Review: Surat under the Raj

Author(s): Vinay Lal

Reviewed work(s):
Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-
1928 by Douglas E. Haynes
Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 18 (May 1, 1993), pp. 863-865
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4399673
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REVIEWS
Surat under the Raj
Vinay Lal
fthetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The
Shaping
of a P'uhlic Culture
in Surat City, 1852-1928 by Douglas E Haynes; University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1992; pp 363, $ 49.95.
THE accommodation to, and contestation
of, colonial rule by Indian 'elites' has
long been a subject of great interest to
historians of modern India, and Douglas
Haynes' monograph, which focuses on the
politics of Surat, is a contribution, albeit
with a difference, to that literature. One
would have thought that this subject had
been pretty much exhausted; indeed, over
the last decade or so the more prominent
works in Indian historiography have taken
us along different directions, so that the
voices we hear now are mainly of women,
peasants, rebels, and other 'subalterns',
and government functionaries or English-
educated Indians do not appear to be the
only sources of 'agency'. Haynes returps
us to a preoccupation of the earliest
literature, that is the appropriation by
Indiaps of liberal or 'western' political
values, but he does so with interpretive
mod'els that in his view owe more to
Gramsci, ethnohistory, and 'cultural
studies' than they do to Weberian social
science, which has long been dominant in
the American academy, with its emphasis
on 'modernisation' 'westernisation', and
rationality. Haynes proposes, in short, to
infuse his work with a focus on "politics
as symbolic action and discursive prac-
tice", so that the intrusion of democratic
values into political life is seen less as the
consequence of "forces external to the
political process" than as a process
resulting from "day-to-day struggles for
power and justice under colonial domina-
tion" (p 5). Haynes rejects the 'evolu-
tionary' model whereby the emergence of
democracy is seen as "an outgrowth of a
universal human drive for freedom (as
defined in western terms)" and the accep-
tance by the non-western world of the
values associated with liberalism as
somehow "natural". It is the tension bet-
ween the appeal of western ideas, and the
constraints that colonialism necessarily
imposed in the shaping of a democratic
ethos, that informs Haynes' exploration
of the political culture that south Asian
elites set out to fashion for themselves-.
It is with a quick sweep that Haynes
traces the history of Surat from the -17th
century, when it occupied a dominant
place in India's domestic and international
trade, to the late 19th century, by which
time it had been reduced to something of
a mofussil town, certainly a pale image-of
its former self, hovering in the shadows
of' Bombay's gigantic hulk. The 'serious
contraction' in Surat's economic activity
owed a great deal, in the first instance, to
the "growing insecurity of trade routes
in the Mughal empire" and increased
pressures upon traders by Mughal noble-
men, and secondly to the establishrient
of British colonial rule. Throughout this
period of decline, and indeed into the 20th
century, there remained intact what
Haynes, obviously invking E P Thompson,
calls a "moral ecohomy of domestic
manufacture'. Business relationships were
built around certain social ties, whether
constituted as "joint-family, caste, com-
munity, and patron-clienf relations':
which ensured that even in times of hard-
ship and financial insecurity merchants
and artisans were not left without some
means of pecuniary support. As Haynes
points out, an understanding of this moral
economy would suggest the severe short-
comings of social science models that
posit an incompatibility between these
kinds of social structures and market-
oriented economies (p 39). Although col-
onialism wrought great changes, and coin-
pelled the residents of Surat to adjust to
new institutions, such as railways, postal
services, and customs, indigenous com-
mercial networks displayed a remarkable
resilience (pp 45, 46). Surat was not only
able to retain its niche, howsoever small,
within the metropolitan colonial economy
by sustaini,g "forms of commerce that
did not compete with European pro-
ducts"', such as trade in pearls and spirals
of silver and silver gilt, but it also
reproduced 'pre-existing social relations'
(p 50). Perhaps the transition from 'status'
to 'contract' was not as complete as some
historians have suggested.
