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From: "Sumit Guha" <
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Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 4:47 PM
Subject: REVIEW: Markovits on Banerjee _Becoming Imperial Citizens_
Sukanya Banerjee. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the
Late-Victorian Empire. Durham Duke University Press, 2010. ix +
272 pp. $84.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4590-9; $23.95 (paper), ISBN
978-0-8223-4608-1.
Reviewed by Claude Markovits
Published on H-Asia ( January , 2011)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha
Imperial Citizenship in Late Colonial India
Nationalist teleologies often result in the erasure of significant
moments and movements, because the latter do not fit within the grand
narrative of the nation that tends to become the dominant version of
history. This is the case with that moment in the history of late
colonial India that is associated with the rise of so-called Moderate
nationalism. The dominant Indian historiography tends to treat it, if
not as a total failure, at best as an incomplete attempt that timidly
opened the path leading to the truly realized historical form of the
nation, the advent of which is often linked with Mahatma Gandhi's
rise to the leadership of the Indian nationalist movement. But Gandhi
himself, as is well known but often forgotten, did pass through a
lengthy phase when he was a believer not in Indian nationalism, but
in imperial citizenship as the way for Indians to acquire political
rights within the framework of a British Empire he then thought
fundamentally benevolent. Such an aspiration to a form of imperial
citizenship was shared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries by a large section of India's Western-educated literati,
and in this book, Sukanya Banerjee, an associate professor of English
at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, seeks to recover the
meaning of this particular moment and to rescue it from what E. P.
Thompson famously called the "enormous condescension of
posterity."[1]
Written in the sometimes impenetrable jargon that seems to be favored
by practitioners of literary studies in North American universities,
the book does not make for easy reading, but it is however well worth
the effort for the often illuminating insights it throws on largely
forgotten and overlooked texts and actors. It is actually a
collection of four studies, held together a bit tenuously by the
thread of imperial citizenship. The notion, as the author rightly
points out, is a kind of oxymoron, as empires, by definition, produce
subjects and not citizens. How a form of putative citizenship could
however be invented within the context of the late Victorian British
Empire is a point about which the author elaborates in a lengthy
introduction that succeeds in defining a framework for analysis that
avoids some of the pitfalls of the postcolonial paradigm.
The first chapter, "Of the Indian Economy and the English Polls," is
a really original take on one of Indian nationalism's founding
fathers, Dadabhai Naoroji, and on his seminal critique of the
political economy of colonial India, _Poverty and Un-British Rule in
India_ (1901). Treating it as a literary text rather than the
scientific treatise it purports to be, Banerjee is able to show its
kinship to the genre of the gothic novel, which was then flourishing
in Victorian Britain. Although the parallel tends at times to
somewhat stretch the imagination of the reader, it proves
nevertheless heuristically rewarding as the author brings out the
similarity between the dismembered body of the Indian nation conjured
up by Dadabhai in his analysis of the profoundly dysfunctional
economic relationship between metropolis and colony and the
grotesquerie and gloom characteristic of gothic novels. The link to
the notion of imperial citizenship is established through a fairly
detailed study of Dadabhai's two campaigns for a seat in the British
Parliament as a Liberal MP on an Irish Home League ticket, which
resulted, at his second attempt in 1892, in his election for Finsbury
Central, the first time a "coloured" person was elected to a seat in
the British Parliament. Often treated in the existing historiography
of Britain and India as a kind of "freak," the episode is
nevertheless worth reflecting about, for the deep paradoxes it
reveals about the notion of citizenship as it evolved in the late
nineteenth century both in the imperial metropolis and in the Indian
colony. For Dadabhai, who was elected to a parliamentary seat in
Britain, would not even have been allowed to vote in his native
India. To a tiny elite of cosmopolitan and mobile Indians, the empire
offered a path to citizenship that India still refused them. But the
small size of the group involved must not lead to the conclusion that
the move and the aspirations were insignificant, and that their de
facto erasure from the historical record is justified.
Similar erasure threatens Gandhi's twenty-year fight for the rights
of South African Indians within the British Empire, often reduced, in
biographical accounts, to a simple rehearsal for Gandhi's future role
as liberator of India. In the second chapter, "South Africa,
Indentured Labor and the Question of Credit," the author returns to
this often-studied episode with a view to showing the many
ambiguities of the future Mahatma's position, in particular in
relation to the indentured laborers who formed the majority of the
Indian population of the colony of Natal. I found this chapter the
least convincing in the book, because treating Gandhi's South African
twenty-odd year stay as a whole, without paying enough attention to
the gradual evolution in the future Mahatma's thought and action,
leads to a flattening of certain dilemmas that he faced. In spite of
what literary analysis can tell us about the "spectral" presence of
the indentured laborers in Gandhi's discourse from the time of his
arrival in Durban, there is little doubt that they did not figure
prominently in his agenda before the last phase of his stay in South
Africa. Their status as "imperial citizens" was far from being a
priority for Gandhi, a critique that could also be extended to the
future Mahatma's attitude toward South African blacks. Late
recognition of their worth was largely linked to Gandhi's "discovery"
of the eminent dignity of manual labor in the writings of Russian
populists, such as Yuri Vasilyevich Bondarev (and Leo Tolstoï), a
linkage that is not sufficiently emphasized. The discussion of
Gandhi's view on "credit" also suffers from insufficient attention to
his own background as a member of a merchant caste. In this chapter,
a certain lack of familiarity with the historical and sociological
context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century South Africa
(thus the author appears unaware of the fact that in the 1890s, the
South African Republic was a Boer state and not a British colony), as
well as a neglect of certain traits of the Gujarati merchant culture
in which Gandhi had been steeped, make for a somewhat unsatisfactory
treatment of Gandhi's very idiosyncratic trajectory.
