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Imitation, Then and Now: On the emergence of philanthropy in early colonial Calcutta

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

BRIAN A. HATCHER
BRIAN A. HATCHER*
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, Tufts University, USA Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The goal of this article is to provide conceptual and historical orientation useful for thinking about the emergence of philanthropy in modern South Asia. Conceptually, the article suggests the need to approach the expression of philanthropy in early colonial Bengal in terms of processes of imitation. To do so, we must overcome the stigma attached to the idea of imitation within both nationalist and post-colonial thought. In the particular context of early colonial Calcutta, local actors entered into intimate relationships with Europeans and these relationships provided occasions to borrow, translate, and retool a range of ideas and practices relevant to new modes of public charity. The importance of attending to historical context is suggested by reading such early colonial developments against the grain of late nineteenth-century perspectives—a time when Bengalis grew anxious about cultural imitation. Rather than deferring to these late-colonial anxieties over imitation, we need to situate them within a critically informed historical framework. To do this, the present article draws on the writings of the Brāhmo intellectual Rajnarain Bose, who pondered the relationship between an earlier colonial moment (‘then’) and his own late-colonial ‘now’. Close reading of Bose allows us to plumb the nature of late-colonial anxiety about cultural borrowing while opening up a new perspective on imitation and intimacy in early colonial Bengal that is not predicated on the teleology of the late-colonial modern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Special Issue 1: Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia , January 2018 , pp. 62 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

This article has benefited from valuable critical feedback and bibliographic suggestions from several colleagues and friends, including Sumathi Ramaswamy, Filippo Osella, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Paul Courtright, and Aniket De.

References

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16 Ibid., p. 51.

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23 See Kamada, R. O., Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance, Peter Lang, New York, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 Ibid., p. 27.

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35 The merchant is Vaṇiknāth (‘lord of traders’), the jolly fellow is Rasamay (‘the witty one’), and the charitable member is Dīnadayāl (‘he who is kind to the needy’). One unnamed religious member is modelled on the figure of Debendranath Tagore.

36 The title page explicitly mentions Addison and almost certainly refers more specifically to the six-volume edition of his work, Addison, J., The Works of Joseph Addison, Washington Greene, G. (ed.), G. P. Putnam and Co., New York, 1856.Google Scholar

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38 The classic study of Addison in relation to the modern public sphere remains J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.

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41 For an historical parallel, the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā was ‘established . . . by a select party of friends’ in 1839; see the ‘Report of the Tuttuvoadhinee Subha’, Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, vol. 13, no. 1, 1843, p. 103.

42 On the bhadralok, see Bhattacharya, T., Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85), Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.Google Scholar

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46 Ibid., p. 3.

47 Rajnarain was himself a Brāhmo, who often dated his letters according to the Brāhmo calendar (Brāhmo Saṃvat). By naming his fictional society the Ātmīya Sabhā, he paid homage to his chosen religious community, even if his sketches are not meant to provide a depiction of Rammohan's group. The ‘Account’ ends with the friends enjoying Brāhmo songs together; Bose, Ātmīya Sabhār Sabhyadiger Vṛttānta, p. 16.

48 Mukherjee, Calcutta, p. 43.

49 For published reports, see Report of the Provisional Committee of the Calcutta School-Book Society, printed for the information of the Subscribers, by order of the General Meeting, held at the Town-Hall, on 1 July 1817, Calcutta; The First Report of the Calcutta School-Book Society, read at the first Annual General Meeting of the Subscribers, held at the Town-Hall of Calcutta, 4 July 1818, with an Appendix, a list of contributions received, and the accounts of the Institution for the year 1817–18, Calcutta; The Second Report of the Calcutta School-Book Society's Proceedings, Second Year, 1818–19, with an Appendix, the accounts of the Institution, and so on, and so on, read 21 September 1819, Calcutta; ‘Calcutta School Society’, Friend of India, no. 3, 1820, pp. 31–6.

50 ‘Calcutta School Society’, p. 36, emphasis in original.

51 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, p. 5.

52 For details, see Bandyopādhyāy, B., Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 2, Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, Calcutta, 1970, p. 396Google Scholar.

53 Possibly the same Rāmaswāmi who established the first native press in Calcutta; see Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 1, Baṅgīya Sāhitya Pariṣad, Calcutta, 1970, p. 13.

54 The following is based on a report in Samācāra Darpaṇa, 25 March 1826.

55 On Palmer, see Webster, A., The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2007Google Scholar. Palmer would in time be remembered among Bengalis as a ‘friend of the poor’. After his death, Calcutta natives took up a subscription for a statue in his honour; see Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 2, p. 342.