Haynes moves from-the larger picture
to a more microscopic view of the dif-
ferent social groups that comprised Surat's
population. Under the rubric of the inner
politics of the city, he considers the idioms
by meatDs of which members of the mer-
chant castes marked their presence, and
also the place of Hindu 'communities of
low and middle status' Muslims, and
Parsis in the economic, social, and cultural
life of Surat. Mierchants engaged in
religious giving because they, no doubt,
saw it as a form of dhartnic activity, but
just as significantly it allowed the
transformation of 'financial capital' into
'symbolic capital' that worked to g,enerate
and enhance their standing within the
community. Religious munificence is, as
Haynes notes, "common to Hindu coin-
mercial communities all over India", but
it has had a special plafce in Surat and the
rest of Gujarat (p 60). There the 'maha-
jans' with tightly kmit organisations
constituting a form of corporateactivity,
wielded an enormous influence not only
in commercial affairs, but in the civic life
of the community as well by endeavouring
"to protect the economy of trust from
being overwhelmed by a commerce bas-
ed on contract and courtroom" (pp 62,
63). When, for example, fam'ine struck in
1899-1900, the mahajans not only created
Hindu orphanages, but also exercised
pressure upon grain merchants, accom-
panied by the threat of sanctions, to cease
all exports (pp 66, 67). Whatever the im-
pulses of capitalism, anid the institutional
pressures of colonial rule, the inner life of
the Hindu communities continued to
reproduce a social order where questions
of family status and reputation remained
predominant, "in which older idioms of
authority met the challenges posed by
changes in the larger world", and "collec-
tivities based upon descent often retained
the cohesion necessary to enforce a wide
range of groups norms" (p 80). Much like
the Hindus, the Muslims and Parsis too
persisted with the structures and idioms
of their social life, and "not because of
any inherent intransigence to change",
which is what those who argue for an in-
alienable divide between a 'stagnant' India
and an ever changing west would like us
to believe, "but because these social forms
remained relevant to the material and
psychic needs of the population" (p 80).
Surat's residents lived, from the 16th
century onwards, under the'rule of out-
siders. The 'outer politics' of the city was
thus characterised by accommodation to
the Mughals and then the British, and this
took the form of, deferential behaviour,
tribute, acceptance of imperial patronage,
and even small acts of resistance. Haynes
does not dwell very long on Surat under
the Mughals, for it is the advent of a new
public culture under the British, suc-
ceeding the initial establishment of what
Haynes calls the 'Anglo-Bania Order', that
is the subject of his study. In the evolu-
tion of this public culture, 'public opinion'
was to assume great importance, for,
though the colonisers might argue that
Economic and Political Weekly May 1, 1993
863
'public opinion' could have no conceivable
authority among a heterogeneous mass of
largely illiterate people without any
experience of governing themselves, the
indigenous elites were to have increasing
success in their appeal to 'public opinion'
as they strove to create a movement for
independence. 'Public opinion however,
was not the only term in the emerging
lexicon with 'particular potency for the
ruling group': other 'keywords and
phrases' were "natural leader, loyalty,
public, nation, representation, political
education. devolution of power. Muslim
backwardness, i-mprovement, and- moral
and material progress" (p 107). It is to the
political participation that was devised
around this vocabulary that Haynes then
turns his attention.
