals alongside the expression of communal or caste prejudices.Footnote 83 The present endeavour thus supports the tenor of a great deal of post-colonial and subaltern criticism, which alerts us to bhadralok hegemony in the shaping of modern Bengali culture and the construction of a masculinized, elite Hinduism.Footnote 84 Another, related dimension of such scholarship has been to show how the same sorts of bhadralok activity worked to reshape supposedly long-standing values of community and nation into the vocabulary of national unity. Thus, in the case of samāj, it is possible to chart the ways in which a term originally chosen to speak of this or that ‘society’ in the narrower sense of an organized group of individuals came over the course of the nineteenth century to speak of a unified (albeit Hinduized) Indian nationhood. The invention of what Swarupa Gupta calls the concept ‘samajik unity’ was thus predicated on the further repurposing of concepts like samāj.Footnote 85 We shall return to this in the conclusion.
Having said this, one goal of this article is to caution us from reading such later developments into the period of the 1820s and 1830s. For that period, notwithstanding the prominent role played by wealthy Hindu bhadralok and the guidance found in the authority of Brahmin paṇḍits, we also have to reckon with a milieu in which a range of actors engaged in complicated and sometimes curious acts of cultural translation.Footnote 86 In addition to the well-to-do Hindu leaders and their Brahmin paṇḍits, we should think of such groups as Hindu merchants and traders; middling- and low-level government servants; European officials; European non-official business leaders; missionaries and their native converts. Locating a single source of enunciative power at this dynamic moment proves rather difficult. What does appear to shape behaviour in this context are concerns such as: Who are the friends with whom I can associate? Toward what ends should we dedicate our new societies? What modes of behaviour and techniques of organization can usefully be adopted in order to respond to such concerns?
Acknowledging intimacy
We began the article by picturing Rajnarain and Akshay seated across a desk, hard at work for the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā—a picture of intimate personal interaction and close collaboration. When recalling his days working with Akshay, Rajnarain uses words like ‘affection’ (sneha) and ‘gratitude’ (anugraha) in order to communicate not just the fact of friendship, but more importantly the force of intimate engagement that gave rise to critical reflection.Footnote 87 Without engaging the copious literature on colonial intimacy, which often turns on debates over the role of colonial power in disciplining the realms of familial, sexual, and inter-racial intimacy, we can profitably take a moment to query other moments of conjuncture that illustrate the role played by intimate relations in fostering patterns of imitation and cultural translation.Footnote 88 Here we may obviously point to examples of early modern European–Indian marriages and the habits of figures like ‘Hindoo’ Stewart.Footnote 89 But we might also consider the kinds of everyday relationships formed in a rapidly expanding commercial centre like Calcutta at the turn of the nineteenth century—a brief and contingent period, falling roughly between the demise of Dalrymple's ‘white Mughals’ and the rise of the British Raj after 1857. During this period, South Asian actors tended to find in the globalizing discourse of liberalism and the spread of republican sentiments a powerful resource for contemplating human commerce, human freedoms, and public responsibilities.
Here we might recall Rammohan Roy's ardent embrace of friends and correspondents around the globe, not least his Unitarian friends in England and America. Or we might look to another figure we have already encountered: Rāmdulāl De, the Calcutta broker and philanthropist. Rāmdulāl formed active relationships with many American merchants who sailed between New England and Calcutta. Such were the bonds he formed with these men that a group of them gifted him an oil portrait of General Washington as a token of shared friendship.Footnote 90 If the focus of Rammohan's friendships tended to be religious and political, in the case of Rāmdulāl, the emphasis was on business. He was connected to a number of colonial firms and banks, and engaged in extensive financial transactions with men like John Palmer, Henry Hobhouse, and the New England merchant, Edward Augustus Newton.Footnote 91 While Susan Bean, whose Yankee Trader brings to life this dynamic world of Calcutta trade, is clear to identify the social and cultural ‘chasm’ that separated Indian banians and American traders, she nonetheless stresses the ‘intimate connections’ they formed, not least by virtue of their financial dealings.Footnote 92
