CHAPTER XV - India, 1840–1905

Summary

In tracing Indian developments in the second half of the nineteenth century it is important to balance carefully the Indian and British sides of the scales. And the British side was not British only, but European and western as well, for in much of their activity the British were harbingers of general western culture rather than the purveyors of Anglo-Saxondom. In the past there has been a tendency to regard the significant features of Victorian India as the completion of the British dominion, and the gradual spread of British administrative techniques and public works, of western cultural ideas and western humane values. The groups who secured the decision to introduce western institutions into India believed that Indian institutions were effete and Indian traditional ideas inferior if not positively harmful. They looked to a gradual replacement of things Indian by things European, though they did not all clothe their expectation in the vivid imagery of Macaulay. The first school of writers on British India were fascinated by the spectacle of the rise of British power, the most striking and lasting, as they believed, in the long procession of Indian empire. There followed, with James Mill's History as a bridge, those who thought that the true significance of British Indian history consisted in the introduction of western institutions. Both schools were absorbed in the British raj; while the first emphasised the raj, the second emphasised the British. Neither, along with most contemporary administrators, thought that India herself had much to offer towards her own future.