The Beautiful Tree #2 - How The Scottish Enlightenment helped the documentation of India
Missionaries, Taxmen, and how Jesus is Indian
This section has very interesting deep-dives and side-quests, I gotta say.
The first section:
I went back to reading The Beautiful Tree by Dharampal, and I realized that the popular PDF version going around actually lacks the tables it references. I hunted for a scan of the original book, and the best I could find was The Essential Writings of Dharampal, which has the tables in the summary but lacks the primary sources attached. The primary sources in the PDF version lack tabulated data as well, so I’m going to stick to the 100-page summary for our readings.
In the last section, we went over how education in England wasn’t so great for the common man by about 1800, and several sections of English society were purposely kept out of education out of fear that they’d read the Bible and start yet another Reformation. After 1800, this had started changing for many reasons, including that they had more access to capital from the colonies, as well as their being able to scale education by implementing the Monitor system, which we previously discussed as having been observed and adapted from India.
The crux of the book is data on Indian education from the 18th century. It involves extensive documentation of schools in each presidency, the demographics of the students and teachers, and what books and topics were covered in schools.
What motivated such extensive work?
The Three Approaches to Gathering Indian Knowledge
As more Europeans traveled to India, they wrote a lot about their experiences. Jesuits were interested in Indian knowledge systems for its own sake. Adventurers wrote riveting and humorous accounts of their own adventures and misadventures in India and elsewhere. These provoked a lot of interest. Many accounts were even rewritten by hand and shared widely (Why not use a printing press? I don’t know, that’s what Dharampal says).
Now that there was a significant body of knowledge, people began talking about India even if they had never been. Voltaire was writing short stories about India or with Indians in them. I haven’t read these properly, but they seem to be some kind of satire on the human condition: An Adventure In India, The Good Brahmin, there’s even one called A Conversation With A Chinese, and there’s one I couldn’t find called The King Of Boutan. (Side note: I didn’t know anything about Voltaire other than his one famous quote, but… okay, so in the 18th century, he was writing satire involving a very expansive idea of the world. Wow.)
There began a clamor for more documentation of India at this point, and it was driven by three sets of people with very different objectives.
Administrators wanted to Indianize British ideas so they went down easy
The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson was a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and advised one of his former students, who was the Governor-General of Bengal
[…] collect the fullest details you can of every circumstance relating to the state and operation of policy in India [...] That you may the better apprehend what I mean by the detail [...] select some town and its district. Procure if possible an account of its extent and number of people. The different classes of that people, the occupations, the resources, the way of life of each. How they are related and their mutual dependencies. What contributions Government, or subordinate masters draw from the labourer of any denomination and how it is drawn. But I beg pardon for saying so much of an object which you must know so much better than I do. The man who can bring light from India [i.e., of its material resources, etc.] into this country and who has address to make his light be followed may in a few years hence make himself of great consequence […]
The British administrators wanted more documentation of Hindu and Muslim law, property rights, tax systems, and social practices, for very practical reasons - they couldn’t just impose a new method of calculating tax and expect it would go okay. So some of them ended up learning Sanskrit and Persian just so they could interpret existing land records, legal orders, and such.
The primary objective of this group of people was to tax as much as they could, and in order to do so, they had to know everything about Indian society, so if there was something that wasn’t paying them a revenue, they could make it do so.
They also wanted to know Indian history and culture so that they could selectively pick and choose parts of it that suited their purpose so they could
provide a garb of legitimacy and a background of previous indigenous precedents (however far-fetched) to the new concepts, laws and procedures which were being created by the British state.
I have to pause here because I feel personally attacked. Whomst among us Indians has not tried to justify something of our culture because it agrees with something that is the latest in science or law? It seems like this is where the need to do that came from, except it started the other way - the British tried to justify things they were doing with ancient Indian culture so we’d agree with it. I feel gross just reading this, and while it’s not something I did a lot anyway, I ought to put a complete stop to this.