The intimacy of such connections, even if principally predicated on colonial business transactions, is nicely illustrated by the case of the Mackay family of Boston, who developed deep and lasting ties with the family of another Calcutta banian, Radha Kissen Mitter (Rādhākṛṣṇa Mitra).Footnote 93 As one accounts puts it: ‘The Mackays knew the Mitters probably better than did any of the other Americans, and Mitter used to say that he considered any of the Mackays as part of his own family.’Footnote 94 Indeed, while in Calcutta on business, the elder Mackay and his son George both used to live with the Mitter family in the so-called ‘native’ part of town. When the younger Mackay sailed back to Boston, Radha Kissen presented him with a ring, making George promise he would give it to no one until he married. George dutifully kept the ring, only parting with it when he eventually married. His wife apparently treasured the ring as a token of the profound connections between the two families. Back in Calcutta, the Mitter family kept an oil portrait of Mackay senior in their home.Footnote 95
In the case of the Mackay–Mitter relationship, the examples of the ring and the portrait offer material signs of intimacy. Along with the gift of Washington's portrait to Rāmdulāl, they remind us that such ritual expressions of friendship were far from uncommon and could be quite lavish. So, for instance, when the merchants and sailors of Salem inaugurated a new museum to showcase their rapidly expanding relationship with India, many banians from Bengal and elsewhere in the subcontinent shipped items for display—further testaments to growing bonds of intimacy and friendship.Footnote 96 Such bonds were formed not despite the hierarchies and inequities of colonial rule, but amid them. As Daniel White has observed, during this period, Europeans and Indians ‘inhabited the same globe’; there may have been ‘unequal relations of power and representation’ that produced conflict and misunderstanding, but the period also witnessed the formation of new alliances and the achievement of significant communication.Footnote 97
The fact that many Bengalis, not least Rammohan, took inspiration from the American model of republican resistance to British rule underscores the way intimate relationships produced new patterns of imitation.Footnote 98 It is precisely because men like Radhakant Deb and Ramkamal Sen (Rāmakamala Sena) served alongside Europeans in organizations like the Calcutta School-Book Society and the Agri-Horticultural Society (established in 1820) that they were able to acquire the sorts of quasi-professional expertise that shaped the objectives of new Bengali associations. Following Lynn Zastoupil, we might imagine these nascent societies with their varied memberships as reflecting intermediate spaces in which were formed new ‘perceptual habits and intellectual horizons’.Footnote 99
Records for such associations as the Gauḍadeśīya Samāj and the Dharma Sabhā reveal the active attempt by concerned local actors to organize themselves, regularize the conduct of their meetings, record the content of their deliberations and decisions, and disseminate such records to an emergent print-based public. Thus, the first meeting of the Gauḍadeśīya Samāj in February of 1823 was not only reported in both the Bengali and English press (the Samācāra Darpaṇa and Oriental Magazine, respectively), but was also recorded in an independent publication recounting the details of attendance, the framing of rules, the collection of contributions, debates over mission and objectives, and the eventual framing of the group's goal to promote the ‘general well-being of the country’ (etaddeśer sādhāraṇa sarva maṅgala).Footnote 100 Here, the Bengali phrase points to the attempt to communicate in Bengali the notion of general welfare that draws both from European notions and pre-modern scriptural categories (such as the idea of sādhāraṇa dharma found in Dharmaśāstra).
For a closer look at how such imitation was enacted, consider two cases. The first is the assistance offered by Ramkamal Sen to a new organization, the Baidya Samāj. This society had been called into being by a number of Hindu physicians, or Baidyas, for the joint purpose of reinforcing their own professional identity (in the face of perceived competition from Western doctors and Muslim hakims) and advancing the study of Ayurvedic texts. The society was first convened in the summer of 1831, with Kṣudirāma Biśārada, a Baidya and professor at the Calcutta Government Sanskrit College, who served as secretary (sampādaka). The ‘proceedings’ (the word baiṭhak is used) of their second meeting indicate that, after resolving to constitute themselves as a group, the Baidya Samāj had reached out to Ramkamal Sen for assistance in framing the appropriate language to express the purpose (abhiprāya) and rules (niyama) of the society. What makes this fact significant is that Ramkamal was not himself a member of the Baidya caste of physicians. He was called upon for one very specific reason: he was known to have intimate contact with Europeans through his work with associations like the Calcutta School-Book Society and it was thus understood that he would know what went into the creation of a new association.