56 Rāmaswāmi mentions the needs of Muslim, no doubt aware of the increasing traffic through Calcutta of pilgrims making the hajj.

57 This was not a pattern restricted to Hindu landholders. The prominent Muslim landlord Haji Muhammad Mohsin of Hooghly (d. 1812) ‘sacrificed his enormous wealth for ensuring proper education, medical care and removal of [the] misery and poverty of his fellow human beings’; Hossein, A., The Mohsin Endowment and the Progress of Education in Colonial Bengal, Udar Akash, Gobindapur, 2015, p. 1Google Scholar.

58 On Rāmdulāl, see Ghosh, G., ‘A lecture on the life of Ramdoolal Dey, the Bengali millionaire’, in Selections from the Writings of Grish Chunder Ghose, Ghosh, M. (ed.), Indian Daily News Press, Calcutta, 1912, pp. 1–43Google Scholar; and Sanyal, R. (ed.), Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Great Men of India, both Official and Non-official for the Last One Hundred Years, Wooma Churn Chukerbutty, Calcutta, 1894, pp. 47–8Google Scholar. Rāmdulāl represents a classic example of the banian or ‘ship Sircar’ who worked alongside European and American trading interests in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Calcutta; see Kumār, M., Bhārata-Mārkin vāṇijyer pathikṛta Ramdulal De (1752–1825), Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, Calcutta, 1976, p. 5Google Scholar; and Kling, Partner in Empire, p. 57.

59 See Report of the Provisional Committee of the Calcutta School-Book Society, 1817. For evidence of subscription, see The Second Report of the Calcutta School-Book Society's Proceedings, 1819. One early publication funded by subscription was an edition of the Sanskrit grammar Mugdhabodha vyākaraṇam by Bopadeva, which was subsidized by over 40 Indian subscribers and a dozen Europeans.

60 See Bose, P. N., ‘Chattisgar: notes on its tribes, sects and castes’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 59, no. 1, 1890, p. 275Google Scholar; and Crooke, W., Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1906, p. 107Google Scholar.

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63 Ibid., pp. 66–8.

64 Today one can also find permanent sarbajanīn temples, established by members of a particular locality for the benefit of residents. Such community temples, unlike traditional family temples, are maintained by members’ subscriptions; see Biswas, L., ‘Evolution of Hindu temples in Calcutta’, Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 4, no. 2, 1984, p. 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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66 On this, see McDermott, R., Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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68 For a contemporary source, see ‘On the present celebration of the Hindoo Poojas’, Friend of India, vol. 3, 1820, pp. 125–31; see also Mukherjee, Calcutta, p. 23.

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70 That is, pāṭhśālār pustakādi prastuta kāraṇa sampradāya; Samācar Darpaṇa, 11 July 1818, quoted in Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 1, p. 3.

71 S. Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, H. C. Sarkar (ed.), 1914, Calcutta, p. 152.

72 The term sampradāya was available to Rammohan, but he would likely have been reluctant to affiliate his new society to any notion of ‘sectarian’ religiosity. On the role of categories like ‘reform’ and ‘sect’ in relation to the study of modern Hinduism, see Hatcher, B. A., ‘Situating the Swaminarayan tradition in the historiography of modern Hindu reform’, in Swaminarayan Hinduism: Tradition, Adaptation, and Identity, Williams, R. B. and Trivedi, Y. (eds), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 6–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 I leave aside the complicating social category of the ‘faction’ (dal), so ably studied in Mukherjee, Calcutta.

74 See the report published in Samācar Darpaṇ, March 1823 and reprinted in Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 1, pp. 8–12.

75 We find scattered evidence of the use of this term during the early period, as when a local paper reported on the monthly meeting (māsik baiṭhak) of the Dharma Sabha in 1830; see the notice of 29 December 1832, reprinted in Maitra, S. C., Selections from Jnannesan, Papyrus, Calcutta, 1979, pp. 7–14Google Scholar; cf. the report of a new society established in 1831 to promote the interests of Baidya physicians and reprinted in Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 2, pp. 397–8.

76 Sarkar, The Folk Element, p. 21.

77 I refer to the Śobhābājār Rāj, who were less kings than a local aristocratic landholding family, or zamindāri.

78 On the evolution of new domestic spaces, see Banerjee, S., The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1989Google Scholar; and Chaudhuri, R., ‘Modernity at home: the nationalization of the Indian drawing room, 1830–1930’, in Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature, Lal, M. and Kumar, S. P. (eds), Dorling Kindersley, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 221–39Google Scholar.

79 On majlis, see B. Bandyopādhyāy, Kalikātā kamalalaya, Samācāracandrikā Yantra, Calcutta, 1823, p. 8; cf. the evidence from 1815 cited in Bayly, C. A., ‘The pre-history of “communalism”? Religious conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1985, p. 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Consider the list of less commonly used terms found in Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 1, pp. 433ff.

