The East India Company and the Bengal Renaissance
It is a small irony of imperial history that the East India Company — a commercial corporation chartered in 1600 to import spices and peppercorns into England — should have been the principal patron of one of the most remarkable intellectual awakenings of the nineteenth century. The “Bengal Renaissance” — the cultural and intellectual transformation of Calcutta, Dacca, and the wider Bengal Presidency in the decades between 1810 and 1900 — was, in many respects, the unintended consequence of the Company’s policies on education, the press, and the administration of justice. That the Company was, on its own admission, an instrument of British commerce does not, in fact, weaken the irony; it strengthens it. The Company did not intend the Bengal Renaissance; it could not have foreseen it; and it would, if it could, have suppressed much of it.
The Company was, throughout its long history, an ambivalent patron of Indian intellectual life. The early Company officials were, very often, men of considerable learning — Warren Hastings was a serious student of Persian and Sanskrit, and he founded the Calcutta Madrasa in 1781; Charles Wilkins was the first European to print a Sanskrit text (the Bhagavad-Gita, 1785); William Jones, the Supreme Court judge, was the founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) and the pioneer of comparative Indo-European linguistics. The Company’s charter, however, was to trade; the British Parliament’s successive renewals of the charter (1793, 1813, 1833, 1853) imposed an increasingly heavy regulatory burden, and the Company’s cultural patronage was, by the 1820s, an item of metropolitan political debate.
The Asiatic Society and the Founding of Indian Studies
The earliest institutional form of the Company’s cultural patronage was the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784 by Sir William Jones, a judge of the Supreme Court of Bengal. The Asiatic Society was, in its origins, a European learned society: its members were the senior British officials of the Bengal Presidency, and its proceedings were in English. The Society’s principal achievement was the foundation of the Asiatic Researches (1788) — a journal of Indian studies that would, for the next fifty years, be the principal organ of European Indology — and the publication of Jones’s translation of the Abhijnana-Shakuntalam of Kalidasa (1789), the first Indian dramatic work to be translated into a European language.
The Asiatic Society was, in its early decades, almost exclusively European. The Indian members of the Society — Raja Rammohan Roy was elected in 1814, the year of the Society’s first Indian president — were, in the main, drawn from the Bengali upper classes and from the English-educated gentry. The Society’s library, museum, and journal were, in the 1820s and 1830s, the principal European-style institutions of Calcutta. The Society’s role in the founding of modern Indian studies was, however, eventually superseded by the Company’s other cultural institutions — the Fort William College, the Sanskrit College, the Hindu College, and (after 1857) the University of Calcutta.
Fort William College and the Indian Languages
Fort William College, founded by Lord Wellesley in 1800 as a training school for the Company’s civil servants, was the principal institutional patron of Indian-language studies in the early nineteenth century. The College was, in its origins, a place where young Company officials could acquire a working knowledge of the Indian languages — Bengali, Hindustani, Persian, Sanskrit — that were, in the early nineteenth century, the languages of the Company’s administration. The College’s professors were, in many cases, Indian scholars — the most famous was Raja Rammohan Roy, who held the chair of Sanskrit from 1812 to 1813.
The College’s most lasting contribution was, however, the publication of a substantial body of Indian-language literature in printed form. The College’s College of Fort William Press published, in the period 1800–1854, more than 400 titles in Bengali, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani. The most famous of these were the Sabda Kalpadruma (1822), a Sanskrit encyclopaedia compiled by Raja Radhakanta Deva, and the Musalman Bengalah (1832), an early history of the Muslims of Bengal. The College’s literary output was, in the 1820s and 1830s, the principal basis of the Bengali-language literary revival, and it was the foundation on which the later Bengali-language periodical press would be built.
The Hindu College and the English-Language Education
The Company’s most consequential educational patronage was, however, the English-language school and university system. The Hindu College of Calcutta, founded in 1817 by a group of European and Indian benefactors, was the first English-language college in Asia; the Presidency College (1817, refounded 1855) and the Hooghly College (1836) were the second and third. The Company’s own role in English-language education was, however, ambiguous: the 1813 Charter Act had allocated a lac of rupees (Rs 100,000) for the encouragement of education, and the Company’s Court of Directors had, in 1814, set up a General Committee of Public Instruction to administer the funds.