Anyway, this is what led to British Indology, British-sponsored Sanskrit and Persian colleges, as well as publications of selected Indian texts that suited the purposes of their governance. I wrote about Shyamji Krishna Varma, one of the mentors of Savarkar earlier here - he was a Sanskrit scholar who had learned at the feet of the great Dayananda Saraswati, and he helped found the Sanskrit college at Oxford. It would be interesting to discuss whether this helped or hurt Sanskrit, because he worked with Monier Williams who has some pretty awful translations of the Rigveda from what I’ve read.
Missionaries wanted to extend ‘Christian Light’ to India
The British would find administration much easier if Indians were Christian, so once the British began administering significant parts of India, they encouraged missionaries to proselytize in India.
But if they were to do this, they had to learn Indian languages, and the Bible needed to be translated into all these languages. William Wilberforce, an MP who was a convert to Evangelical Christianity, said the task before them was
“the circulation of the holy scriptures in the native languages” with a view to the general diffusion of Christianity, so that the Indians ‘would, in short become Christians, if | may so express myself, without knowing it.’
Christian missionaries even opened schools and wrote about the state and extent of indigenous education.
However, essentially the British interest was centred not on the people as such, or their knowledge, or education, or the lack of it, but rather in such ancient texts which served their purpose and in making the people conform to what was chosen for them from such texts and their new interpretations. The other interest (but initially till 1813 this was only amongst a section of the British) was in the Christianisation of those who were considered ready for such conversions or, in the British phraseology of the period, for receiving “‘the blessings of Christian light and moral improvements’
The administrators agreed with this aim as it made their job easier.
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake
Alexander Maconochie, a Scottish soldier, penal reformer, and Professor of Geography at the University College, London, wanted “Our Monarch, the sovereign of the banks of the Ganges” to take measures “as many be necessary for discovering, collecting, and translating whatever is extent of the ancient works of the Hindoos”.
Quotes from him in this book:
(If the British) procured these works to Europe, astronomy and antiquities, and the sciences connected with them would be advanced in a still great proportion”not less interesting than those of their sciences”
He also observed:
the antiquities of the religion and Government of the Hindoos are not less interesting than those of their sciences.
And
the history, the poems, the traditions, the very fables of the Hindoos might therefore throw light upon the history of the ancient world and in particular upon the institutions of that celebrated people from whom Moses received his learning and Greece her religion and her arts.
He also said the center of all of this learning was in Benares, where “all the sciences are still taught” and where “very ancient works in astronomy are still extant”.
So here is a Scotsman who held such views in 1783. Why?
The Scottish Enlightenment And Connections with India
From Wikipedia:
The union with the Kingdom of England in 1707, which formed the Kingdom of Great Britain, meant the end of the Scottish Parliament. The parliamentarians, politicians, aristocrats, and placemen moved to London. Scottish law remained entirely separate from English law, so the civil law courts, lawyers and jurists remained in Edinburgh. The headquarters and leadership of the Church of Scotland also remained, as did the universities and the medical establishment. The lawyers and the divines, together with the professors, intellectuals, medical men, scientists and architects formed a new middle class elite that dominated urban Scotland and facilitated the Scottish Enlightenment.
But just there being a middle class doesn’t create an Enlightenment. Scotland, had, for various reasons, much better education than England in the 17th and 18th century. It was much easier for a common Scots child to go to school than an English child. And while England had two universities, Scotland had five - Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Aberdeen, and Dundee. There was a much more educated population in Scotland, and they took a lot of the opportunities to work as administrators in the colonies.
But there was another very important factor here - The Highland Clearances
The Jacobite uprisings in 1715 and 1745 against the British (I don’t know much about this stuff other than what’s in the TV show Outlander) happened with the support of Highland clans. To break this clan system, the British outlawed the wearing of Scottish traditional garb, speaking in Scottish Gaelic, and banned the Highlanders from carrying weapons. They also confiscated the lands of clans that supported the Jacobites.
So, since the clan system was broken at this point, the only power a clan leader had was as a landlord. Now, he was accountable to the British government as such and had to maximize the revenue he got from his land so he could pay the high taxes.
