Panel Organizers:

Dr. Michael Mann - FernUniversität, Hagen, Germany
Dr. Harald Fischer-Tiné - Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Abstract
   
Until recently the rhetoric and practice of the British imperial ‘civilising mission' in South Asia has not been systematically analysed by historians. Building on our first effort in the field, we want to complete the picture by exploring some aspects of the phenomenon that have largely escaped scholarly attention so far. While remaining open to the more logical topics of control and ‘improvement' implemented by the colonial state, this panel hence seeks to expand our understanding of ‘civilising' endeavours into three different directions. First we want to look at the ‘softer' cultural forms of the civilising ideology like the spread of literary canons, scientific paradigmata, architectural styles or the notion of a standardised, measured clock time. Second we wish to focus on civil society actors with a ‘civilising' agenda. This is intended to deal not only with actors on culturally or ethnically associated with the colonisers (Christian missionaries, early feminists and philanthropists etc.) but also with efforts of ‘self-civilising' carried out by South Asian actors and organizations (Social reform movements, philanthropic and political associations etc.). Thirdly, we wish to explore continuities of the civilising agenda from the colonial into the post-colonial era by studying the paternalist agenda of the independent states as well as of non-governmental outfits (NGOs, voluntary associations).

Although mainly dealing with issues of historical import, the panel encourages interdisciplinary approaches and invites scholars from other disciplines (e.g. political science, social anthropology, gender studies, cultural and literary studies etc.) to join in the effort of refining our understanding of a phenomenon that has remained frighteningly relevant until this day.

Nancy Gardner Cassels, Ontario, Canada
Public Instruction and Public Justice -- The Twin Faces of the East India Company's Civilizing Mission
 
When the East India Company began to grasp its responsibilities as a ruling power on the Indian subcontinent in the early nineteenth century, it donned the mantle of a civilizing mission which incorporated numerous social issues.  For those problems with a criminal dimension, such as thuggee, dacoity, and even sati and sorcery, legislation provided an efficient remedy.  But the Company's Legislative Council recoiled from a plethora of social issues which reflected ‘immemorial custom'.  For concerns raised by the first reports of female infanticide, cases of adultery and practices ranging from hook swinging to polygamy among Kulin Brahmins, the Council deferred to the educational process.  Very early in the nineteenth century the Company realized that remedies for cases that might have been addressed in the Diwani Adawlut or civil courts would be more effectively confronted by an extension of vernacular and female education.  However, the supercharged controversy between Anglicists and Orientalists in Bengal distracted the Company from its civilizing mission.  This caused it to fall behind Christian missionaries in the work of supporting traditions of vernacular education which already existed and of creating a non-existent tradition of female education.  Efforts to promote vernacular education foundered upon a lack of funds.  Even for its English schools the Company leaned heavily upon donations from wealthy Indians.  Early efforts by missionaries to develop female education ran afoul of the Hindu tradition of childhood marriage and the Muslim tradition of purdah.  And, the missionaries' problems were compounded by suspicions that the Government was conspiring to promote Christianity through its schools.  By the time the Company ceded its responsibilities to the Crown, its failure to champion vernacular and female education had severely compromised its civilizing mission.
 
Carey Watt, St Thomas University, History Department, Fredericton, NB, Canada
The Rhetoric of Development in Indian Philanthropy and Social Welfare c.1900-1955
 
This paper will compare and contrast discourses of ‘progress' and ‘development' as employed in three different contexts of charitable and philanthropic activity between 1820 and 1955. It seeks to show some surprising continuities over this 140-year period, in which tropes of development, scientific progress and modernity supported philanthropic ‘civilizing missions' on the part British and Indian state and non-state actors.
 The first case looks at descriptions of charity used by East India Company officials in the decades after 1820 when colonial power was institutionalized and consolidated. Colonial officials portrayed Company philanthropy as "works of public utility" that were public, institutionalized, utilitarian and scientific. They were set in opposition to supposedly superstitious and wasteful Indian charity.  Thus Company philanthropy was represented as a symbol of improvement, progress and modernity under colonial rule - and it enhanced the legitimacy of the Raj. The second case looks at discourses of development in Indian social service, philanthropy and social work between 1900 and 1940. These ‘civil society' or non-governmental (NGO) movements often had links to Indian nationalism and they were critical of colonial action (and inaction) in various social and cultural fields, but they were also dismissive of older forms of Indian charity. While informed by India's ‘living traditions', such proto NGOs claimed to be on the side of modernity and efficiency. They favored organized and institutionalized philanthropy for national development over what they considered to be wasteful forms of personal charity. The third case examines philanthropy and development under the Nehruvian state in the early1950s. Nehru was often harshly critical of existing Indian philanthropic and social welfare efforts. He saw the modern state, supported by scientific planning, technology and expertise, as the principal agent for delivering welfare and social justice - not the voluntary associations and networks of India's civil society.
 