As a second example, we may consider a brief report regarding the establishment of a society for publishing literature in the Bengali language, the Baṅga-bhāṣā-prakāśikā Sabhā. In this case, we are able to witness the actual process by which European models were chosen for emulation. In the report, we are present for an early meeting of the society, at which the members are at pains to formalize their somewhat unstructured get-together. This prompts one of the members to remark that, when the English meet in this fashion, they sit in chairs that are placed around a central table. He goes on to say that, at such meetings, it is the custom for members to then take turns addressing the group. He then describes how each speaker would be expected to stand up from his chair in order to deliver his remarks. Even from the brief report we have, it is possible to appreciate the transformative effect of this new information, which pointed not just to the best way to structure a physical space (for example, with a conference table and chairs), but also to the kinds of conduct of appropriate to such a space. The report concludes with the news that all those present resolved to adopt such procedures at their future meetings.Footnote 101
In both of these cases, we see how ‘the most intimate of social relations’ between Indians and others could serve to generate occasions for imitation that helped shape Bengali associational behaviour.Footnote 102 If a Boston trader like Henry Lee was known to observe, learn from, and criticize his local agents, can we imagine that those same agents were any less observant or any less eager to experiment with new manners, skills, or commercial stratagems?Footnote 103 Furthermore, the kind of learning that came from such immediate, day-to-day contact through business was compounded by the regular dissemination in print of new developments in all areas—from trade agreements to favoured imports to social alliances. As the two cases described above illustrate, the rapidly expanding Bengali press played a central role in promulgating the reverberations of change to readers of both English and Bengali newspapers. We must reckon with the role of such newspaper reports in communicating models for the structuring of associational activity, the framing of public debate, and the transmission of values like accountability, charity, and responsible management. In this way, the patterns of intimacy and imitation associated with this early period speak directly to the local translation and implantation of liberal values in the vernacular public sphere.
O, for another Rāmdulāl!
That such values would in time fall under the suspicion of the very Bengalis who early on embraced them, that by Rajnarain's day an anxiety began to emerge regarding the possibility of resisting the commercialized, racialized logic of empire even while affirming liberalism's promises, or that by the Swadeshi period the liberal project itself was repudiated should not prevent us from addressing the ways in which the emergence of modern South Asian philanthropy is bound up with this history. The fact that the conditions making for the remarkable intimacies of the early period were ‘undone, forgotten or repressed’ in later generations does not mean the residue of those intimacies or the habits of public benevolence they supported vanished.Footnote 104 Philanthropy emerged from such a moment and became one strand within the complex web of modern South Asian cultural practices. What bears recognition is that these habits of accommodation and imitation continue to inhabit late-colonial understandings of philanthropy even as those habits came to bear the stigma of enslavement. Thus, when Bankim Chandra Chatterjee gibed that your typical Bengali Babu would gladly give away his wealth if it would lead an Englishman to dub him a philanthropist, he was struggling, like Rajnarain, to reconcile what had happened ‘then’—in the days of Rāmdulāl—with what was happening in the ‘now’ of the 1870s.Footnote 105 Like Rajnarain, Bankim saw all too clearly that, in the post-1857 colonial economy, there were no more Bengali entrepreneurs, but only lowly clerks, schoolmasters, and pleaders.Footnote 106
Recognizing this layering of meanings over time may allow us to better appreciate the fragile contingency of the early colonial moment. In his ‘Account’, Rajnarain uses the theme of imitation (anukaraṇa) to register his growing anxiety not over the nature of associational behaviour in the narrow sense, but over the putatively universal values of friendship and charity that such associations sought to promote. Even his account seems to predicate colonial modernity on the fact of cultural difference. Notice that the imaginary ‘Society of Friends’ has no British members, and yet its Bengali members are routinely identified in relation to aspects of the British colonial legacy. Thus we learn that Abhayacitta, who is a ‘man of the new variety’, is comfortable eating and drinking with foreigners and can interpret English-language works for his friend.Footnote 107 The society's only Sanskrit pandit not only wears shoes, but speaks English as well.Footnote 108 And the merchant Vaniknath is admired by his European colleagues while nonetheless being adamantly opposed to any kind of cultural ‘aping’.Footnote 109 Putting these members into relation with one another but then situating them collectively against a British other, Rajnarain is able to further highlight the apparent cost of imitation.
The most complex character and the one who suggests a way to mitigate the late-colonial fear of imitation is, not surprisingly, Dīnadayāl. His prominence in the narrative, and the way he resolves the tension between imitation and authenticity, suggests that Rajnarain created his character with a particular question in mind: How could one bring into view the comfortable embrace of liberal associational behaviour and public benevolence while not discounting the anxieties that had emerged after 1857? If the character of Dīnadayāl is Rajnarain's answer to this question, then that answer entails acknowledging the persistence of older models of traditional leadership within the character of the Bengali civic leader. So, on the one hand, Dīnadayāl reverts to older modes of ‘Mā-Bāp’ patronage, wherein the landlord assumes the role of the caring, if authoritarian, parent who looks after his people (prajā), much like the pre-modern Bengali zamindar.Footnote 110 The fact that Dīnadayāl lacks English-language competency, along with his fondness for Sanskrit and Persian sources, supports this element of traditionalism. In this respect, he represents one ethical universe shaping the articulation of modern South Asian philanthropy—one in which a benevolent ruler looked out for his people in times of distress and supported projects for the public good.Footnote 111 On the other hand, Dīnadayāl clearly models the norms of public charity and practices of civic benevolence we associate with urban, colonial culture. He builds schools and promotes the study of English; he likes learning about electricity and railroads; and he is a leading figure within this new voluntary society. Perhaps in its anxious quest to reconcile these different life-worlds, the ‘Account’ tells us more about its own historical moment than it does about the earlier nineteenth century but, in the character of Dīnadayāl, Rajnarain offers us a tool for reconceptualizing the meaning of early colonial imitation.