Landlords consolidated estates to maximize economic output, and they realized sheep farming was way more profitable than subsistence farming. Hence they evicted their subsistence farming tenants and replaced them with sheep. The evictions grew more and more aggressive and sudden and was often without compensation, which led to widespread poverty and squalor.
With such a large number of people ousted from farming and land use, and in deep poverty, they moved to towns. Many educated Scots joined the British administration, and many Highlanders joined the British army, and went to the colonies since there was nothing at home for them anyway. (I suppose I’d know all this better if I actually watched Outlander instead of calling it a ‘rape show’ and watching The Ultimatum instead).
I have to pause here because this sounds horribly familiar. My ancestors were farmers in southern Tamil Nadu. I should ask the old people in my family to confirm, but it does seem like they lost their lands, possibly in the aftermath of the 1900 Madras famines. The children were sent up the coast to live with relatives in Kakinada, and they found their way to the gold mining town of KGF. The first ones worked in the mines and in agricultural trading, and were dirt poor. World War 2 meant the British started manufacturing planes in the nearby town of Bangalore, and the next generation worked in the factories there and managed to send their kids to college. Others weren’t so lucky. Several ended up as ‘girmitya’ bonded laborers in Fiji, Mauritius, or the Caribbean. It feels like a playbook the British used again and again to great success.
Anyway, the result was a lot of innovative and impactful thought from the Scots. Adam Smith, the ‘Father of Economics’ was part of this scene, for instance. As was James Watt, who invented the steam engine. Adam Ferguson, who I mentioned before, is considered the ‘Father of Sociology’. Two of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were from this setting as well. (Side note: I found there’s a novelist called John Galt who wrote about the downsides of the Industrial Revolution. Somehow, Ayn Rand did not name her iconic character after him but independently arrived at the name).
There were a lot of educated Scots in India, and India had great knowledge systems that were widely discussed in this era, so their natural tendency was to want to learn and document it.
But there was yet another aspect that motivated them - the displacement of their own countrymen.
Adam Ferguson, for instance, was from the heart of the highlands, from Perthshire. According to Wikipedia,
Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community
They had many of their countrymen in America as well as other colonies, and they were aware of how European colonialism destroyed Native American societies, and their knowledge systems with them. They had witnessed this happening in their own country with schools having English as the medium of instruction, and their losing knowledge of Scottish Gaelic, as well as the demise of the Clan system.
The Scots were, hence, very conscious of the same happening in India and wanted to document all the knowledge before it was gone.
At the same time, they were loyal to the British crown (as I suppose, is common among those with British education), so it made for an interesting perspective they came with.
Some interesting Scotsmen
This is not in the book other than passing mentions of these people, but when I looked up these people, I had to share here.
John Playfair
He was a minister in the Church Of Scotland who had been educated at St. Andrews. He got interested in studying astrophysics. He was the tutor of Adam Ferguson who I mentioned earlier.
Among other things, he became interested in Indian astronomy and mathematics. He wrote a paper titled Remarks On The Astronomy Of The Brahmins and another titled On the Algebra and Arithmetic of the Hindus. It would be interesting to read these works.
Francis Wilford
When I looked him up, I knew I had to share it here. From a paper from Qatar University (of all places) talking about Indian influences on the poet PB Shelley:
Shelley was also influenced by the work of Captain Francis Wilford, a fellow member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who represented the most extravagant development of Jones’s linguistic research. Wilford claimed that all European myths were of Hindu origin and that India had produced a Christ whose life and works closely resembled the Christ of the Bible. The ten articles which he contributed to Asiatic Researches between 1799 and 1810 provided a rich source for poets like Southey and Shelley. Unlike the cautious Jones, who paralleled only Hindu and Greco-Roman traditions, Wilford was more interested in tracing parallels between Hindu and Jewish traditions. He claimed to have discovered a Sanskrit version of the story of Noah. In ‘Mount Caucasus’ (1801), Wilford argued for a Himalayan location of Mt. Ararat, claiming that Ararat was etymologically linked with Aryavarta, a Sanskrit name for India.