Shobna Nijhawan, York University, Dept. of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
Toronto, Canada
Responses to Colonial Discourses on Indian Womanhood
 
It has by now been well acknowledged that imperial powers legitimized their claim over foreign territory not only through promises of political and economic benefit but also on the basis of civilizing discourses which were informed by Enlightenment notions of universal human and civil rights (T. Metcalf 1998). Within this process, a diversity of "self-civilizing" social reformative and nationalist efforts to "elevate" Indian society onto a "higher stage of civilization" can be witnessed. Their actors were indigenous social reformers and nationalists, amongst them also women.
 
By means of discursive analysis of Hindi women's periodicals of the early twentieth century, I wish to explore how civilizing discourses that conjured up the degradation of womanhood in Indian society, inserted themselves into the consciousness of those who were in direct contact with the colonialists and missionaries: the indigenous elites and emerging middle class. The vernacular sources that I consult not only provide a perspective from the Hindi public sphere, they also represent voices of women that have often been left unacknowledged in academic discourse.
 
I argue that the colonial civilizing discourse featured as a central reference point in women's periodicals. In examining the arguments brought forth by British historians such as James Mill, the writers suggested that more attention be turned to the "ideal" Hindu past and women's revered status therein rather than to use a Western-defined scale of measurement. This approach became instrumental to a reformist and nationalist agenda that ultimately wanted to prove its cultural superiority in relation to the West. I will show in my paper how the colonial civilizing discourse was not only appropriated in women's periodicals but also transformed in order that it might serve yet another "civilizatory" purpose: women's rights and the (imagined) nation's independence.
 
Ian Petrie, Saint Joseph's University, Department of History, Philadelphia, USA
Improvement, Reform, Development: The Bengal Countryside 1860-2000
 
This paper historicizes the idea of "development" by tracing, for one region, the emergence of official and popular discourses on rural poverty and "backwardness" and the prospect of their amelioration through science, social science and technology. Diverse data - testimony presented to proliferating state commissions, landlords' diaries, theses of students sent abroad for scientific training, poetry and fiction - permit the reconstruction of the material and cultural circumstances in which a modernizing vision for the countryside was taken up and institutionalized in colonial Bengal, a process reflecting the interplay between both global and local forces, and dynamic understandings of region and nation. The spectre of famine spurred increasingly regular interest and intervention in rural conditions by the state and local elites, and discourses on episodic crises gave way to considerations of endemic poverty. After the turn of the twentieth century, diverse groups sought to improve villages and villagers using scientific and social scientific tools. New understandings of the power of the state and the power of emergent academic disciplines, both international in their referents, put down deep roots in the interwar years, ensuring substantial continuities across the putative divide of independence. Technological change presented differential costs and opportunities, reflecting changing rural power relations, in which rising actors included not only an increasingly interventionist state but also ascendant entrepreneurial elites and transnational businesses. The middle class's engagement with ideas of rural development was strongly influenced by regional histories, environments and identities - considerations also shaping the response of peasants to the initiatives putatively enacted in their interest.  The existence of regional permutations, however, does not mitigate the connection between development ideology and power relations.  Rather, the historical inflection of development discourse with caste, communal and ethnic anxieties, all predicated on hierarchies of "civilization", reinforces our sense of the continuing protean legitimating power of "development".
 
Jana Tschurnev, HU Berlin, Comparative Education Studies, Abt. Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
"Keep Them in Their Place and Make Them Useful": Missionaries and Elementary Schooling in Madras and Bengal, 1789-1830
 
Focusing on the development and spread of a certain model of schooling, the so-called monitorial system of education, this paper will outline some common features of elementary education for all and its non-governmental promoters in the early nineteenth century Empire. The inclusion of the children of the poor of England, as well as the "eurasian" population of the colonial cities and the rural "natives" of Bengal into cheep, rational, and effective educational institutions was a special concern of the emerging charity and reform-oriented organisations run by the respectable British middle class. The "diffusion of useful knowledge" appeared as a means for social reform and a double civilizing mission at home and abroad. Adopted to the special purposes regarding the different target groups, monitorial schools promised to "render" the children of the subalterns "useful in their own sphere". The "degraded indigent christians" in India were to be enabled to act in a middling position between European gentlemen and the locals, while monitorial schools run by missionary societies for the "natives" were meant to disrupt the vicious circle of "ignorance" and "superstition through Western sciences. Thus, missionaries and school societies hoped to employ monitorial pedagogy as a civilizing technology.
 
