Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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Roy is the first clear case of what would become the natural condition of many later Indian intellectuals. It can be described as an unhappy restlessness between two thoughts: Could India be changed for the better using its own historical and intellectual resources? Or must Indians turn to Western and foreign values and ideas to achieve such change, thereby running the risk of undermining their own Indian identity?
Roy tried to resolve this dilemma by imagining a golden age in India’s past, and thus a standard by which to criticize and change the fallen present. “He never used the word reformer,” Christopher Bayly said, “because his idea was that the ancient religion of India, Advaita Vedanta (the last books of the Vedas) was itself a form of religion which had been corrupted, from monotheism to polytheism, over three hundred or four hundred years. And his idea was to restore that ancient religion of India.”
Roy’s public profile grew quickly, first in India and then in Europe. From 1815 onward he published many volumes and translations, appropriating Vedantic writings and drawing extensively on the works and commentaries of Adi Shankara (8), to vindicate his views and establish himself among a European audience as the authoritative interpreter of Hindu thought and belief. Roy was effecting a crucial shift in the self-conception of the Indian public intellectual: from being a commentator on religious beliefs and texts to becoming an advocate for changing religiously sanctioned social practices.
Over the years, Roy’s personal life was tumultuous—three wives, many more affairs, estranged children—yet his self-belief was so strong that he eventually decided to start a new religious sect (elite in its membership and puritanical in its tendencies) that came to be known as the Brahmo Samaj. According to Bayly, the Samaj “was a kind of organization of equals—they were mostly high caste, they were mostly educated—which sought to purge Hinduism of idolatry.”
Though it may have been largely an upper-caste, upper-class club, the Brahmo Samaj preached a religious ethics that combined something of the individuality of bhakti worship with a new vision of Indian society as a whole. “He argued that it was important to stress that everybody—not just the high caste, not just the renouncers, not just the Brahmins, but the whole of Indian society—could achieve some knowledge of God through good practice, and also good practice in society,” Bayly added. “It was very much the beginnings of a social turn in Indian society, and a way of breaking down its divisions.”
For Roy, the regeneration of India lay in the social domain, and changing its customs required reform of religious practices such as the worship of idols. Roy came to be known as a “Hindu Unitarian,” and the Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri, himself something of a fellow traveler, later described him as the instigator of a Hindu Protestant reformation. The influence of this reformation would be felt directly by many important twentieth-century Indians, particularly Bengalis, including the religious reformer Vivekananda (28), the poet and thinker Rabindranath Tagore (32), and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray (47).
The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen is another who has family connections to the Brahmo Samaj. He sees as characteristic of Roy a certain restriction of vision in the issues that exercised him, matched by an admirable if abstracted human sympathy. “He concentrated on those things which agitated him most,” Sen says. “Given his class background, he was mainly concerned with upper-class problems—but he was very sympathetic to humanity in general. He had strong religious views—monotheistic, Unitarian—and he wanted to see the Hindu religion itself having that base at some time.” It was Roy’s commitment to universalist principles, directly applied to the social world of his experience, that guided his evolving critique. Sen adds, “He was initially not very critical of the British. But gradually, as time evolved, he changed that position. He was very much a progressive, upper-class reformer of his time. And he did some splendid things.”
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In 1828, Fanny Parkes, a Welsh writer married to a clerk in the East India Company, described the funeral rites of a married Hindu man, which her husband had witnessed:
After having bathed in the river, the widow lighted a brand, walked round the pile, set it on fire, and then mounted cheerfully: the flame caught and blazed up instantly; she sat down, placing the head of the corpse on her lap, and repeated several times the usual form, “Ram, Ram, suttee; Ram, Ram, suttee;” … “God, God, I am chaste.”
As the wind drove the fierce fire upon her, she shook her arms and limbs as if in agony; at length she started up and approached the side to escape. An Hindoo, one of the police who had been placed near the pile to see she had fair play, and should not be burned by force, raised his sword to strike her, and the poor wretch shrank back into the flames.
Like other human acts that leave no survivors to articulate their meaning, sati is open to varying interpretations: Is it the noblest form of self-sacrifice, or heinous, expedient murder, removing from families the responsibility to care for widows? Roy found it appalling—it is said that he once witnessed a relative forced to perform the rite—and many of his reform efforts leading up to the creation of the Brahmo Samaj centered on its abolition. In 1816 he visited the Baptist missionaries at Serampore, who regarded the rite as a form of human sacrifice. “Forbid it, British Power! Forbid it, British humanity!” one of the missionaries urged the following year. By 1818, Roy had published his first tract on sati. His second tract, dedicated to the Marchioness of Hastings, came in 1820. It would make his name outside India.
Until the nineteenth century, British officials had largely tolerated sati, unwilling to intervene in their subjects’ religious customs. But Roy’s campaign converged with the birth of an international concern with human rights. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, movements to abolish slavery and capital punishment, to promote the rights of women, and to articulate and uphold humanitarian values became the first global moral crusades.
