The book, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, has already won its share of praise from many quarters. It has been hailed as the most detailed expose of the British Empire and the violence that was embedded in its acquisition, expansion and preservation.
All the accolades are well-deserved. But what this tsunami of acclaim does is submerge a particular kind of indifference and poverty that haunts much of Western writings on the Empire, the violence that was integral to it and its ingrained racism.
This review doesn’t aim to add to the rising chorus of praise that already envelops Caroline Elkins’s tome. My purpose is a little different, and my review is written from the perspective of Britain’s work in India – the “brightest jewel in the British Crown’”, as India was often referred to.
Caroline Elkins
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Penguin Random House (March 2022)
Caroline Elkins, like many Western scholars, works on the assumption that most of the empirically solid and theoretically insightful work on the British Empire in India (I cannot speak of other parts of the globe that the British conquered and dominated) has been produced by Western academics. Nothing could be further from the actual state of play.
In the field of modern Indian history, the writings of Ranajit Guha, both empirically and theoretically, opened up new dimensions in the understanding of the colonial state and its operations – the violence of the conquests, the brutality of its counter-insurgency operations and the intellectual scaffolding the Empire fashioned to justify and camouflage its terrible work in the colonies and over the colonised.
There is no recognition and acknowledgement of Guha’s seminal contribution in Elkins’s book. In what is best described as a feat of bravado, she writes without making any reference to Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Dominance without Hegemony and The Prose of Counter Insurgency, to name only three of Guha’s most important pieces which are of direct relevance to the narrative and the argument that Elkins constructs.
But is hers merely a feat of bravado? The propensity to marginalise Indian history and Indian history writing has a long lineage. In the early 19th century, James Mill in The History of British India – mandatory reading for any Briton who wanted to come to India to help in the administration of British India and make a personal fortune – had announced that “the subject [Indian history] forms an entire and highly interesting portion of the British history.”
The implication was obvious: India had no history of its own before the arrival of the British in India, and thus, logically, there could be no Indian history of India. The implication blossomed into a larger imperial truism: the history of India, even when it came to acknowledging the wonder that was India’s ancient past, had to be written by British/Western academics. This idea refused to go away.
Till the early 1970s, Oxford undergraduates who wanted to do a special paper on India had to study a course entitled ‘Warren Hastings and Oudh’. Only in the early 1970s was this replaced by a paper called Constitutional Developments and the Indian National Movement. But the James Mill mindset continued to have an afterlife. In the 1990s, one of India’s finest historians was asked in a job interview at Oxford how he would teach Indian history as a part of British history. The question came from one of the most distinguished historians in the Oxford History Faculty. Needless to add the Indian historian did not get the job.
Watch | Ramachandra Guha on 7 Forgotten Western Rebels Who Fought for India’s Independence
India’s experience of British rule
In the grand narrative of global or comparative history, India’s experience of British rule and British exploitation and oppression is made just a part, sometimes a minor part, of a wider and bigger story. In this move, the Indian experience is denuded of its own autonomous and unique trajectory.
The Revolt of 1857 (called the Mutiny of 1857 by British writers and historians) is a landmark event in the narrative of violence in British India – Elkins aptly calls it an “explosive” event. She claims that it is one of the events she will “investigate”. But there is no coherent analytical account of the uprising in the book. There are references to it, most of them passing and fleeting. It will be an exaggeration to call such references an “investigation”. And what she writes on the Revolt has no recognition or acknowledgement of the body of work produced by Indian historians on various aspects of the great uprising.
Revolt of 1857. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Full disclosure requires that I mention myself as one of those several historians who have published extensively on the Revolt of 1857 – so I can hardly be alone in feeling the need to show Elkins’s intellectual inheritance from the elder Mill.
The violence and prejudice embedded in British rule in India have been written about extensively by Indian historians. Elkins chooses to ignore the work of Gyanendra Pandey on the history of prejudice. Three of the writings of Partha Chatterjee, who has written extensively on these themes and on nationalism in India, get mentioned in the bibliography. But in the text, only a comment of his on Charles Tegart, a particularly vicious police officer in British India, is quoted. This can hardly be considered an original contribution by Chatterjee.
The latter, in fact, made several important observations on British rule in India which Elkins could have used to elaborate and enrich her narrative. She chose not to. I will turn to one of Chatterjee’s analytical points in a later paragraph. Elkins’s comments on Gandhi without any reference to Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial two-volume biography of Gandhi which, too, cannot have escaped her notice since it was published and reviewed globally.
Similarly, she writes about Jawaharlal Nehru without any reference to Sarvepalli Gopal’s three-volume biography of Nehru. I could cite other examples but that would be to labour the point about Elkins’s bizarre and seemingly wilful indifference to Indian scholarship.
It is difficult to find a parallel to such indifference within a book that has garnered so much praise. If this sounds harsh, consider Elkins’s view that Gandhi’s non-violent mass mobilisation against British rule was largely ineffectual and the only language that the British imperial official mind of the Empire understood was violence. This indirectly echoes the opinion of the Cambridge historian, Jack Gallagher, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s peddled in scintillating prose the view that independence of the colonies was “not usually a victory won by freedom-fighters”.