The decisive moment was Macaulay’s 2 February 1835 Minute, which recommended that the Company’s educational funds be devoted to English-language education rather than to Sanskrit and Arabic education. The Minute, adopted by the Governor-General’s Council the same day, redirected the Company’s educational funds decisively into English-language education. The result was the system of English-language schools and colleges that would, in 1857, become the basis of the University of Calcutta, the University of Bombay, and the University of Madras. The universities were, in their origins, examining bodies modelled on the University of London, and they were, in their administration, the responsibility of the Company’s successors — the Crown, after 1858 — rather than the Company itself.
The Company’s Press and the Indian Periodical Press
The Company was, throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the principal publisher of Indian-language literature. The Company’s press at Haurani (1779) and the press at Calcutta (1780) were the first modern printing presses in India; the Company also sponsored, through its Board of Revenue, the printing of statistical, fiscal, and administrative materials. The Company’s press was, however, subject to the censorship of the Company’s civil service, and the press was, on the whole, a more cautious body than the independent Indian press that emerged after 1830.
The Indian periodical press was, in its origins, a response to the Company’s educational and cultural policies. The first Bengali-language newspaper, Samachar Darpan (1818), was the work of the Serampore missionaries; the first Bengali-language monthly, Digdarshan (1818), was the work of the same circle. The first Indian-owned English-language newspaper, the Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780), was the work of a European adventurer and was, very soon, the object of Company censorship. The Company’s role in the press was, on the whole, suppressive: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 (passed under the Crown) and the Indian Press Act of 1910 (also passed under the Crown) were the most dramatic expressions of the colonial state’s suspicion of the Indian press.
The Company and the Indian Cultural Inheritance
The Company’s role in the Indian cultural inheritance was, throughout its history, contradictory. The Company was, on the one hand, the principal European patron of Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian scholarship — Warren Hastings’s Madrasa of 1781, the Company’s Persian press, the Company’s sponsorship of the Asiatick Researches, all testified to the Company’s serious intellectual interest in the Indian cultural inheritance. The Company was, on the other hand, the principal European patron of English-language education — the Hindu College, the Presidency College, the University of Calcutta, all testified to the Company’s commitment to the English-language inheritance.
The contradiction was, in many respects, the consequence of the Company’s position as a commercial body with quasi-sovereign powers. The Company’s educational policy was, in the 1820s and 1830s, the object of a vigorous political debate — the “Orientalist” debate — between those who favoured Sanskrit and Arabic education and those who favoured English. Macaulay’s 1835 Minute settled the debate in favour of English. The 1835 Minute was, in effect, the founding document of the modern Indian educational system, and the Company’s role in its production was, on the whole, a more complex one than the later celebratory accounts of the Indian educational inheritance have allowed.
The End of the Company and the Inheritance of the Renaissance
The East India Company was abolished, as a governing body, by the Government of India Act 1858, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion. The Company’s commercial functions had already been abolished by the Charter Act of 1813, and its territorial functions had been transferred to the Crown in 1858. The Company’s role in the Bengal Renaissance was, however, not over: the Company’s successor institutions — the Fort William College (closed in 1854), the Sanskrit College (renamed the Presidency College in 1855), the Hindu College (renamed the Presidency College in 1855), the University of Calcutta (founded 1857) — were, in many respects, the institutional foundations of the later Indian educational system.
The Company’s most lasting contribution to the Bengal Renaissance was, however, the cultural framework within which the Renaissance was possible. The Company’s educational institutions, its press, its administrative structures, and its commercial networks had, by the 1840s, produced a generation of Indian intellectuals who were deeply conversant with both the Indian and the European inheritances. The Company’s role in the production of this generation was, in many respects, the unintended consequence of policies that the Company had adopted for quite different reasons. The irony, as so often in imperial history, is that the Company did not intend the Renaissance; it was, rather, the unintended consequence of the Company’s commercial and administrative practices.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the East India Company and the Bengal Renaissance has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of C. A. Bayly, the Cambridge School of imperial history, and the post-colonial generation of Indian historians. The earlier celebratory accounts — the histories of the Company’s educational and cultural patronage — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question in the field is the same as for the Bengal Renaissance itself: whether the Company’s role in the production of the Renaissance is best understood as a form of cultural patronage, a form of cultural appropriation, or a form of cultural production that has its own logic. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the Company a clean bill of health.