Sadly, the ‘Account’ is largely unknown, in part because Rajnarain chose not to advertise his authorship. Therefore, searching within the British Library Catalogue, one will not find the work listed under Rajnarain's name; nor is it included in a recent edition of Rajnarain's selected works.Footnote 112 What catalogues and anthologies obscure, close reading thankfully reveals. Rajnarain's sketch of Dīnadayāl in the ‘Account’ closely parallels some comments he makes about certain charitable landlords in other of his works. For instance, Rajnarain tells readers of the ‘Account’ that Dīnadayāl was in the habit of daily setting out with umbrella in hand to tour the surrounding villages to see how people were faring.Footnote 113 This mirrors a passage from his well-known work, Then and Now, in which he refers to a wealthy gentleman living near Calcutta who every day used to set out with his umbrella to tour the surrounding villages in order enquire after the well-being of the villagers.Footnote 114 What is more, in his autobiography, Rajnarain makes the very same claim (right down to the umbrella) about his own grandfather, Rāmasundar Basu.Footnote 115 Recognizing this pattern allows us to draw one significant conclusion: Rajnarain's understanding of the charity that used to be practised in ‘those days’ was clearly based on memories of his own grandfather.
If Rajnarain's model for an older generation of philanthropic Bengali was his grandfather Rāmasundar, he also saw these values embodied in a figure like the Calcutta merchant/broker, Rāmdulāl De.Footnote 116 This too allows us to further appreciate the significance of Dīnadayāl within the ‘Account’. In fact, we might even speak of something like a composite character—Rāmasundar/Rāmdulāl/Dīnadayāl—who represents Rajnarain's attempt to wrestle with the problem of recovering for his own age some of the values of those bygone days. This composite figure of charity represents Rajnarain's conviction that it ought to be possible to find public-minded individuals who remain authentically Indian—leaders who care for the public as much as they care for their immediate families. Whether in the ‘Account’, Then and Now, or his autobiography, Rajnarain wants to suggest that, whereas ‘now’ Bengalis were prone to think only of themselves, ‘then’ there had been genuine fellow feeling (sahānubhūti) among Bengalis.Footnote 117 Here again, his grandfather Rāmasundar seems to represent the absolute ideal—someone whose selfless concern for the indigent was nothing like the proud aloofness of present-day Bengalis, who copy the British only in their faults, but not their virtues.Footnote 118
This is precisely why figures like the real-life Rāmdulāl and the fictional Dīnadayāl mattered so much to Rajnarain. These were people who could engage on intimate terms with the British; these were men who were able to learn from the British and even imitate the best of their practices. And yet such men remained true to their local identity. That such a possibility was beginning to seem increasingly remote by Rajnarain's day is what lends to his other great work, Then and Now, its emotional force. Then and Now is a work in which nostalgia becomes the fuel for a kind of patriotic awakening—a curious blend of longing for lost intimacy while cautioning against loss of self. Was Rajnarain able to square the circle of imitation and authenticity? Perhaps to some degree, since we note that, when some of his contemporaries began to cast about for appropriate examples of ‘eminent Indians’ whose life stories might galvanize Indian pride, we find that some were led to lament, ‘Oh! for a Ramdulal at the present time!’Footnote 119
Conclusion
If a figure like Rāmdulāl could emerge in the late nineteenth century as a figure of authenticity, Rajnarain subtly reminds us that integrity need not fear imitation. And yet, a work like Then and Now also reminds us how much the late-colonial quest for authenticity comes freighted with judgements about appropriate modes of cultural expression. After all, this is the moment when Bengali intellectuals began an outright dismissal of liberalism as the ‘imitative shadow of an alien (commercial) civilization’.Footnote 120 It is that dismissal that helps account for the chequered after-life of imitation in nationalist and post-colonial thought. And it is that dismissal that continues to haunt our understanding of cultural change in early colonial Calcutta. In looking at the ‘then’ of Rajnarain's book, our goal should thus be to escape this late-colonial normative framework in order to think about lived practices of imitation in early colonial Bengal as creative avenues for the translation of emergent ideas about charity and philanthropy into local forms.Footnote 121 Michael Taussig has remarked that mimesis is the ‘nature culture uses to create second nature’ and his comment on the way this ‘natural faculty’ for imitation eventually doubles back onto mimesis as a ‘historical product’ suggests one possible way to think about the latter-day status of philanthropy in colonial India.Footnote 122 We can marvel at the wonder of mimesis or fume at its duplicity, but Taussig's work suggests we might also simply pause to ask what it meant for Bengalis to imitate a range of material, social, and linguistic forms.Footnote 123 How were these Bengali expressions of philanthropy necessarily drawn into the ‘ricocheting’ exchanges between India and the West? And how does this ultimately complicate the job of locating any clear cultural borders for modern philanthropy?Footnote 124 All land becomes borderland—a fluid space within which to look for the early traces of modern South Asian philanthropy. In this respect, we can scarcely close without noticing that Rajnarain's ability to warn against imitation was matched only by his gift for imitation!