Ravi Ahuja, University of Heidelberg, Goettingen, Germany
Circulation, 'Improvement' and 'Public Works': Conceptualising the Social History of Transport in Colonial India
 
'Public works' of transport and particularly those connected with novel steam technologies were represented as powerful 'civilising' influences in nineteenth-century 'gentlemanly' discourses. Colonial 'public works' policy was simultaneously a powerful force in material processes that transformed India's circulatory regimes and lived social space in the latter half of that century. Yet the complex interdependence of dominant conceptions of how to 'civilise' India by way of transport infrastructure and the socio-spatial practices of conflicting social agencies has so far hardly been explored. This seems to be due, on the one hand, to the pervasive indifference of the hegemonic historiographical currents towards material processes and a tendency towards a reductionist understanding of history as rhetoric. On the other hand, most economic historians and, until recently, most railway historians  have bothered little with conceptual niceties entailing, for instance, a widespread uncritical und unreflected acceptance of the notion of 'productive' and 'unproductive public works'. This paper attempts to open new perspectives on India's social history of transport under colonialism by exploring the interdependent conceptual fields of 'social space', 'circulation' and 'infastructure'.
 
Emma Reisz, University of Oxford, Jesus College, Oxford, UK
Beyond Ornamentalism: Agricultural ‘Improvement' in Company Bengal and the Zamindar's Dilemma
 
This paper considers ideologies of agricultural ‘improvement' in Bengal under the East India Company, focusing on the period around 1830, when orientalist approaches to government were giving way to anglicising ones. Based on original research using both official and private sources, the paper emphasises the Indian experience during this period, looking particularly at Indian participation in non-state organisations promoting agricultural change in the early nineteenth century. Although it has been almost entirely neglected, agricultural improvement was a crucial area of activity for East India Company reformers, since it united the emphasis of learned urban society on rationality and knowledge with the demands of rural governance. Agricultural reform was also a central location of tension between the Company and Bengali elites, since farming practice could only change through the agency of zamindars.
 
The paper argues that Bengali landowners after the Permanent Settlement in 1793 were caught between pursuing Company support for agricultural change which could improve their economic position, and attempting to maintain distance between themselves and the social reform movements which, particularly after 1813, threatened to undermine their position in Bengali society. This ‘zamindar's dilemma' provides, I argue, a more helpful way to understand the rural impact of the Company's civilising mission than David Cannadine's simple emphasis on ‘ornamentalism' and conservative paternalism.
 
The paper focuses particularly on the Agri-Horticultural Society founded by the missionary William Carey in 1820. This received substantial Company funding to promote cooperation between Bengali elites and British agricultural improvers in transforming farming practice in Bengal. However after the appointment of William Bentinck as Governor-General in 1827, deep faultlines were exposed between on the one hand the increasingly Anglicising preoccupations of the Company with its largely urban allies, and on the other the social conservatism of most large Bengali landowners. Prominent landowners in the Agri-Horticultural Society, such as Radhakanta Deb, began to move closer to the religious concerns of Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, founder of the Dharma Sabha, who rejected the Society on the grounds that it encouraged cultivation of onion and garlic, regardless of religious prohibitions.
 
Meanwhile Bentinck's fiscal caution also ensured that by the mid-1830s, the Company had moved away from paternalistic agrarianism and was instead focusing on research into export agriculture. The Company hoped to produce rapid cash returns on its agronomic innovations, and to ensure rural stability instead through political and economic means. In 1838 the Landholders' Society was established by Bengali landowners (including Radhakanta) to lobby in their interest, the Agri-Horticultural Society having become almost exclusively European and preoccupied with investigating new agricultural crops. Faced with this ‘economic anglicising', the members of the Landholders' Society continued to hedge their bets. While they agitated to protect traditional economic relationships, conservatives such as Radhakanta also invested and cooperated in quintessential ‘improving' colonial agricultural ventures, notably the cultivation of tea in the newly acquired valleys of Assam - Anglo-Indian cooperation born not out of shared paternalist ideology but from the shared pursuit of global markets.
 
