Book Review: Empire Building and the Meeting of Two Cultures

She might well be called ‘Rosie the Book’ in her native Wales [just as the baker was called Dai (David) the Bread]. Since the 1980s, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones has been writing steadily on Lucknow, on art history, on the 1857 Rising. Here is another stimulating offering, Empire Building: The Construction of British India 1690-1860, about the underpinning of the landscapes that she had earlier sketched so vividly. Not ‘deconstruction’ research, but a narrative of how the British constructed secure enclaves adjacent to or separate from existing ones. Together with this, the East India Company officials conquered their ignorance of a country of which they had initially known only the ports – by collecting, speculating and recording. Llewellyn-Jones’ half-century of felicity in Urdu, familiarity and empathy with the dramatis personae and the sites, and the gift for linking individuals, ideas, plans, and geographies give a rich texture to this book.

The chapters are divided into two sections – the first from 1690 (the founding of Calcutta) to 1790 (when the three ‘Presidencies’ of the East India Company were in place); the second, 1790-1860, after which the Company’s territories were taken over by the British Crown.

The stage is India, but the shadow of European developments is in the background – the first period was dominated by wars, from those of Louis XIV to those of Napoleon; these echoed in India, where British soldiers were confronting the French, and performing other tasks as well – mapping and categorising, putting together buildings for homes and offices. There was a curiosity, an eagerness to understand languages and the arts, and a readiness to mix socially with Indians.

The second period, the ‘war-free’ decades in Europe, saw battles between the Company and Indian rulers. In these years, the Company’s perceptions were influenced by the European ‘enlightenment’, when philosophers and political economists analysed social and political changes, and worked on theories to suggest reforms and institutions for the future. India was suggested as a convenient testing ground for some of these proposed institutions, as was described by Professor Eric Stokes in 1959, in his classic The English Utilitarians and India.

Stokes’ pioneering work was followed after a decade by young scholars of South Asian history – at Indian, British, European, American and Australian universities. They shifted the focus from research on political conquests of kingdoms to studies of the conquest of the people – the twin developments of a public works system and the codification of ‘law and order’ embodied in civic and police administration. For these themes, there is copious primary material – one, buildings, many of which are still standing, and two, records stacked on miles of shelves in innumerable archives in India and Britain.

These have been mined for the last four decades, beginning with Jan Morris’s Stones of Empire, 1983, and Llewellyn-Jones’ own A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow, 1985. As the East India Company’s political control extended over more regions, landscapes, urban and rural, became transformed – to older royal forts and palaces, cathedral mandirs and masajid and ceremonial routes, were added ‘cities of palaces’ (those of Company officials), chequerboard cantonments (new versions of the chhaoni), simple but workable school buildings and civic offices, the use of chairs and tables which created a difference of height between the teacher/official and the students/supplicants. Model institutions – hospitals, homes to contain the unwanted and the dangerous (lunatic asylums and jails), metal bridges to ford rivers and, later, highways. supplemented with railway lines.

In the last 70 years of the Company’s rule (from the 1790s), military conquests continued but military engineers now doubled as civil engineers – until a separate cadre of civil engineers was established, and the Roorkee College was built in 1847. The fuzzy boundary between engineering and architecture in contemporary Britain was mirrored in the Company departments, where engineers proudly modified streets and buildings, with innovations like glass windows and clock towers. The last, a corollary of the English industrial revolution, was part of the totems of ‘improvement’, the buzzword of the time.

The author suggests that while the initial sense of a meeting of the two cultures was invigorating, once success came easy, military and political victories took the edge off the initial curiosity about and respect for Indian knowledge systems:

“..the sense of wonder and enquiry exemplified by the Asiatick Society in its early days had been lost by 1800. As the new century dawned, Indians were increasingly seen as characters in an antique land, unchanging and unwilling to change. It was one of the Company’s most serious errors to underestimate the desire for progress among the people it ruled. Nor did it do much to exploit indigenous talent. It was also slow to recognise and adopt technological innovations from the West that were promoted by enterprising individuals in the face of indifference and penny-pinching. Yet somehow modern India was being constructed, …in jerky and uneven steps, and often in greedy and self-serving ways…”

A plea to the next generation of scholars on South Asian history – someone should write the sequel to this book. 1860-1950 has been studied chiefly in terms of political debates and negotiations. Someone needs to pull together the research done on public works, both infrastructure and grand architecture,  the development of school and university education, medical breakthroughs, linked to developments in the West, often anticipating them.

Even more important, historians should cross the Lakshman rekha of 1947 and point out continuities and breaks. We need to think about the rationale for the architectures of the last 75 years, class prejudices in town planning, and hierarchies in engineering projects. Another way of looking at the issues may be to puzzle out why a genius like Patrick Geddes has been ignored in the country where he did so much research on the ground, interacted with so many policy-makers and philosophers, and introduced the concept of ‘civics’. What explains the class divide today between file-pushers and workers on the ground, in departments as different as the Archaeological Survey and in the CPWD?  Nehru’s description of modern dams as “the temples of modern India” was evocative – but it should have been possible to use the same term for schools, hospitals, and civic centres. Citizens need to identify with their modern institutions.

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones should be read with attention, to get a sense of how negative perceptions can reduce, how empathy can enrich, how visual beauty can uplift, and how listlessness can destroy. It is a parable for today.

Narayani Gupta is a historian.