If we return to the example of community-based initiatives—pre-colonial and modern—we can see there are benefits in adopting the kind of ‘then and now’ perspective used here. We have noted, for instance, that, for the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the pre-modern Gambhīrā festival featured distinctive organizational and political elements, such as the role of temporary officers of the baiṭhak, who played the role of something like ‘honorary public servants’. In such ancient modes of political organization, Sarkar detected the spirit of ‘indigenous republican organizations of self-government’.Footnote 125 Of course, Sarkar published his book Folk Element in Hindu Culture in 1917, at a time when Swadeshi enthusiasm and the quest for an authentic indigenous culture were running high—a time when the idea of imitation found little favour among Indian intellectuals. We must view his quest for an authentic Indian ‘folk’ against this backdrop, even as we note that the idioms he uses to identify pre-modern vernacular political forms (for example, officers, budgets, public service) reveal the legacy of earlier colonial expressions of associational and philanthropic behaviour. Something similar can be noted with respect to the modern puja association. These associations took on a new and vital role in the nationalist context at precisely the time Sarkar was writing his work on Hindu folk culture.Footnote 126 And yet the characterization of these associations conjures the same range of new organizational features we saw first emerging in the early colonial moment (that is, once again, volunteers, office bearers, membership lists, subscriptions, and budgets). Even if the ‘now’ of a Rajnarain or a Benoy Kumar was predicated on finding something truly Indian or meaningfully sāmājik, we see the degree to which it remains embedded in the messy space of colonial mimesis out of which ultimately emerged modern notions of samāj.
Thus, instead of pointing to a single historical wellspring for South Asian philanthropy, this article attempts to conjure the complex conditions shaping its emergence and development across the nineteenth century. We have a model for such an approach in the work of Donna T. Andrew, whose study of philanthropy in eighteenth-century London avoids tracing the source of modern philanthropy to the operation of a reified ‘charitable tradition’; Andrew rightly asks: How could recourse to such a ‘tradition’ ever help us understand the particularity of efforts geared toward the public good during this period?Footnote 127 Instead of getting caught up in the cultural arithmetic of what is retained and what is rejected, Andrew concludes we do better to think of tradition itself as a flexible framework—something mutable and responsive to the creative agency of various actors. The work of these actors is never completely de novo, since it bears the traces of ‘past choices’, but it is also sufficiently new to render meaningless the idea of any self-evident or primordial ‘tradition’ of benevolence.Footnote 128
Applying Andrew's approach to the emergence of philanthropic behaviour in early colonial Calcutta requires that we acknowledge that neither Britain nor South Asia had any single ‘tradition of benevolence’ that shaped the articulation of norms of giving, kindness, or public good. We have to ponder instead the messy and vibrant mingling of multiple traditions. There is no other way to confront the complicated encounter of already rather complex European traditions of charity (whether framed by Biblical, mercantilist, radical, or reformist ideologies) with the equally (or should we say more) complex conceptual, moral, social, and philosophical traditions that have served to structure giving and public goodness among Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, and other communities in South Asia. Were we to look at Hindu communities alone, we would have to reckon not only with the scriptural, legal, and devotional strands of Brahmanical traditions, but also the many caste-, clan-, community-, and gender-based understandings of self, property, duty, kindness, or entitlement.Footnote 129 In such a context, overlapping traditions (European and South Asian) create a veritable Indrajāla of discursive and organizational possibilities. Knowing all these strands are in play, it can be helpful to redirect our attention away from the quest to find an essential mode of South Asian philanthropy in order to explore those particular, concrete, and contingent ways philanthropy comes to expression, both then and now.