Shelley embraced Wilford’s thesis with enthusiasm: he set both his Alastor and Prometheus Unbound in Wilford’s Hindu Kush and Cashmere (McCalman 1999: 341- 42). In Alastor, the poet-protagonist’s journey takes him back through human history (that is, Arabia, Persia, over the Hindu Kush mountains, which form the Indian Caucasus extending from Afghanistan to Kashmir in north-west India) to “the thrilling secrets of the birth of time”.
From Wikipedia:
Wilford claimed to have discovered the Sanskrit version of the story of Noah (who had three sons – Japheth, Ham, and Shem) named Satyavrata (in Sanskrit) and his three sons Jyapeti, Charma, and Sharma from a Vedic scripture titled Padma-puran. The actual scriptural text does not attest Wilford's version. As unearthed by Nigel Leask, the story goes this way—Aftermath the dispersion of Babylonian, the sons of Sharma had emigrated to the banks of Nile or Cali. The Negro sons of Charma – cursed as he scoffed at Noah -, had emigrated to India and then from there to Egypt. Wilford claimed to had found proof of this based on the fact that "the very ancient statues of Gods in India have crisp hair, and the features of Negroes," in contrast to modern denizens. In Egypt, the Semites – sons of Sharma -, by now well-settled, had expelled the Hasyasilas – sons of Charma -, into the desert, from there they populated and spread the entire African continent.
Going over his Wikipedia page, it seems like he started off looking for justification of Jesus in ancient Indian texts, and then stretched what he found kind of a lot, because, at that point, his focus had become getting Indians to believe in Christ. He apparently admitted to forging manuscripts that showed some of the connections and making up some others. But then he blamed it on the pandit translating these manuscripts for him and got away with it.
The Wikipedia page also says this, though this to me seems like editorializing:
This deception of Wilford, although aimed at fooling Indians into Christianity, had become the theme of general campaign by European intellectuals to belittle Indian learning against some respect which it had before. This was naturally followed by flurry of other bogus claims of deceptions by Indian informants in the fields of Medicine, Astronomy, and Literature.
So… these farfetched “everything came from India” claims originated with Scotsmen such as Wilford in a desperate attempt to get Indians to become Christians and they then acquired a life of their own, which then led to the ancient texts getting wholesale rejected.
Oof.
Onto the next one.
Francis Whyte Ellis
He was a civil servant stationed in Madras. He started off wanting civil servants to learn the languages of Madras to do their job better. He ended up becoming proficient in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit and helped establish the college at Fort St George. All that is great.
Then he wrote a paper saying Tamil and Telugu are a completely different branch of language whose origins have nothing to do with Sanskrit.
And then the missionary Robert Caldwell took this and ran with it, and now we have two insane political parties taking turns in Tamil Nadu.
Phew
I didn’t expect this piece to get so long so quick. I had another part about the kind of data the British collated about education in India and the unexpected conclusions from that data, but that will be for next week. This is already a lot to chew on.
We know, and are slowly proving conclusively, that there were no Aryans who invaded us. We know there is no “Aryan” and “Dravidian”. We know we don’t have to justify our culture based on papers in Nature saying ghee is good for you.
But for the longest time, we had nothing but a niggling feeling that these things are wrong when they were presented to us as fact or the ‘right’ way of thinking.
When I worked on this piece, it hit me repeatedly how all our methods of thinking that do us no favors are rooted in these men and their lives and motivations. We have a vague feeling this is the case, but putting names, faces, and backgrounds to people who did this repeatedly gives us a better grip on what’s so wrong with these thought processes. I suppose William Wilberforce has succeeded, in making us Christian without even knowing it.
The propaganda we were hit with was relentless and came at us from all sides and in every way. We had no immunity to it other than what self-confidence we had in our ways. Many didn’t. Even today, we think a lot of this stuff is scientific, but often, they weren’t. They were just what barely-educated British men with a strong Christian indoctrination and a missionary background believed, or found convenient to their aim of subjugating Indians, or projected based on the problems of their own country.
But now that we know, we don’t have to continue approaching life this way. We can do things differently. This truth sets us free.
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