The Birth of the Amateur Intellectual

The following is an excerpt from Saikat Majumdar’s The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony – a volume on the making of the popular amateur intellectual in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

How did Indians respond to Western education under British rule? Particularly, what was their response to the humanistic education that occupied a place of central importance in the administrative vision of the British Empire? Few subjects have drawn as much debate and disagreement in South Asian postcolonial studies – perhaps because few feel more influential in the very making of the postcolonial subject. These are crucial historical debates that have, over the last few decades, revealed contours of educational development for the modern Indian subject as well as the formation of a public sphere in colonial India. The questions, much less the answers, are far from being settled – if indeed they can ever be.

But my particular goal in this book is to read certain individuals who imbibed European culture and education wilfully and yet in modes of jagged disobedience from the imperial mission of European humanities in the colony and its decolonized afterlife. Taking place either in the absence of institutional education or in a deeply conflicted relation with it, the learning of these individuals has been primarily driven by autodidactism, which in turn has shaped an amateur impulse in their writing that I see at once as deviant and productive. I seek to ask a few questions: in what sense can they be called amateurs? Against what contextual measure of professional aptitude? And more importantly – what is the connection between their deviant amateurism and the unique, often provocative nature of their appeal as popular literary intellectuals?   

The early years of postcolonial studies – particularly following Edward Said’s arguments about the discursive structure of imperialism and Louis Althusser’s identification of education as a totalising force – Gauri Viswanathan’s work on English education in 19th century India as soft imperialism felt deeply convincing. Rosinka Chaudhuri, on the other hand, has been a consistent critic of Viswanathan’s argument of English as “masks of conquest”. She has argued for the agency and willingness of Indians in taking what they ‘found good and liked best’ from Western education, particularly in 19th century Bengal, the hub of British colonial administration. From Sanjay Seth we have received insights about the radically different subjectivities posited by pre-modern and colonial education in India. Indeed, Seth has revealed the limitation of imagining the very conception of subjectivity within pre-colonial education. Critical university studies in India have also read administrative control as the driving mechanism behind key curricular and pedagogic initiatives in British India that the independent nation has allowed to continue uninterrupted all the way to our present. 

An influential voice here belongs to Andre Beteille, who has traced the centrality of examinations, which creates a culture of rote-learning, to the British government’s need to train and certify clerks in massive numbers to staff the imperial administration. This remains a deeply persuasive argument given the pervasiveness of both rote-learning and the continued demand for government jobs. Even so, Sanjay Seth has offered important correctives to this line of thought. Seth admits to the widely accepted reality of Indians merely using western education for instrumental purposes, essentially, to the goal of securing a government job. But he also argues that it is misleading to interpret this as the “failure” of western education, or even to talk about the “intent” behind such an education. He goes on to illustrate the radically different, disruptively plural subjectivities of pre-colonial India and their incompatibility with the kind of kind of modern subjecthood western education sought to create. “If the Indian student was bending things his own way,” Seth writes, “was the failure of subjectivity occurring because another subjectivity was intervening – an indigenous one?”.

Eventually, he argues that the very notion of “subjectivity” becomes inadequate as an intellectual category in understanding this conflict. Learning habits perceived as mechanical and unimaginative, such as that of rote-learning, for instance, appears rooted in bodily forms of learning as those shaped by memory, not merely of the liturgical learning of religion, but also of secular knowledges of poetry and arithmetic.  

This conflicted desire for English and European education created some of the earliest exponents of colonial and postcolonial literature. These are figures who illustrate critical agency in assimilating western culture against the argument of its programmatic dissemination among a passive or resistant population. There is no doubt that the latter also existed – as for instance illustrated by Indians’ fulfilment of personal desires through vernaculars and their use of English education merely for instrumental purposes. But they certainly do not tell the whole story. Some of the most striking instances of assimilation of western culture, in fact, does not happen within institutional spaces, but takes place along trajectories of autodidactism. The process is usually patchy, inconsistent, and flawed in many ways. But when carried out by deeply imaginative individuals, it is this amateur assimilation of, and engagement with western humanities, that creates the most influential model of the postcolonial reader and writer. Whatever the larger reach, impact, or success of the colonial education system, the most interesting and memorable assimilation of western humanities happened outside this system, or at least at strange angles to it. 

Ephemeral insights from a brief life

Seth points out that one of the goals of English education was to turn the native away from idolatrous Hinduism. “It is my firm belief that,” he quotes Macaulay as writing in 1836, “if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater in respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence”. And after western education had corroded their idolatrous beliefs, they would eventually be on the path to readiness for the word of God. Western education did turn certain sections of Hindu society away from polytheistic religious practice. But the monotheistic sects and institutions that came into being as a result, such as the Brahmo Samaj and later the Arya Samaj, did not necessarily become pathways to conversion to Christianity. They rather turned into final religious and communal destinations themselves. The Dutts of Rambagan in north Calcutta, a family of well-placed colonial officials deeply absorbed in western education and literary culture, were something of an exception to this dominant religious pattern. Toru Dutt’s father, Govind Chunder Dutt, converted to Christianity along with his whole family – his wife, Kshetramani Dutt, and the three children: the daughters Aru and Toru, and a son, Abju.

While there has been significant critical attention on Toru Dutt’s poetry and unfinished novels in French and English, I want to turn to her thoughts on her reading life as it emerges in her series of letters and the couple of brief essays and responses she published. Together, they reveal an account of self-learning, at once privileged and constricted – a kind of a colonial counterpart to the limited and rarefied life of the “educated man’s daughter” as envisioned by Virginia Woolf. Primarily through her letters, written to her friends and cousins, we get an account of a private literary education put together by her father and herself, through a steady supply of books, both French and English, the learning of Sanskrit, as well as traditional songs and stories in Bengali from her mother. This hybrid education, unusual for a girl of the time, finds imaginative expression in her poems and fiction. Her letters, which contain her sporadic attempts to record her reading experience, reveal the fragility and superficiality that might be expected of a teenage girl, but which also curiously evokes the weight of a much longer life that she never had. Her involvement in European literature, along with the inheritance of ancient Indian tales from her mother, indicates a fused sensibility, which, even though extinguished before a fuller maturity, leaves a valuable map for the future development of the Indian writer in English.

Saikat Majumdar is professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He is the author of a monograph, Prose of the World (2013) and five novels, including The Firebird/Play House (2015/2017), and The Remains of the Body (2024); and the co-editor of The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019).