81 Contrast this with the Persianate idioms that frame the report of a North Indian assembly in the 1860s, where the Persianate legacy remained more vital; in Stark, U., ‘Associational culture and civic engagement in Colonial Lucknow: the Jalsah-e Tahzib’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011, p. 10Google Scholar.

82 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, p. 343.

83 As Bayly notes, liberalism and neo-conservatism were ‘joined at the hip from birth’, ibid., p. 94.

84 For some analyses of bhadralok hegemony, see Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; Sarkar, M., Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sengupta, P., Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Gupta, S., ‘Samaj, Jati and Desh: reflections on nationhood in late colonial Bengal’, Studies in History, vol. 23, no. 2, 2007, pp. 177–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Majumdar, R., ‘A conceptual history of the social: some reflections out of colonial Bengal’, in Trans-colonial Modernities in South Asia, Dodson, M. S. and Hatcher, B. A. (eds), Routledge, New York, 2012, pp. 165–88Google Scholar. However, we should not oversimplify. In the case of sabhā, during the Swadeshi period, Rabindranath Tagore suggested that the organizational overtones of the term sabhā lent it an artificial flavour; thus he preferred melā or ‘fair’ to capture the spirit of social cohesion; see Tagore, R., ‘Svadeśī Samāj’, in Rabindra-racanāvalī, vol. 2, Viśvabhāratī Press, Calcutta, p. 632.Google Scholar

86 Consider how the Biblical concept of ‘stewardship’, which structured British understandings of charitable behaviour, was translated into Bengali. In his Bengali New Testament, William Carey yoked the Greek oikonomos of Luke 12:41 to the local figure of the Dewan (deoyān); see Dharmapustak maṅgal samācāra, Serampore, 1803. Later translators deferred to emerging idioms of associational practice in rendering the term as adhyakṣa; see Dharmapustaker antabhāg, British and Foreign Bible Society, London, 1839.

87 Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. i.

88 On colonial intimacy, see Ballantyne, T., ‘Strategic intimacies: knowledge and colonization in southern New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, vol. 14, 2013, pp. 4–18Google Scholar, which reviews and responds to: Stoler, A. L., ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34, no. 3, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stoler, A. L. (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bayly, C. A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996Google Scholar; and Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India.

89 On the former, see Dalrymple, W., The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India, Penguin, New York, 2002Google Scholar; on the latter, see Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. 3.

90 See Bean, S. S., Yankee Trader: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784–1860, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, 2001, p. 72Google Scholar. Out of respect for Rāmdulāl, the Lee family of Boston named one of their ships Ramduloll Dey; see Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 72; see also Kumār, Bhārata-Mārkin vāṇijyer pathikṛta Ramdulal De, p. 10. Around 1799–1800, the Salem merchant Dudley L. Pickman, visiting Madras, noted the ‘confidence and esteem’ felt by one Englishman there toward his dubash; see the Journal of the Belisarius, quoted in Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 101.

91 Kumār, Bhārata-Mārkin vāṇijyer pathikṛta Ramdulal De, p. 29. Newton made his first successful venture shipping pale ale from England to Madras, but later joined the agency house of John Palmer and Company; see Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, vol. 5, Published by the Society, Boston, 1894, p. 92.

92 Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 74; cf. p. 129. Bean refers to men like Rāmdulāl as representing both the most ‘crucial’ and the most ‘intimate’ of the connections formed between American merchants and local actors (p. 71).

93 When thinking about the tensions between business interest and friendship in a colonial context, we might heed Vanessa Smith's advice to temper ‘the complacencies of our skepticism’, spending less time searching for sinister subtext and more time explicating what such friendships made possible for local actors; Smith, Intimate Strangers, p. 13.

94 See State Street Trust Company, Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston, State Street Trust, Boston, 1919, p. 42.

95 Ibid., pp. 42–4.

96 Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 79. This is not to discount the fact that, to many Americans, India remained not only a distant and exotic land, but also one whose ‘heathen’ customs were ‘succumbing to the control of a stronger, more enlightened Western power’ (p. 85).

97 White, From Little London to Little Bengal, p. 2. As with the case of the Mitter-Mackay relationship, White's study of ‘Little Bengal’ in early nineteenth-century London reminds us of the concrete ways aesthetic, affective, and commercial bonds shaped the lives of Indians and Britons.

98 Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 74.

99 Zastoupil, L., ‘Intimacy and colonial knowledge’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 3, no. 2, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v003/3.2zastoupil.html#FOOT12002: para 11, [accessed 18 January 2018]; cf. Mukherjee, Calcutta, p. 40.

