The Containment and Re-Deployment
of English India
Abstracts
Siraj Ahmed | L.M. Findlay | Daniel J. O'Quinn | Rita Raley | Susan B. Taylor | Kate Teltscher |
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Siraj Ahmed, "'An Unlimited Intercourse':
Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth
Century" With parliament’s 1813 decision simultaneously to end
the East India Company’s monopoly by opening the colonies to British
free merchants and to permit British evangelicals to establish missions
there, the nature of the empire in India began to change: the British
public now had an opportunity to play an economic and spiritual role
in the empire. Now, the economic and moral aspects of the empire, superintended
by the British nation, separated from the political aspect, which remained
in the hands of the EIC. The former staked the claims of "modernity"
and the civilizing mission; the latter rationalized its openly despotic
politics by insisting that it was concerned to preserve native "traditions."
Sydney Owenson’s early-nineteenth-century historical novel The Missionary:
an Indian Tale was the first novel to represent the problem of colonial
India in terms of a conflict between modernity and tradition, rather
than between the principles of the nation-state and the politics of
empire. In order to produce this new vision of the colonial encounter,
The Missionary needed to produce a new narrative form that effaced
a fact eighteenth-century writers rarely could: in the colonies, Indian
"traditions" were a mask constructed by the colonial regime to conceal
its violations of the fundamental principles of civil society. -- SA L. M. Findlay, "'[T]hat liberty
of writing': Incontinent Ordinance in 'Oriental' Jones" Sir William Jones (1746-1794) remains a key figure in
the continuing history of romantic and other orientalisms. At the very
mention of the idea of "Containing English India," he leaps to mind
not only as part of the contents contained within any envelope or archive
so designated, but also as part of the discontent and unruly dissemination
of such contents. Jones is both of the Indian sub-continent and in various
senses incontinent within it and when writing about it (just as he is
both inside and outside the dominant versions of Englishness in the
later eighteenth century). In this essay, I revisit this dialectic of
positioning or location, containing and incontinence, and the related
contradictions that constituted Jones's early libertarianisim in England
and his later legal and philological activities in India. My emphasis
at every stage is on the Anglo-Indian Jones. Moreover, the echo in my
title of that Gulf War euphemism, incontinent ordinance, is a deliberate
gest! ure towards two points I stress in my conclusion: namely, that
imperialism did not end with the British in India, and that imperialism's
instabilities and illusions are always evident, if we care to look,
in the language it uses to describe itself. -- LMF Daniel J. O'Quinn, "Through
Colonial Spectacles: The Irish Vizier and the Female Knight in James
Cobb's Ramah Droog" James Cobb's popular comic opera Ramah Droog
offers a useful site for examining the ways that representations of
colonial space and of sexual deviance come together to generate a phantasm
of a heteronormative imperial Britain. The set designs of Cobb's opera
are explicitly linked to Thomas and William Daniells illustrations of
Indian landscape and the essay demonstrates how key aspects of the visuality
of the opera celebrate Cornwallis's victory over Tipu Sultan. This celebration
is crucial for the play suggests a parallel between Cornwallis's defeat
of Tipu and his later subjugation of Irish rebels in Wexford. These
parallels are elaborated through the play's deployment of characters
who are both ethnically and sexually cross-dressed. The presentation
of a feminized Irish vizier and a masculinized Irish female knight constitutes
a rupture in conventional theatrical representation and as such points
toward the silent construction of heteronormative British imperial subjects
at the opera's close. --DJO Rita Raley, "A Teleology of Letters;
or, From a 'Common Source' to a Common Language" Like Sir William Jones, the Orientalist John Borthwick
Gilchrist, one-time professor at the College of Fort William and seminary
instructor, composed an orthoepigraphical system for the transcription
of South Asian languages into the Roman alphabet. Gilchrist’s project,
though, was inherently instrumental, and it effected a partial shift
in philological emphasis away from the decoding of the scholarly and
classical languages to the demotic and vernacular; his campaign was
to insure colloquial proficiency in Hindustani, generally considered
the popular language of the East, so that those bound for India could
have the proper foundation with which to converse with the natives,
to acquire local knowledge, and to come to know Oriental literature.