Sati fitted into this larger discourse, though it was probably not the most pernicious social ill inflicted on Indian women. In most parts of the country, it was exceptionally rare and, if anything, on the decline. In Bengal, though, sati had seen an upsurge during Roy’s lifetime; in 1823 there were approaching six hundred recorded cases. The ritual was rooted in Hindu custom (instances can be found in the Mahabharata), and Hindu practice certainly permitted it, if not actually prescribing it. To Amartya Sen, Roy’s focus on sati accorded with Roy’s generally patrician attitude to reform:
The barbarity of it horrified him, so I don’t think you have to ask why was Roy interested in it. He had good reason to be. But his natural sympathy was in the direction of preventing nastiness as opposed to social change. He’s often taken to be a great social reformer, but there, I think, much more credit needs to go to people such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who was concerned with the remarriage of Hindus, preventing polygamy—these are subjects on which Rammohun had sympathy but didn’t do very much.
Roy was not in favor of government interference in religious matters. Rather, he hoped Indians would abolish the practice of sati themselves. Among his main appeals to his fellow Indians was that it had no justification in Hindu law or scripture. And in order to remove any economic grounds for the practice, he also called for property rights to be given to women, which would help ensure their security after their husbands’ deaths.
The campaign against sati was useful to Roy, enabling him to promote himself as a native moral conscience in tune with international norms. Yet he was not the only one for whom it was a boon, and reform ultimately came not from within India, but with a government ban, in 1829. The ruling marked a major shift in how the British saw their place in the country. Henceforth, part of their justification for ruling over Indians was the need to civilize them and educate them away from barbaric practices. Sati was a ready way of foregrounding the primitive bloodthirstiness of the Hindus, and of justifying the corrective despotism that the British now saw themselves as dispensing to India’s benefit.
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/> In the summer of 1833, while visiting Bristol, Rammohun Roy contracted meningitis and died suddenly. He had originally come to Britain in 1830 to lobby against a counterpetition by conservative Bengalis to overturn the ban on sati. “He found himself arriving in England at just the moment to catch what was going on about women’s rights,” Carla Contractor says. “And because he had fought for women’s rights, particularly against concremation as he called it, he had a very warm reception.” When he died, an obituary in the Times of London concluded, “A more remarkable man has not distinguished modern times and advance of opinion.”
Today, some Indians take a more critical view of Roy, seeing him as the ultimate colonized mind, in thrall to British ideas and expert at flattering his colonial masters. Yet others see in his life the early glimmerings of Indian nationalism. He came to believe that the ancient Indians had governed themselves democratically—a rejoinder to the British insistence that Indians were culturally habituated to despotic rule and unaccustomed to democratic ideas. Roy’s claim might have been as dubious as the British one, but it served as a lifeline, however imaginary, to Indian nationalists a century later.
Though Roy eagerly pursued fame and recognition, at home and in the West, one of his lasting legacies was to chide educated Indians into questioning their own habits in the light of universal values. Ever since, Indians have been part of a global argument about the nature of justice, rights, and freedom—even as they’ve struggled to preserve their own traditions and systems of knowledge. Roy also showed how, in dreaming up a past better than the fallen present, Indians might aspire to a fairer future.
23
LAKSHMI BAI, RANI OF JHANSI
Bad-ass Queen
1828–1858
Even the terms used to describe the famous Indian uprising against the British in 1857 are political positions. Was it a mutiny or India’s First War of Independence? Rebellion or uprising? A nationalist movement or a string of local protests?
The violence began in Meerut, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, and the proximate cause was the British acquisition of Enfield rifles. To load these new weapons, Bengal sepoys—the security forces for the Raj—had to use their teeth to tear open paper cartridges produced, in accordance with a British design, at the Dum Dum Arsenal, on the outskirts of Calcutta. A rumor had spread that the cartridges were greased with tallow and lard. Biting down on them was therefore an affront to Hindus and Muslims alike.
The first to be appalled was a Brahmin worker at the arsenal, which still today produces ordnance for the Indian military. His disgust quickly spread among the sepoys, and many refused to load the rifles. When they were punished, long-suppressed grievances erupted. In May 1857 some of the roughly two thousand sepoys based in the Meerut cantonment turned on their officers, killing them and their families before moving to the town to massacre English residents there. They then marched on Delhi, where their numbers swelled. Over the course of a year, the rebellion spread across northern and central India. The violence was ferocious, producing long-remembered cruelties on both sides.
British colonialism had changed fundamentally in the decades since liberal polymaths such as William Jones tried to understand India and extract value from it, without interfering overmuch in local religious practice. An evangelical revival in early-nineteenth-century Britain had sent missionaries to India to provide behavioral improvements and spiritual rescues—sometimes by means of forced conversions. Economic exploitation grew more brazen: from new taxes to the insatiable East India Company land grabs that were dispossessing a chunk of the Indian aristocracy and others less visible. Mingling with such religious and economic affronts were many local grievances, which propelled lower-status people into the rebellion. “An accumulation of adequate causes,” Benjamin Disraeli rightly noted in Parliament as the uprising began. The greased cartridges were a metaphorical match, lit and tossed, into a landscape ready to burn.
