History of India 1

HISTORY

Subject : History
(For under graduate student)

Paper No. : Paper - IV

History of Modern India

Topic No. & Title : Topic - 3

Colonial State & its Ideology

Lecture No. & Title : Lecture - 2

Utilitarianism

Script

Colonial State & its Ideology: Utilitarianism

The British imperial attitudes towards India began to

undergo radical changes since the 1820s. Some historians
have tried to label these changes as a kind of liberal project
for India’s modern transformation. The civilizing mission
became the principal moral foundation of a new policy
which rejected the ‘Orientalism’ of the first generation of
British imperial officials in India. The most remarkable
expression of this new attitude was the educational policy
History of India 2

that Governor-General William Bentinck and the law

member in his council, Thomas Babington Macaulay had
enunciated, emphasizing English education for the Indian
literate classes. The administrative motive of creating a
class of native interpreters between the white ruling class
and the Indian subjects notwithstanding, the policy carried
the imprints of a new imperial ideology.

The Roots of the New Policy

Explanations for the British civilizing mission, the new
aggressive liberal spirit that a man like James Mill and his
followers represented, required to be sought in the
changing context of imperial practice in India. If the
unquestioned supremacy of British paramountcy from the
1820s made the imperial officials more confident than they
had been in the past, the completion of the Industrial
Revolution in England which produced an immense amount
of wealth for Britain, generated the conviction that this
British model of progress unleashed by individualist
entrepreneurial spirit needed to be implanted in India to
make it dynamic once again. A difference between the east
and the west was certainly perceived; but it was not looked
History of India 3

upon as a permanent condition. If India was changeless and

backward, a perception that most imperial officials shared,
it was important to lift it out of the morass. In addition to
the political confidence that apparently made this imperial
vision more easily translatable into concrete policies, there
were debates among liberals in England about what
characterized improvement in India. The English liberals
were divided along sectarian lines due to their ideological
allegiances to conservatism and liberal utilitarianism, and
such differences made a good deal of impact on Indian
policy. India began to feature in the ideological conflicts in
British domestic politics as well. It was of course not a one
way process. If the British in their domestic sphere debated
on what needed to be done for ‘India’s progress’, however
illusory the tangible meaning of the progress might have
been, knowledge about India also made a major
contribution to these debates, compelling the warring
intellectuals in England holding conflicting beliefs to take
opposite sides. British politics, competing visions in British
liberalism, the increasing knowledge about India among
English men, and the changing conditions of Imperialism in
India converged to create the ingredients and the larger
History of India 4

context of what has been studied as the ideological basis of

imperial reformism.

The Debates in British Liberalism

In the aftermath of the French Revolution British Liberalism
was called upon by the traumatic events in France to
engage with the question of democratic reform. On one side
of the spectrum were the conservatives like Edmund Burke,
who thought that each country in the world had an intrinsic
ancient constitution, and political and social change was not
expected to depart radically from this. On the other side
were the Utilitarians who believed in certain universal
principles about human nature which were capable of
governing social policy everywhere in the world regardless
of cultural differences. The individual as a potential
entrepreneur or an innovator, as he had been lionized in
Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations, was in all
circumstances attracted to pleasure and avoided pain.
Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian reformer, who was a
mentor of James Mill, stated this in a systematic manner in
his numerous tracts. The most covetable of all pleasures
was the pleasure of wealth that a man was likely to pursue
History of India 5

if he was freed from different kinds of legal and social

constraints. A free man in other words must be a free
economic agent, and in order to realize fully such
potentialities the political system required to recognize each
individual as a free citizen. Bentham in addition, also
offered a practical reason for undertaking political reform in
England. In a tract written during the late 1790s he
recommended electoral reform and wholesale
enfranchisement for all adult men to avoid a catastrophe
like the French Revolution. Utilitarian democracy which
formed the backdrop to the First Reform Act in England in
1832 was designed as a barrier to the Revolution. This new
angle about enfranchisement is suggestive of how British
liberalism had moved away from the aristocratic liberalism
of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
celebrated in John Locke’s ideas. Bentham’s main
contention was that in order to make the ruling classes
responsive to the peoples’ needs, the latter must possess
some power to control the ruler’s conduct. This was, as a
form of government, the most useful.
History of India 6

This particular attitude which did not have an immediate

impact on India had run counter to another set of Utilitarian
premises which considered the discussion on forms of
government as irrelevant. Bentham, before he was troubled
by the French Revolution, had felt that carefully chosen
classes of law makers, recruited from people with
specialized knowledge in different spheres were the best
legislators and were entitled to lead the ordinary people to
the road towards progress. Progress was defined as
maximization of wealth, freedom from unnecessary
constraints and proper codification of laws, which would
make people aware of their obligations as responsible
citizens. Education, as Bentham commented in one of his
tracts, was meant to equip individuals to pursue their
material objectives effectively, instead of being needlessly
bogged down by the curricular of a classical education
consisting of literature, language and history. If the
Utilitarian vision of democracy was withheld from
application in India for obvious political reasons, the other
Benthamite prescriptions need to be fitted into the
ideological requirements of the new Imperialism of the
1820s. A small community of imperial ruling class could not
History of India 7

afford to allow representative government, let alone

enfranchisement of the Indians. Yet they could pride
themselves about the fact that as carefully chosen law
makers, they had the mission to lead Indians to the path of
progress. What India needed in their perception was
carefully drafted laws that would unburden them of the
accumulated weight of an ancient history. Not unnaturally a
man like William Bentinck who became Governor General of
India in 1828 once remarked that in India he would rule
only in name, while Bentham and James Mill would remain
the guiding spirit always.