If colonialism was unable to inipact
greatly the idioms by which Surtis con-
ducted their private lives, in the 'civic
arena', by contrast, Anglo-Indian political
idioms were decisive in shaping the con-
tours of Indian political activity and
defining the parameters of Indian political
discourses. The newly emerging English-
educated elites, seeking to justify their
assumption of leadership roles, turned to
"British historical theories" to suggest
that there was "a universal tendency for
societies to move from social stages
in which leadership was based upon
hereditary qualities io those in which it
was founded upon public capabilities"
(p 163). To take another example, when
the notables active in the tnunicipality
invoked the idea of 'improvement', they
were evidently speaking the language of
British reformers (p 156). They might have
disputed with the British where Indians
stood on the evolutionary scale from
'backward' to 'progressive, or how far
Indians had moved from habitation in
'village communities' to creating institu-
tions with a measure of self-governance,
but they did not dispute that there was
such a scale (p 146). Indian elites did not,
in other words, effect any epistemological
breakthrough; they did not doubt that
British and European models of what we
would today call social science discourse
mapped the reality of Indian social and
political life, and provided the knowledge
by which India could be known, but ques-
tioned only the motives of some British
writers and scholar-administrators and
their findings by which Indians were con-
demned to remain in a per.petual stage of
inferiority and tutelage. As one might
expect, the most frequent complaint of
Indian elites was that the colonisers fre-
quently did not themselves honour their
obligation to uphold the values they had
espoused. Could, for instance, the British
claim a unique adherence to the 'rule of
law' when brutal techniques of repression
were the order of the dav? If one were to
adopt Haynes' view, then what is most il-
ustrative about such a claim is precisely
that Indians never contested the normative
value ot the 'rule of law' but only the ap-
propriateness of the view that it was by
the 'rule of law' that the Empire claimed
the allegiance of natives.
The hegemony of colonial rule was such
that a "thoroughgoing critique of the
political order that might have informed
a sustained, collective resistance to the
Raj" could not be developed. In the arena
of ritual, as the nationalist movement
grew in strength, 'symbolic substitutions'
marked the extreme limits of what na-
tionalists could hope to achieve. So, at
nationalist durbars, the "prominent
visiting congress leader assumed the place
of the governor or viceroy", "the (Home
Rule) League replaced the municipal
couhcil as chief sponsor of the visit", and
so forth (p 195). Haynes concedes that the
years 1919-1924, the first significant phase
of a mass movement for independence,
represented a 'counter-hegemonic period.
It was in this period that lndian elites,
under the leadership of Garndhi, while still
employing the "vocabulary of public
politics" were able to steer it away. "from,
its moorings in evolutionary thought"' so
that service to "the nation, the people, and
public good" were "radic&lly dissociated
from the notions of loyalty, progress, the
law, and responsible self-government"
(p 219). At the same time, a more in-
digenous discourse of dtarma, satya,
ahimsa, tyag, tapasya, bhog, pratishtha,
shram and prayaschit was revalorised or
otherwise given political currency so as to
evoke the idea of a politics that would be
divorced neither from spirituality nor
from morality. However, this 'counter-
hegemonic' discourse could not be sus-
tained for long, partly because of the
withdrawal of the lower classes from the
non-cooperation movement, and partly
because of a growing feeling among
Muslims that there would be little place
for them in an independent India. Most
significantly, the elites returned to 'con-
stitutional politics', which had an en-
durance that alternative styles of politics
could not command, and which lured by
its promise of the spoils of office. The last
20 years or more of British rule were, in
Haynes' view, signified by the 'restoration
of hegemony.
The analysis Haynes offers of Ahe
'Gandhian interlude' and, as it were, its
communal aftermath is quite common-
place and not wholly convincing. It need
not detain us, for it is to Haynes' central
arguments, and to certain questions of
methodology and epistemology, that we
must now turn. Haynes had. at the very
outset, promised to free Indian historio-'
graphy from tne shackles ot that massively
disabling vocabulary of evolutionary
thought typified by the notions of 'wester-
nisation' and 'modernisation' and his
chosen vehicle for doing so is the notion
of 'hegemony'. But is his departure from
the evolutonary model all that significant,
given that he perforce has to confine his
analysis to the 'elites'? His excuse for ig-
noring the 'masses' is that politics under
the colonial dispensation required the
presence of 'symbolic specialists' who
were just as conversant with the idioms
of indigenous culture as they were with the
idioms of Anglo-Indian politics (p 15).
However, what is it that enables Haynes
to make so sharp a break between the
'elites' and the 'masses' a break that can
then be described as being mediated by a
very small class of "symbolic specialists",
if not another kind of evolutionary
model? Haynes, to appropriate his own
mode of argumentation, retains the 'gram-
mar' of American social science discourse,
substituting for the 'western-educated'
and 'modernising' elites a vocabulary of
"symbolic specialists" and other masters
of 'bilingualism' (p 191).
