Race in the late nineteenth century India:
Race is one of the most important categories that researchers encounter while studying much of the massive colonial documents preserved in various archives across West Bengal. Eurocentric notions of ‘race’, ‘racial difference’, ‘racial hierarchy’ were the underlying principles that informed the episteme of the British Empire. But all these concepts related to race started to assume their modern connotation around the mid-nineteenth century. Before that Englishmen in India were aware of their racial supremacy over their ‘inferiors’. But till then they had not found its analytical counterpart in science. The political scenario changed very rapidly during the 1850s. After successfully dismantling a series of popular rebellions, the British had to make some significant strategic changes. India Act of 1858 ended the rule of the East India Company, empowering the British government to take direct charge of its Indian empire. Change in the sphere of political governance was followed by an equally important shift in the realm of colonial knowledge formation. The emergence of scientific racism and racial typology in India can be conveniently traced back to this period when the ‘scientific method’ of anthropometry was first introduced and invoked to justify the British colonial rule. Many of the contemporary British anthropologists thought that the method of anthropometry had a high chance of success in India since they felt that the Indians almost jealously observed purity of their racial stocks and most of them lived within the exclusive marital groups[i]. Contemporary developments in the fields of evolutionary science, geology, and technology had been appropriated in the service of the Raj. These developments also saw the emergence of a curiously new discipline – ethnographic photography. Ethnographic photographs of various Indian ‘races’ conveyed to its Western viewers the unmistaken sense of superiority by celebrating subjugation. These photographs of men and women were captured in such a way as to present them as helpless enslaved bodies. They were what the imperial eyes wanted them to be.
Terms, such as ‘race’ and ‘racial difference’ were not rare in the early nineteenth century British colonial documents on India. But back then these terms didn’t have the currency which they took after the momentous events of 1857. Macaulay’s pompous claim in his “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) was more an instance of hyperbolic nature of imperial pride and its growing confidence than anything else. It certainly lacked the delicate, almost invisible and sophisticated racist arguments of a Risley or a Dalton. Viewed through the backdrop of a series of mid-nineteenth century rebellions, this change of stance looked inevitable. Intensive surveys were carried out in those parts of India which rose to rebellion. It had been claimed that in all cases where racial stability and harmony had not been achieved, the different races held in a particular space had tended towards disintegration. When races fused in a geographical space they brought together their own socio-cultural and psychological features. A harmonious fusion ultimately led to the creation of nationality, as in the case of Great Britain. Mixed races with discordant and mutually competitive identities had little or no chance of forming a nationality. India thus emerged in these official documents as a colonial state without a nationality. Possibility of an Indian nationality had been further doubted by pointing the presence of caste and religious differences. Interestingly the British authority in their official efforts rarely intended to challenge the caste-system of the Hindus. Rather than challenging the Indian caste-system, the colonial state led ‘racial’ classification of Indian people went on to explain and favour the caste hierarchy practiced by the Hindus. A long series of monographs, gazetteers, district histories, settlement reports, and so on was produced to illustrate various Eurocentric notions of India and its people. The basic aim of these massive efforts was to create, develop and control a knowledge system which would help them to predict and understand human behavior. The promotion of various imperial sciences, such as anthropology, geography, ethnography and so on, was ultimately aimed at bringing every sphere of Indian life under the surveillance system of the British Raj.
· [i] Data generated through anthropometric measurements complicated the issue of race even further rather than solving it. The ‘belief’ in racial purity of Indians had been well contested by Colebrooke in his ‘Introduction’ to Risley’s The People of India. See Risley, Sir Herbert. The People of India, Calcutta: Tracker, Spink & Co. 1915, pages xvi-xxi.
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