Bureaucratic Reformism in India

The most powerful exponent of such bureaucratic reformism
in India was James Mill. From 1819 until his death in 1836
he held a high position in the East India Company’s London
establishment. Most of his ideas about reforms in India
were based on the assumption that India stood low on the
scale of civilization. One of the main objectives of his
History of British India was to question William Jones’
claims that India had achieved a high state of civilization in
ancient times. Mill felt that a culture of despotism had
History of India 8

created in India a rude and slavish people. By preventing

individual accumulation of wealth such conditions had
created barriers against enterprise and change. Indian
society had remained changeless and stationary for
centuries. James Mill’s remedy was a code of laws that
would release individual initiatives from the constraints
imposed by tradition and a culture of despotism. Following
Bentham, he recommended ‘light taxes and good laws’ in
order to promote individual initiatives towards
improvement. Working on a wrong assumption that in India
private property had not existed, he insisted on the creation
of individual property rights as the basic foundation for a
dynamic society. The primary objective of the new codes of
law that the British officials were expected to enact in India
was protection of private property. In a typical early
utilitarian fashion, James Mill felt no urgency to introduce
representative government in India. Since happiness rather
than freedom was the moral ideal, security of property was
more important than participatory government. So long as
the British bureaucracy in India performed efficiently, there
was no reason for the British to feel any moral compunction
about what emerged as a system of bureaucratic despotism
History of India 9

in India. James Mill’s son John Stuart Mill who became

during the middle of the nineteenth century an ardent
campaigner for democratic reform in England, and defended
liberty almost as a religious commitment however,
considered India to be unsuitable for political democracy.
India according to John Mill needed a long period of
apprenticeship under British tutelage to become competent
for political democracy.

It is therefore obvious that some of the Orientalist

assumptions about India’s difference from the west
moulded the utilitarian judgment about the Indian people.
For all practical purposes it had very little difference from
what has been labelled as ‘Bureaucratic Paternalism.’
Between utilitarian reformism and bureaucratic paternalism
which dominated the imperial ideology in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, there was however one important
difference. Utilitarian liberals like James or John Stuart Mill
showed an element of optimism about the prospects of
India’s achieving certain equality with the west after a
period of apprenticeship. This optimism was lacking among
the paternalists who felt that the political culture in India
History of India 10

was so powerfully change-resistant that British reformism,

however well-intentioned it might have been, was destined
to failure. This sentiment was celebrated in poetic language
when Rudyard Kipling, the poet of Imperialism wrote those
famous lines that ‘the east is east and the west is west and
never the twain shall meet.’

Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism

Besides Utilitarian Liberalism, Christian evangelical ideas
made a similar contribution to the reformist imperial
ideology which dominated British thinking about India
during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. If the
utilitarians had visualized India’s degeneration through
introduction of good laws, the evangelical vision,
represented most powerfully by a man like Charles Grant
promised India’s cultural revitalization through the
introduction of Christian monotheism. To the extent that
Charles Grant deprecated the superstitious and polytheistic
Hindu religion, his views were perfectly in accord with
James Mill’s similar denunciation of Hinduism and the
decadent Brahmins. Charles Grant was convinced that
Christianity would enable Indians to rise in the scale of
History of India 11

civilization, and to achieve in the end a measure of equality

with English men. The Evangelicals and the Utilitarians
together represented the rising middle class in Britain, who
increasingly found in India an appropriate ground to
practice the morally elevated role of civilizers. The vision of
India’s modern transformation provided the basis for the
justification of Britain’s right to rule India for years to come.

Lord William Bentinck and the Programme of Reform

The imperial ideological impulse that we come across in
James Mill and Charles Grant became the principal
watchword of policy making during the tenure of Lord
William Bentinck as Governor –General. The same
sentiment certainly had been expressed by some of his
predecessors, like for example, Lord Hastings of Moira. Yet
it was during Bentinck’s tenure that the assumption about
India’s inferiority as a civilization was translated into an
elaborate project of reform. Hence the British set out to
turn Indians into English men as Macaulay, the law member
in Bentinck’s council, described it in his 1835 Minute on
Education. The purpose behind the introduction of western
education, in Macaulay’s perception, was not the limited
History of India 12

objective to create a class of interpreters but to create a

race that would be ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals
and in intellect.’ Nothing less than a complete
transformation of India’s culture and society was to create a
‘new west’ in India.