The famous Gallagher quip was “Indian nationalists were once non-cooperative, twice shy”. By ignoring most of the enormous body of work by Indian scholars on the strength of the national movement in India, Gandhian and non-Gandhian, Elkins comes close to flying Gallagher’s flag. To do this half a century after Gallagher’s callow version of the “Cambridge School” was discredited (including from the inside by the Cambridge historian Chris Bayly) calls for rare and unenviable intellectual courage.
Caroline Elkins. Photo: Screengrab via YouTube/Vintage Books
The men who conquered India in the second half of the 18th century were shameless about the use of violence in establishing British rule and control. Philip Francis, an important British administrator in the 1770s and one of those who worked to set up systems and processes for maintaining the Empire, wrote with unabashed candour that “there was no power in India but the power of the sword, and that was the British sword and no other.” Francis’s famous rival, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general, also admitted that the sword was the most valid title the British had to sovereignty in India.
British rule in India carried on it the indelible birthmark of violence. Whenever rebellion challenged British dominance, the latter reasserted itself through deployment of violence and terror. There was no attempt to justify and cover up the violence. Might was seen as right.
This brazenness moved to an elaborate intellectual justification with the rise of liberalism and with the thrust to improve and westernise Indian society. Elkins, drawing on the works of scholars like Uday Mehta and Karuna Mantena, exposes the hypocrisy and the double standards embedded in the liberal project. The two Mills, James and John Stuart – father and son – argued at different levels of sophistication that India was barbaric and backward, stagnant and unprogressive. The only way India could be rescued from this plight was through a kind of parental despotism.
Indians were in no state to embrace the virtues of liberalism – freedom, democracy and so on. Indians had to be trained to accept these virtues. The training period was never announced: it was like the receding horizon. Many, if not all, British politicians and administrators believed that British rule in India was permanent. The liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, wrote in 1872 to Lord Northbrook, the then viceroy of India, “when we go, if we are ever to go…”
The principle of equality so central to the liberal doctrine appeared seriously compromised when those who were perceived as “subject races” laid claims to be brought into the ambit of that principle. The rule of law, crucial to the functioning of a democracy, was seldom honoured in India. British rule in India did not see itself embodying democratic principles. It fashioned itself as a ‘despotism’.
James Fitzjames Stephen, a legal member of the Colonial Council in India, was forthright on the matter. According to him, (a passage quoted by Elkins) the empire
“is essentially an absolute government, founded, not on consent, but on conquest. It does not represent the native principles of life or of government, and it can never do so until it represents heathenism and barbarism. It represents a belligerent civilization, and no anomaly can be so striking or so dangerous as its administration by men who, being at the head of a Government…having no justification for its except [the superiority] [of the conquering race], shrink from the open, uncompromising, straightforward assertion of it, seek to apologize for their own position, and refuse, from whatever cause, to uphold and support it.”
On the basis of a sense of superiority and, by implication, the inferiority of Indians, it was argued by John Stuart Mill and others that Indians had only a choice of despotism and should have no access to the government of democratic representation as they were incapable of benefiting from free and equal discussion. India was, thus, excluded from the liberal understanding of the world. It was the exception that upheld the general rule.
What was it that made India an exception? The fact that it was a colony of the British Empire. It had to be ruled by a superior power, and imperial rule, because it was made possible, and violence could only justify itself by making India and Indians inferior, incapable of having access to liberal values.
John Stuart Mill. Photo: London Stereoscopic Company/The Conversation
Partha Chatterjee has called this “the rule of colonial difference”. By the operation of this rule “a normative proposition of supposedly universal validity…is held not to apply to the colony on account of some inherent moral deficiency of the latter. Thus, even as the rights of a man would be declared in the revolutionary assemblies of Paris in 1789, the revolt on Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) would be put down on the ground that those rights could not apply to black slaves. John Stuart Mill would set forth with great eloquence and precision his arguments establishing representative governments, but would immediately add that this did not hold for India.’’
It is not that Elkins is unaware of “the rule of colonial difference”. She mentions it in passing in the text but does not elaborate on it nor does she say that it is a formulation made by Chatterjee. The reader has to turn to the voluminous endnotes of this book to find out the author of this rule. It is indeed amazing that Elkins in the text cites and quotes Chatterjee on Tegart, but fails to mention Chatterjee on the important and insightful “rule of colonial difference”.
Elkins is fully aware of the hypocrisy and double standards inherent in the liberal justification of the British Empire in India. What she refuses to recognise is that the hollowness of such justification, both empirically and theoretically, has been worked out by a number of Indian historians, most of whom do not get even a cursory nod in her narrative. This implicates the author of The Legacy of Violence in a related legacy of intellectual and epistemological violence by which the research of Indian historians is ignored and marginalised.
What do they know of empire who know the empire only as a political and economic institution and thus continue to perpetuate the empire’s intellectual dominance?
Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of History at Ashoka University. All views expressed are personal.