100 For accounts, cf. Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 1, pp. 8–12; cf. the information found in ‘Native Literary Society’, Oriental Magazine and Calcutta Review, vol. 1, 1823, pp. 521–9.

101 Bandyopādhyāy, Sambād patre sekāler kathā, vol. 2, p. 399.

102 Bean, Yankee Trader, p. 129.

103 Ibid., pp. 125–9.

104 Zastoupil, ‘Intimacy and colonial knowledge’, para. 1.

105 Sartori, Bengal, p. 104.

106 Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. 50.

107 Bose, Ātmīya Sabhār Sabhyadiger Vṛttānta, p. 8.

108 Ibid., pp. 26–7. There are no Muslim members of the society, though the continuing influence of Muslim cultural and aesthetic values can be noted.

109 Ibid., pp. 21–2.

110 Cf. the depiction of the Muslim zamindar Mirza Salah ud-Din offered in Hossein, The Mohsin Endowment, p. 14.

111 Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, pp. 60–1. For a depiction of this liminal moment between pre-colonial and colonial philanthropy, cf. Bandyopādhyāy, Kalikātā kamalalaya.

112 See Bose, Rājanārāyaṇa Basur nirvācita racanā saṃgraha. The work was printed in an early collection; see Bose, R., Bibidha Prabandha, part 1, Oriental Publishing Establishment, Calcutta, 1882, pp. 23–48Google Scholar. However, the only original copy I have seen is in the British Library. The title page indicates no author, specifying only that it was published by the Brahmo Samaj Press. This led the British Library cataloguer to include the work under ‘Theology’ and to annotate his entry, ‘A Brahmist's reflections on social life’; see Blumhardt, J. F., Catalogue of the Library of the India Office, vol. 2, part 4, Oriya and Assamese Books, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, Bengali, 1905, p. 202Google Scholar. Correct attribution is found in Bāgal, ‘Rājanārāyaṇa Basu’, p. 69, which however offers no details about the text.

113 Literally, ke keman āche; see Bose, Ātmīya Sabhār Sabhyadiger Vṛttānta, p. 13.

114 Where we find repeated the phrase ke keman ache; Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. 60.

115 Bose, R., Rājanārāyaṇa Basur ātmacarita: tatkartṛk likhita hastalipi haite mudrita, Orient Book Company, Calcutta, 1985, p. 2Google Scholar. Other parallels can be found. In the ‘Account’, when describing the death of Dīnadayāl's father, Rajnarain says Dīnadayāl's 17-year-old brother threw away his earrings and bracelets in order to take up the position of Dewan. In Then and Now, Rajnarain uses the same terms to describe the behaviour of the 17-year-old brother of a deceased Dewan; cf. Bose, Ātmīya Sabhār Sabhyadiger Vṛttānta, p. 12; and Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. 9.

116 See the footnote in Bose, Se kāl ār e kāl, p. 60.

117 Ibid., p. 60.

118 Bose, Rājanārāyaṇa Basur ātmacarita, p. 3.

119 Sanyal, Reminiscences and Anecdotes, p. 48. For an exploration of the after-life of one ‘eminent Indian’ in biography and popular memory, see Hatcher, B. A., Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian, Routledge, New Delhi, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

120 Sartori, Bengal, p. 107, emphasis in original.

121 Similarly, Partha Chatterjee points to the error of reading Rammohun Roy as if he marked the advent of ‘nationalist modernity’ instead of an ‘unstable and short-lived’ early modern moment; see Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire, pp. 141–2.

122 Taussig, M., Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 252.Google Scholar

123 Ibid., p. xviii.

124 Ibid., p. 249.

125 Sarkar, The Folk Element, p. 22. Sarkar drew upon the extensive work of Haridās Palit in his Opinions on Ādyer Gambhīrā: Bāṅgālār dharma o sāmājik itihāser ek Adhyāy, Kṛṣṇacaraṇ Sarkār, Malda, 1917. The elevation of Gambhīrā to special status as a national folk form by the likes of Palit and Sarkar is explored in detail in A. De, ‘Disguises of Shiva: nationalism and folk culture in the Bengal borderland since 1905’, unpublished BA honours thesis, Tufts University, 2016.

126 Sarma, ‘Modern Puja associations’, p. 583.

127 Andrew, Philanthropy and Police, p. 5.

128 Ibid., p. 12.

129 For Muslim parallels, Hossein, The Mohsin Endowment, shows us how the cosmopolitan Islamic culture of pre-modern Hooghly produced a benefactor like Haji Muhammad Mohsin, who in turn created a trust deed in 1806 that was to have a significant after-life in supporting a range of public charities, not least in education.