The Rule of Property in Agriculture

Besides western knowledge, the introduction of the rule of
law, protecting private property and the civic freedom of
individuals, defined the parameters of this reformist
enterprise. Already in 1793 an important step was taken by
Cornwallis in the Permanent Settlement. The zamindari
right which was basically a right to take a share from the
revenue fund, was transformed into estate ownership.
Cornwallis wished to protect the private property of the
landed intermediaries. The utilitarians, however, as Eric
Stokes has suggested, had more radical ideas. Following
David Ricardo’s Theory of Rent, the utilitarians looked upon
the rent extracted by the zamindars as an unearned income
that belonged to the government. Consequently, in several
land revenue settlements, initially in the north-western
provinces and later in Maharashtra, sought to vest property
History of India 13

rights in the actual cultivators by setting aside the claims of

revenue intermediaries. Since the zamindars showed no
signs of undertaking measures of improvement to increase
agricultural production, officials influenced by utilitarianism
began to look for peasant enterprise in agriculture. The
attack on intermediary rights had the additional motive of
creating appropriate conditions in which urban capital would
be encouraged to make investments in agriculture, in the
absence of locally powerful parasitic classes.

Macaulay’s Legal Project

In addition Macaulay’s Law Commission embarked on the
codification of laws in order to make the principle of rule of
law effective. Laws properly codified were expected to bring
to an end the arbitrary nature of ‘Oriental despotism’ The
legal codes were required to enunciate predictable rules and
regulations, which were meant to replace the discretionary
authority exercised by despotism. Even then there was a
strong bureaucratic opinion which looked upon these
western principles of legal adjudication unsuitable for Indian
society. Consequently when the projected code was finally
completed in the 1860’s, an alternative theory suggested by
History of India 14

John and Henry Lawrence, gave greater importance to

personal government by the civil servant, in order to avoid
the dilatory procedures of the new institutions of justice.
The codification project however drew heavily on the
emerging corpus of Hindu and Muslim laws, which had
already been assembled by the first generation of officials
like Warren Hastings and William Jones.

The Programme of Western Education

Western education as the basis of social improvement,
featured prominently in the reformers’ programme. Even
though English education was introduced in the eighteenth
century, the Company’s government, despite Charles
Grant’s pleadings, did not take any direct responsibility for
the promotion of English education. A few missionaries like
Dr. William Carey, William Ward and Joshua Marshman set
up educational institutions as a part of missionary activities.
The Charter Act of 1813 recognized the need for English
education, but failed to break the stranglehold of the
Orientalists in policy making, who were instrumental in the
establishment of the Sanskrit College. It was during
Bentinck’s tenure that the protagonists of western
History of India 15

education finally won the battle, strengthened in the

meanwhile by Rammohan Roy’s memorandum in its favour.
Rammohan represented a new generation of westernized
Indians who believed that English education would usher in
India’s modernization. This was the context of Macaulay’s
Minute of Education in which dissemination of western
knowledge became a part of the modernization project. One
important feature of this new educational policy was the
theory of downward filtration. It excluded the masses as
recipients of the new education and had great expectations
from a handful of elites, who were to play the important
role of disseminators. The English education that the
reformers planned for Indians went far beyond the limited
objective of teaching languages. By using English literature
as a medium of cultural imperialism, attempts were made
towards the ideological indoctrination of Indians in an
attempt to inculcate loyalty among the Indian subjects.
Certainly in the long run the policy did not , since the
English educated Indians became vociferous critics of
Imperialism in the latter half of the century, but at the time
when the new educational project had been undertaken the
History of India 16

intention clearly was to build a permanent bridge between

England and India.

Social Reformism
The new educational project was also expected to create a
class of civilized people, who would give leadership in the
movement for social reform by stamping out the barbaric
legacy of what was seen as a rude civilization. The social
reform project made its assault on practices like sati, or
widow burning against which a law was enacted during
Bentinck’s tenure. The other important landmark was the
law against thagis (armed robbers) but whose
distinctiveness was linked with the religious imagery that
they were stranglers in the service of the goddess Kali.

From Reformism to Conservatism

In the history of British imperialism however the reformist
phase had a brief tenure. Reformism dominated policy
making for a brief while during the 1820’s and 1830’s. From
the 1840’s, as Francis Hutchins has rightly suggested, the
reformist initiatives had begun to peter out. The end of
reformism came after the revolt of 1857 which convinced
History of India 17

the British that much of the Indian reaction in 1857 was

due to their disapproval of westernizing measures. The
westernization project in this context came under fresh
scrutiny. New schemes of social reform were discouraged.
Missionaries were asked to limit their activities to education
and to avoid proselytization. The idea that the Indians were
resistant to change became to powerfully etched in the
British mind, that this entire strategy of westernization as a
bridge-building measure between India and Britain became
suspect. In this situation the paternalist ideology which
emitted the flavour of a despotic political culture returned
with vengeance.