The connection between common languages and governmental control partly
accounts for Gilchrist’s extensive valorization of functional rationality,
as does the idea that language ultimately cannot awe, mystify, enthrall,
or govern if it is not common. Gilchrist, however, did not discount
the value of the learned languages; rather he transported this value
to the vernacular by articulating a teleological model of philological
work that was to progress toward a suturing of the utile and the dulce
within a particular ‘common’ language. English came to be situated in
these terms at the intersection of these two paradigms of scholarly
activity, at the divide between Jones and Gilchrist, liberal and useful
knowledge, and universal and national literacy. In his search for a
"remedy" for the Oriental languages and a "new universal grammaclature"
to be spoken "by all nations in every age and clime," Gilchrist ultimately
directed his efforts toward the introduction of what he called "sterling
english" and prophetically calculated the imperial spread of a common,
basic, or vernacular, English dialect. Coming at a historical juncture
in which the claims for the practical, utilitarian, and scientific uses
of language were on the rise, Gilchrist’s alignment of scholastic
philological work with the vernacular strengthened, by extension, the
claims to legitimacy on the part of all vernaculars; and it most particularly
paved the way for the legitimation of English. Gilchrist and the author
of the coterminous philosophical text Enclytica (1814) contributed strongly
to an emergent theory of the vernacular, particularly in their suggestions
that vernaculars are tied to industrial and scientific development,
that they function as the languages of contemporary record and of history,
that they contribute to nation formation, and that the systemic code
underlying all languages, the universal grammar, is marked by a profound
simplicity. -- RR Susan B. Taylor, "Irish Odalisques
and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh." Susan B. Taylor examines two distinct but related scenes
of British colonization in the early nineteenth century: one of Ireland
as a woman and one of the East as a woman. These metaphors coincide
in Irish writer Thomas Moore's 1817 narrative poem, Lalla Rookh,
An Oriental Romance. The Indian setting and orientalist rhetoric
that Moore employs in Lalla Rookh form a sort of literary mantle
that allows him to articulate concerns about Irish liberation in the
guise of an Eastern tale. Yet as the author this Eastern tale, Moore
is in an almost paradoxical position as a citizen of Ireland, a British
colony which is geographically Western but culturally viewed as "other"
in prejudicial fears and fantasies. Ironically enough, Moore presents
similar fantasies and anxieties about Arab and Indian culture as he
uses Lalla Rookh's allegorical Eastern tales to depict Ireland's
subjection to British rule. Moore's text speaks to the politics of metaphor
with its implications that there is some term in common between the
Irish experience and the cultures of the East. -- SBT Kate Teltscher, "Colonial
Correspondence: The Letters of George Bogle from Bengal, Bhutan and
Tibet, 1770-81" George Bogle was the first British envoy (and first
British traveller) from India to Bhutan and Tibet in 1774-5. His letters
home provide an exceptional account of British life in Calcutta of the
1770s and a fascinating record of the first mission to Bhutan and Tibet.
He is best known for the narrative of his friendship with the third
Panchen Lama of Tibet, apparently a relationship of mutual respect and
affection which developed during Bogle's five-month stay. This essay
explores the multiple, often incompatible, personae which Bogle adopts
in his letters home. Writing to his father and brothers, Bogle represents
himself as an ambitious, politically astute careerist; to his sisters,
as a charming, self-denigrating dilettante. His letters to his sisters
are filled with nostalgic invocations of childhood, but this domestic
space must also accommodate unfamiliar cultures. In what guise is the
Orient admitted to the home? By asking such questions, by tracing Bogle's
various epistolary identities, we may catch the process of textual,
social and colonial self-fashioning at work. -- KT
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