It Haynes is unable to escape altogether
from the manicheism of 'elites' and
'masses' he fails equally to pursue the
ramifications and difficulties of transfer-
ring a political theory from the European
context to colonial India. The notion.of
a "limited and negotiated hegemony" of-
fers, in Haynes' view, a "conceptual alter-
native to approaches that currently imbue
popular understandings of cultural
change in the 'third world', but this leads
of course to the obvious query; "is it really
possible to test the validity of Gramscian
propositions in colonial contexts?" (p 16)
Haynes proceeds, as we have seen, to of-
fer an analysis whereby Indian political
activity is construed as taking place within
tle hegemonic framework established by
the British, but this analysis. loses much
of its resonance in theoretical terms on ac-
count of his rather uncritical investment
in the notion of 'hegemQny' To mean-
ingfully pose questions about the trans-
ference of a political theory, in this in-
stance of 'hegemony' would entail some
reflections about the place of hegemony
in Gramsci's political philosophy, and the
philosophical and sociolpgical implica-
tions of comparative historicisation of
hegemony. Nor is this all; hegemony
emerges in Haynes' work as so overdeter-
mined a concept as to disallow any space
within which Indian nationalists could
have attained an epistemological
autonomy. Thus,
accordipg
to Haynes,
even "the most ambitious goal they [the
elitesJ expressed-the establishment of
home rule-seemed to involve the inser-
864 Economic and Political Weekly May 1, 1993
tion of Indians in slots now held by the
British rather than the creation of a new
sort of political system" (p 197). He is
right in pointing out that the mere
substitution of brown sahibs for white
men can scarcely be construed as evidence
of an alternative politics, but he says
nothing of what a "new sort of political
system" might look like. Had the elites
turned to some variation of communism
or socialism, they would still stand con-
demned as imitators, as emulators of
European idioms of political behaviour,
for Marxism, much like parliamentary
democracy. too is of European vintage.
There is, in Haynes' book, a trequent
slippage into the very modes of discourse
that he seeks to avoid. When he states, for
example, that "there were times when the
expansion of British power was as much
a response to indigenous pressure as it was
an outgrowth of a drive for empire issu-
ing from the English" (pp 89-90), the
argument sounds suspiciously akin to
pronouncements from historians of the
'Cambridge School' about British adven-
turism as a 'reluctant imperialism. The
similarity with the 'Cambridge School'
does not end there; certainly there are
moments in Haynes' writing when it ap-
pears that it was the lot of Indians to merely
react, for only the British were endowed
with agency. Although Haynes himself is
far removed from any kind of communal
outlook, his arrangement of the material
at hand is quite unfortunate. His treat-
ment of the subject matter reinforces the
importance of religion as an organising
principle of Indian history and culture.
Thus his discussion of the "inner politics"
of Surat, particularly of religious giving,
is not dialogic or dialectical, but along
the lines 6f what each religious group-
Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi-did in turn
(pp 52-80). In his discussion of philan-
thropy among the "bilingual notables",
Haynes similarly comments on the pre-
valence of this activity among the Hindus,
and then proceeds to look at the Muslims
and Parsis (pp 121-26). In the last analysis,
Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India
gives. the appearance of being rather too
neat, orderly, and systematic. However, it
is the very presentation that also makes
the shortcomings somewhat less obvious,
and there is no doubt that, in its intricate
and finely textured discussion of the local
politics of Surat under the Raj, it con-
stitutes a worthwhile addition to the
historiography of modern India.
Keeping House for the Old Lady
Meenakehi Tyagarajan
A Domestic History of the Bank of England, 1930-4960 by Elizabeth
Hennesy; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1992; pp xv + 449.
