Review: To Raise a Fallen People edited by Rahul Sagar
This anthology of essays reveals what Indian intellectuals of the 19th century thought and said on several issues that remain contentious today
A formidable list of writers appears in the contents page of To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours, edited by Rahul Sagar. There’s Mohandas K Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Annie Besant, Salar Jung II, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and T Madhava Rao among others. The book is an anthology featuring extracts from the works of these writers that have been arranged thematically into chapters on topics such as English education, crossing the seas, free trade, racism, and so on.
It is an illuminating read.
The opening essay of the volume, titled Knowledge is Power, was authored by the pioneering journalist Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar and published in 1832. In it he laments that “had the Asiatic philosophers bestowed the same attention on useful arts and sciences, as they have done on more abstruse and subtle branches of knowledge, such as metaphysics and logic, much more good might have been expected from their labours. But it appears that they regarded all knowledge as useful only in religion, or as a means of gaining victory in argument, and in no way connected with the common purposes of life”.
“The ancient learning of the country, whatever may have been the advantages of it in former days, must gradually lose its value in connection with the necessities and wants of human life,” Jambhekar wrote. His clear-eyed espousal of modern, western education is echoed in the following essay written by T Madhava Rao in 1846. Rao, then a student and later Dewan of Travancore, Indore and Baroda states, wrote that “a diffusion of western knowledge alone will dispel the dark shades of ignorance that have fallen upon our country”. The spread of English education in India, as Rahul Sagar points out in his introduction, was thus not entirely due to the impositions of Thomas Babington Macaulay and the British. There was also, then as now, a demand for “English medium” education among Indians themselves.
There was also a keen desire for social reform and the relaxation of ancient taboos. Among these, one that proscribed travel across the oceans – it was believed to cause loss of caste – was the subject of a debate that pitted conservatives against liberals in India. A “Standing Committee on the Hindu Sea-Voyage Question” came into being and, in 1894, this body published an essay that summarised a few “well-known facts”. Among these was the well-known fact that “There was a time when it was considered an un-Hindoo practice to drink pipe-water. Not only is pipe-water drunk today by Hindus of unquestioned orthodoxy, but aerated waters, European wines and spirits, and medicines prepared by Europeans, are habitually consumed by large numbers of them”. Responding to this, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, doyen of Hindu nationalism, came down on the side of the reformers, writing, “if society were everywhere governed by the Sastras, it is doubtful whether the result will be social welfare”.
The dialogue and debates between the 19th Century Indians featured in this collection reveal an engagement with issues of the time that is both pragmatic and forward-looking. Among the highlights of the collection is a wonderfully lucid and direct speech made in 1883 by Anandibai Joshi, the first Indian woman to become a doctor in modern medicine. For a young married woman from a brahmin family to go to America then – and to study medicine at that – was simply unheard of. Joshi had to run the gauntlet of social opprobrium and invasive curiosity, an experience that started much before her foreign trip. “If I go alone by train or in the street some people come near to stare and ask impertinent questions to annoy me,” she said. People would stop and stare at the sight of her going to school and she could hear them laughing or crying out about the onset of Kali Yuga, of which a woman going to school was considered a sign.
Two chapters in the book contain essays on the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires, and on the reflections – mainly of Indian Muslim writers of the time – on pan-Islamism, the caliphate, and Europe.
Sagar, the editor of the volume, argues in his long and thoughtful introduction that, taken together, the essays reveal “the foundations of India’s half-hearted approach to great power politics”. He contends that the book’s account of modern India’s intellectual history helps decipher India’s “perplexing” behaviour, by which he means the attitude of “cautious prudence” that has typically characterized its foreign policy down the decades.
Whether that behaviour can be explained by the essays in To Raise a Fallen People is debatable. The connection between Indians wanting a modern education and the freedom to travel abroad, and India being a prudent or even diffident state in foreign affairs, is not apparent, at least to this reader. Sagar makes much of the global interests and outlooks of some 19th century Indians, but a global outlook then would hardly be surprising considering that India was part of an empire that literally stretched around the globe. Indeed, Singapore and parts of Malaysia were administratively included in the Bengal Presidency, while Aden in Yemen was part of the Bombay Presidency. It can be argued that Indians then had much closer ties with Europe and the rest of Asia than Indians now.
Editorially, the number and brevity of the essays is a good that has been achieved at the cost of cutting for length. Almost all the pieces are marked by numerous ellipses where paragraphs and sentences have been cut short. This produces a slightly jarring read at times.
However, the anthology’s excavation of aspects of the intellectual history of key debates that preceded the birth of modern India is undoubtedly a valuable contribution. The editor has done contemporary Indian debates a service by bringing back into circulation these essays that reveal what thought-leaders of 19th Century India actually thought and said on several issues that remain contentious to this day.
Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist. His most recent book is The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra