Complex nature of Whitenesses in the late nineteenth century India:

The success of Whiteness study, in the last two decades, in unmasking racial motives in traditional knowledge systems with a new set of questions cannot be written off. But very rarely we find it engaging with the differences in any substantive way. It rather focuses on, what Lata Mani claimed in a different context, “inventories of difference” (Mani, cited in Lal, 2002:157).Traditional forms of anti-colonialism, such as Whiteness Study, Postcolonialism, and so on, all had their origin in the Western academy. These disciplines can be a deceptive “apologia for the colonization of minds” (Ashis Nandy, 2008: Preface to Intimate Enemy). The West, according to Nandy, not only colonizes but also creates its official forms of dissent (Nandy, 2008: Preface to Intimate Enemy). Furthermore, the impact of whiteness, as we find it in Whiteness study, is, at times, grossly overstated. Whiteness has been seen as all-pervasive. These simplistic one-dimensional analyses of ‘whiteness’ are not adequate to explain the complex and multilayered racial relations that the colonial encounter had produced. In fact Whiteness Study often fails miserably to unravel the complex nature of racial confrontations. It seldom explores the regions that lie beyond the binary opposition between black/white. As a result of this people often tend to paint all the Europeans who came to India during the colonial period with the same brush, forgetting all about their socio-cultural-economic differences, conflicts of interests, social position and so on. But the basic arguments of Whiteness studies are so well established in the academy now that they influence whenever someone interprets the colonial literature. It is not possible at present time to write anything on colonial encounters and its resultant modernity without acknowledging directly or indirectly the importance of the race question in some specific ways.

There can be no denying of the fact that whiteness had been effectively institutionalized by the British Raj to produce gains to safeguard its own interests. It created in the nineteenth century India fixed classification of non-white Indians. But it simultaneously maintained a strategic silence over the fact that the notion of ‘whiteness’ in the colony itself was fractured into a system of hierarchized whitenesses. Whiteness, like any other dominant ideologies, cannot be one-dimensional. A closer look at the nineteenth century India reveals that the class and national identities used to determine the position of a white individual in the colonial society. This often had an interesting impact on their relationship with the Indian subjects.

I will start by considering the case of Sir William Wilson Hunter, one of the well known British administrators of the Indian Empire. Hunter, for one, was neither oblivious of his whiteness nor he was mindless of his historical position. It is this awareness that created open spaces in his writings about India. These open spaces invite readers to project their own reason and imagination to form their opinions. Was it a deliberate ploy on the part of the official historian of the Raj? Why are the Indian thinkers, ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to Ranajit Guha, so generous in praising a person whose declared aim was to justify the British regime? Hunter’s works show a high degree of commitment and responsibility towards the Empire. This commitment actually sprang from his faith in the ‘anthropomorphic desires’ of the Enlightenment. It sheds important sidelight on the popularity of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment reason among the educated Europeans. But Hunter’s success lies in the fact that he never ceased to question the very faith that he had embraced as an official of the Raj.

Not every European who came here during the nineteenth century was a ‘vulgar flag waver’ of the Empire. Linda Colley in Captives wrote about Irish soldiers who defected from army camps to live among the Indians (Colley, cited in Brantliger, 2009:73).Many white people who came to India were only vaguely associated with the apparatus of the Empire. Some of them came here, driven by a spirit of wanderlust, to explore a land and its people. They spent the best years of their lives here. The Norwegian Christian missionary P. O. Bodding, who spent no less than forty years in collecting alternative medicine systems and folktales of the Santals in remote areas of Bengal and Bihar, was one such individual. Bodding had always lived under the surveillance of the Raj. Unlike Edward Lane who converted to Islam to produce ‘useful knowledge’ (Brantliger, 2009:76), Bodding always believed in an authentic plurality. The case of Georg Bühler is no less interesting. An extremely hardworking Indologist, Bühler found it difficult to work under the colonial government. The authority was highly suspicious of this German researcher’s intentions. He was never allowed to work freely; yet, seventeen years of his stay produced some of the most extraordinary results in the field of ancient Indian studies. Three white men, mentioned above, are taken from three different spheres of life: One, an imperial officer; the second, a Christian missionary; the third, a secular Indologist. It should be admitted though that in Hunter’s case he had very little space to maneuver compared to the other two men. But all three of them faced problems from the authority because they failed to live up to the official ideas of whiteness celebrated by the Raj. They are surely not the true representatives of their communities but together they offer serious challenges to fixed notions of whiteness. However privileged they might be as whites, it never had a solely decisive role in their lives or works. There are many Britons, from Meadows Taylor in the nineteenth century to Leonard Elmhirst in the twentieth century, who came with a spirit of inquisitiveness and found in India their second home. It would be a heinous crime to hang them with the same rope.

Reference:

Brantlinger ,Patrick. Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Lal,Vinay. Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy. London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002.

Nandy, Ashis. Exiled at Home: At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate enemy, Creating a Nationality. New Delhi: Oxford, 2008.