THE Bank of England may not be the
oldest central bank in the world-that
honour is said to belong to a bank of
Scandinavian origin. But it is undoubtedly
the most important. It has served as the
model for central banks round the world,
thanks to its age, traditions and the pro-
selytising activities of Montagu Norman,
its most famous governor. In keeping with
its stature, the Bank of England also has
a deep sense of history. The book under
review bears testimony to this in more
ways than one.
This beautifully produced book is a
part of the third and latest instalment of
the official history of the bank. It men-
tions the availability of an unbroken series
of ledgers going back to 1694, the date of
the founding of the bank. Another in-
teresting reference concerns a box kept for
safekeeping with the bank in 1900 which
remained unclaimed for 50 years. It was
believed to contain paintings of enormous
artistic content and value. When finaly
opened, no more than three very ordinary
paintings of domestic animals were found
inside. These were not thrown away but
preserved "in view of the history of the
box".
The tradition of preservation, which
these references illustrate, is of enormous
.mportance to historians. Elizabeth Hen-
nesy herself refers to the "rich and exten-
ding" archives of the Bank. She is very
meticulous about documentation and her
references-to internal papers, files,
minutes, reports and such like of the
different departments-are listed in the
'Notes' section at the end of the book.
The references total around 750, which
makes an average of two per page of text.
This is mere arithmetical evidence. For an
idea of the range of topics and the wealth
of details available in the documents, one
has to read the book. This may not be
recognised as an advantage of importance
in the Threadneedle-Street milieu, where
high standards of archival maintenance
may be taken for granted. But less
advantageously placed institutional
historians-and there may be a few such
in tfis country-would definitely envy
Hennesy. This of course is not to suggest
that a historian's craft is of secondary
importance to the availability of sources.
This book is something special. The
two previous historians of the bank, John
Clapham and R S Sayers, had dealt with
the Bank's evolution as a whole, taking
up internal or domestic changes of impor-
tance alongside the more substantive
theme of policy developments. This was
not entirely satisfactory, especially as
policy matters grew more complex and re-
quired greater attention. When the writing
of the latest instalment was considered, it
was decided to split the coverage. John
Fforde, a former executive director of the
Bank, took up the external preoccupa-
tions of the Old Lady. His massive The
Bank of England and Public Policy,
1941-1958 is the first, and more impor-
tant, volume of the present instalment of
the Bank's history. Hennesy's subject is
the internal or domestic concerns of the
Old Lady, the way the household was run
during a period of vast change. This is
thus the first time that separate, undivided
attention has been given to the internal
organisation of the Bank. On policy or
external matters, information can be
found in other books. But the material of
this book cannot be found elsewhere.
Unlike Fforde, the author of the com-
panion volume, Hennesy is an 'outsider'.
This does not seem a disadvantage. In
fact, it could be deemed an advantage to
have been able to look at various
developments and issues without the hin-
drance of personal involvement and
prejudice. Hennesy has done a truly
remarkable job of gettingto know the Old
Lady and her very special and complex
household. Her own enjoyment of what
she calls an "absorbing assignment" is
conveyed to the reader who will find this
a delightful book. Her principal job, that
of giving an outline of the structure and
working of the- Bank of England as it had
evolved by 1960, is admnirably tone-
comprehensive yet never so detailed as to
become tiresome. Scattered through the
book is a variety of incidental informa-
tion about an institutioi that has come
to be considered a stolid replication of the
British temperament.
Although 1930 is given as the starting
point for the study, Hennesy goes further
back quite often to indicate the build-up
of tradition or the beginnings of change
The period covered by the book was one
of transformation for the institution as
indeed for the country. The Second World
War was the major catalyst. The Old
Lady's household was rudely shaken.
There was a sense of danger and somer
departments were moved out of London
(there is an enjoyable account of the camp
life of the evacuee employees). Tbtafly new
jobs had to be taken on. Currency notes
of countries of occupied Europe, procured
by the Secret Service, were stored in the
Bank and supplied in appropriate pres
'Seial purpoe notes' was printed for the
specific use of British troops landed b6
Ecoi-omic and Political Weekly May 1, 1993