By contrast, the method of literary criticism employed to good effect
by the author in the first chapter proves again its worth in the
third chapter, "The Professional Citizen in/and the Zenana," which
looks at a famous autobiographical text by India's first female
lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, _India Calling: The Memoirs of Cornelia
Sorabji_ (1934). Recasting "professionalism" as a crucial idiom for
articulating citizenship without the nation (as Sorabji remained an
empire loyalist till the end of her life), the text offers a balanced
account of a fascinating and atypical career. Denied official
recognition as a lawyer because of her gender, Sorabji found a
specific niche for herself as a legal adviser to _pardanashin_ women
(women kept in the seclusion of _purda_) with the Court of Wards, a
role she assumed with considerable success. Allowed unlimited access
to the _zenana_ (women's inner apartments), which was of course a
forbidden space for male lawyers, she did not use the knowledge
gained to develop and publicize a systematic critique of the
condition of women in India, but pursued a piecemeal ameliorative
strategy, which left her in a kind of limbo vis-à-vis emancipatory
narratives recently developed by Indian feminists. Somewhat
distancing herself from feminist discourse and avoiding facile
censure, Banerjee is able to use Sorabji's largely self-chosen
liminality to good effect to underline some of the ambiguities of the
project of imperial citizenship, and its complex relationship to
issues of gender and race.
The fourth and last chapter, "Modernity and the Indian Civil
Service," deals with one of the major demands of "moderate"
politicians, the admission of Indians to the Indian Civil Service
(ICS), the "steel-frame" of the British Raj, a much-coveted badge of
imperial citizenship of a kind. It does it through a double movement
of examining a leading moderate's autobiography, Surendranah
Banerjea's _A Nation in the Making _(1925), and of looking at the
figure of the "competition-wallah" through a presentation of two now
largely forgotten literary texts produced in England, G. O.
Trevelyan's _The Competition-Wallah_ (1866) and H. S. Cunningham's
_Chronicles of Dustypore_ (1877). Counterposing Banerjea's trajectory
that led him to be the first Indian to have successfully passed the
ICS examination to a study of the way in which the "new" British ICS
officers, those who had entered the service after the institution of
a competitive examination in 1853, were perceived, offers a way of
going beyond the "binarism" that has too often dominated studies of
colonial India. Both the "effeminate" Bengalis, who represented the
majority of Indian aspirants to the ICS, of whom Banerjea was a
representative, and the "unmanly" middle-class British
"competition-wallahs" were judged by dominant voices in Anglo-India
to lack in "character" and virility, those essential attributes of
the Victorian gentleman, who served as the ideal type for both the
citizen and the bureaucrat. Thus the difference between Indian and
Briton was partly erased in the censure exercised by the dominant
"gendered" language of Victorian officialdom against all who did not
conform to its ideal of muscular masculinity. Those thus indicted
reacted by emphasizing their own masculinity, be it Banerjea
detailing his physical exertions in his memoirs, or Desvoeux, the
"competition-wallah" character in the _Chronicles of Dustypore_,
flirting with the main female character. Their similar rejection
points basically to a global unease in the way the Victorians dealt
with aspects of bureaucratic modernity and their lingering nostalgia
for some kind of "feudal" values.
All in all, the book brings into focus the way in which "imperial
citizenship" could be an ideal inspiring individual careers, but
failed to make the transition to becoming a viable political program.
Such failure need not be interpreted however only in negative terms,
for the measure of cosmopolitanism the "imperial citizenship" phase
injected into Indian political discourse proved of some value in
limiting the "nativist" excesses of the full-blown nationalism that
flourished in the following phase of India's history. As the author
underlines in her conclusion, recovering that moment is therefore not
to be viewed as a mere antiquarian pastime, but can prove to be of
more enduring value.
Regarding the insights that literary theory allows into the study of
history, a highly controversial topic, the book inspires slightly
mixed feelings. On the one hand, when it can rely on what it does
best, i.e., analyzing "literary" texts (including memoirs and
autobiographies), the literary method proves of undoubted heuristic
value, although its construction of inter-textuality is always in
danger of being somewhat arbitrary and therefore problematic. On the
other hand, when the analysis of printed texts has to be combined
with the perusal of archival materials, as in the case of Gandhi's
South African episode, some of the limitations of the method become
visible. One is nevertheless grateful to Banerjee for having
retrieved from quasi-oblivion an archive of imperial citizenship well
worth our attention. That the definition of citizenship cannot be
entirely encompassed within the ambit of one particular nation-state
is an idea that broadens our horizons and is potentially fruitful.
There remains for the present time a challenge: how to be a "global"
citizen, without being an "imperial" one.
Note
[1]. E. P. Thompson, _The Making of the English Working Class_
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 21
Citation: Claude Markovits. Review of Banerjee, Sukanya, _Becoming
Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire_. H-Asia,
H-Net Reviews. January , 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30858
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
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