In India, the uprising produced many heroes, but only one celebrated heroine: Lakshmi Bai, the Rani, or Queen, of Jhansi, a midsize kingdom in the Bundelkhand region, around four hundred kilometers south of Delhi. General Hugh Rose, the British officer determined to capture her and take control of her territory, famously said, “The Indian Mutiny has produced but one man, and that man was a woman.”
In the Indian nationalist story, the Rani was transformed from a woman into a mythic being. At the height of the rebellion, General Rose’s forces laid siege to her fort and thought they had her cornered. But in the dead of night, she mounted her horse, her young son holding on tight behind her, and made a do-or-die bid for freedom. She leapt from the ramparts and vanished into the darkness.
It’s one hell of an image, engrained now in India’s popular and political culture, and even celebrated in the West. Lakshmi Bai today is remembered in film and poster art as a rebel leader, a warrior queen. A few years ago, Time magazine listed her, along with Michelle Obama, as one of history’s “Top 10 Bad-Ass Wives.” Looking down from the battlements of Jhansi Fort, at the place where a big metal sign marks the spot of the legendary jump, you might feel a bit of vertigo. It is a sheer plunge of about fifteen meters—hard to imagine anyone human surviving it.
“She is a figure of belief in some ways,” says Harleen Singh, a professor at Brandeis University who has written a book about Lakshmi Bai. “She allows the Indian imagination to think of a past that is a little bit out of reach, that is always in some ways jumping over the precipice, out of control, and signifies that kind of rebellious strong spirit.” There’s also an important sense in which many Indian women might feel they share something with Lakshmi Bai’s story. “Young women today take umbrage at the fact that her fighting against the British is thought of as her acting like a man,” Singh continues. “We’re fighting every day in our lives, on the street, in living, in our households, in many different ways. And we don’t fight like men. We fight like women because we have to fight for our rights as women.”
* * *
On a typical day for the Rani, weightlifting, wrestling, and steeplechase came before breakfast. Intelligent and simply dressed, she was a businesslike ruler, occasionally punishing criminals herself—with a stick. We know this and other details about her from a fascinating account (only recently translated in full) by a Maharashtrian priest and mendicant, Vishnu Bhatt, who stayed at Jhansi in the 1850s. Yet little in the queen’s life before 1857 augured her role as the British Empire’s chief nineteenth-century villainess—“This Jezebel Ranee,” in the words of one member of General Rose’s campaign.
Lakshmi Bai was born in 1828. Her original name was Manakarnika, and she was also known as Manu. Her mother died when Manu was young, and it seems she was raised mainly in the company of boys, picking up horsemanship as part of her upbringing. At puberty she was married to a man with a much higher social position: Gangadhar Rao, the recently widowed maharaja of Jhansi. A cultured, bookish man (who was given to cross-dressing, according to Vishnu Bhatt), he was well into his forties, childless, and looking for an heir.
The young queen, with her newly given name of Lakshmi Bai, was installed in the ornate, art-filled Jhansi palace, where servants labored to fill the air with the scent of flowers. The maharaja was less interested in his young wife than in other pursuits, so it is said the queen passed the time teaching horsemanship and swordsmanship to her female servants; by some accounts, she created a well-drilled women’s military unit. (In the 1940s a women’s regiment raised by Subhas Chandra Bose [37] for his Indian National Army would be named the Rani of Jhansi Regiment.)
Vishnu Bhatt put this all down to the region’s arid climate, which made the men of the Bundelkhand “somewhat weak of body and mind,” and the women confident and strong. When Lakshmi Bai held court, “she sometimes appeared in male clothing: pyjamas, a waistcoat and headgear with a starched, fan-like top,” he wrote. “Around her waist, she tied a scarf with gold embroidery and hung from it a sword in a scabbard. She was a tall, fair woman—dressed thus, she loo
ked like the avatar of a warrior goddess.”
In 1851, after nine years as a somewhat eccentric royal consort, she was celebrated throughout Jhansi for doing the more conventional thing: producing a son. The celebrations would be tragically short-lived. The child died when he was just three months old. Crucially, the maharaja was also dying. Under the Doctrine of Lapse, a typically British form of colonial legal brigandage—thievery sanctified by conversion into a doctrine—the Raj gave itself the right to annex any territory under British influence if its ruler happened to die without an heir.
Desperate to preserve his family’s dominion, the maharaja adopted his cousin’s son, Damodar Rao, and left instructions that Lakshmi Bai govern Jhansi after he was gone. Yet when he died in 1853, the British annexed Jhansi anyway and hoped to pension off the Rani. She refused the annuity of sixty thousand rupees they offered her, and petitioned Lord Dalhousie, the East India Company’s governor-general, for redress. “Does it entitle them to seize the Government and territory of Jhansi?” Lakshmi Bai wrote to Dalhousie in an official “memorial,” or petition. “Does it entitle them to seize your memorialist’s treasury—to pension off your memorialist on a pittance of the Treasures of the State, payable only during the period of your memorialist’s life, and to deprive your memorialist’s ward, or the heirs of the late Rajah, of their entire inheritance, except the petty reversion of his personal estate?”