Harald Fisher-Tine, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Reclaiming Savages: The Salvation Army in ‘Darkest England' and ‘Darkest India' (ca. 1880-1920)
 
In current political discourse there has been a rather intensive debate about the ideal of establishing a ‘global civil society' and the positive role Non-Governmental Organizations can play in this process. Often the ‘forces of global civil society' - exemplified by International Non Governmental Institutions (INGO's) - have been portrayed as the very antithesis of the ‘forces of empire'. This paper wants to question such over-simplifications by looking at the issue historically. Taking the example of the Salvation Army, It first tries to argue that INGO's could as well be involved in imperial civilising missions. Examining the role of the organization in England and British India in late 19th and early 20th centuries, it wants to show that the rhetoric and social practice of the Salvation Army's activities in both theatres influenced and mutually informed each other in significant ways. The Army, it is argued, closely interacted with the ‘forces of empire' and became actually a handmaiden of British imperialism by serving the colonial state in British India in various significant projects, namely the surveillance and disciplining of ‘unruly' or ‘dangerous' segments of the population.
Finally, the paper tries to demonstrate that the activities of the Salvation Army were not confined to the ‘imperial social formation' that tied together Britain and India but had an impact on other regions of the world, too. It becomes clear that the convenient colonial divide that still structures much of the historical scholarship on the 19^th century does not reflect the degree to which individuals and social movements had begun to act on a global scale.
 
Shahid Perwez, The University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Studies, Edinburgh, UK
Post-colonial State, Civilizing Mission, and Female Infanticide in Tamil Nadu
 
This paper engages with the post-colonial State response to female infanticide in Tamil Nadu. Some people have argued that the modern Indian State derives its stand on tackling female infanticide in Tamil Nadu from the colonial government's ‘civilizing mission' agenda. Others insist that the post colonial State claims for itself a more absolute mandate for intervening in social or women's issues than colonial ones by claiming a consensus that need not be reiterated. Claiming both, I argue, the State and other social actors in Tamil Nadu have launched a massive drive to curb female infanticide. This is evident from the range of programs and practices, targeting families and communities selectively, undertaken by the Tamil Nadu government - as well as by the NGOs - since early 1990s in response to the publicized reports of female infanticide and sex selective abortions in the state. Casual reviews, evaluations and assessments of these policies, programs and practices have formed part of most of the academic and non-academic (mostly journalistic) writings on female infanticide in Tamil Nadu since 1992. However, a thorough enquiry into these measures has rarely been attempted. Viewed from the perspective of women considering female infanticide, these measures appear to be fraught with tensions and conflicts both from the point of view of their ‘concepts' and ‘implementation'.
 
Based on a year fieldwork among infanticide population in Salem district - epicentre of State intervention on female infanticide - in Tamil Nadu, I show how State and other social actors have used the cultural problematic of female infanticide as a ‘litmus test' - in as much as the Colonial state did in their civilizing agenda in the 19th century - to construct a larger discourse on gender (equity), health (delivery) and demography (balancing the sexual composition of the population) by justifying big-budgeted interventions with national and international aid.
 
Kim Wagner, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Suppression of Thuggee and the Myth of Reform
 
The suppression of thuggee during the 1830's assumes a place of honour within the colonial history of the British Raj: In spite of all the deficiencies of the East India Company's administration, its rule in India was after all redeemed by benevolent acts such as the eradication of these religious stranglers. In 1829 the zealous official W.H. Sleeman supposedly discovered thuggee and the Governor General Bentinck promptly seized the opportunity and put Sleeman in charge of the operations to suppress the thugs. In the course of the following decade Sleeman and his officers managed to uncover and destroy thuggee in all its ramifications, mainly through the use of informers and legal innovations. As far as the initiative and moral incentives are concerned the suppression of thuggee is thus often seen as the result of the utilitarian and Evangelicalist policies of Bentinck, similarly to the abolition of sati.
But the conventional account of the suppression of thuggee is based on a whole range of erroneous assumptions. The British first encountered thuggee around 1810 and spent the following decades trying to suppress what was simply perceived as a problem of law and order. The anti-thuggee campaign of the 1830's was accordingly merely the final stage of a much longer process and there was nothing novel about the measures implemented during that period. What has been hailed as one of the few true examples of good governance during the Raj was in fact the result of lobbying on behalf of a few enterprising officials, most notably Sleeman, who ‘sexed up' the evidence of an all-India conspiracy of ritual stranglers.