BOMBAY AND THE RELIGIOUS ECONOMY OF IRAN

The migration of Iranians to India forms one of the great themes in the religious history of both India and Iran. But while these interchanges are common enough knowledge with regard to the pre-modern period, their continuity – and, indeed, acceleration – through the nineteenth century has been neglected. From the early nineteenth century, India was key to the development of Iran's diplomatic contacts with the wider world and Iranian relations with Britain were brokered through the exchange of ambassadors with Calcutta as much as London. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, the ill-fated voyage to India of the resident of Bushire, Hājjī Muhammad Khalīl, on behalf of the Iranian ruler Fath ‘Alī Shāh began this round of diplomatic exchanges with India, and soon led to the establishment of a permanent Iranian consul in Bombay. These diplomatic relations, and the founding of the consulate in Bombay, were a reflection of the expansion of trade between the two regions. We must look first, then, at the trade connections that underwrote Bombay's connections with Iran. Recent scholarship has begun to draw attention to the persistency of mercantile connections between Indian and Iranian merchants in the nineteenth century. The old Iranian trading town of Kerman, for example, maintained a growing population of Indian merchants throughout the century, while the renewed ties between the Zoroastrians of Yazd and their Parsi co-religionists in Bombay assured the presence of a wealthy contingent of Indian merchants in Yazd as well.

The early twentieth century witnessed a diversity of social and religious reforms as well as nationalist efforts to ‘elevate’ segments of Indian society to a supposedly ‘higher’ stage of civilization. In ‘civilizing’ discourses of this time period, the degradation of women in Indian society featured central not only amongst colonial rulers and missionaries; it also inserted itself into the consciousness of indigenous elites and the emerging middle classes, including elite and middle-class women. This chapter explores the interventions of Hindi women's periodicals in colonial and nationalist ‘civilizing missions’ of the late 1910s. More precisely, it analyses how contributors to women's periodicals examined the arguments brought forth by agents of the British civilizing mission such as James Mill, James Tod and Herbert Spencer. It also addresses (male) social reformist and nationalist positions on the topic of the woman question. Most importantly, though, it presents examples of women writers and activists proffering their very own civilizing missions. The central question of such contributors revolved around the implications of ‘improvement’ and ‘development’ for Indian middle-class women. The contributors also assessed notions of ‘civilization’ both in theory and in practice, specifically considering what could be in the best interest of women (as defined by both women and men). Some contributors suggested that more attention be turned towards a presumed ideal Hindu past and women's revered status therein. Others called for a break with tradition and a redefinition of gender roles.

Prologue: On the Political Implications of Art and Architecture

In the long decade after the victorious Boer and Boxer Wars in Africa and China and before the outbreak of the First World War, the short period marking the heyday of British (as well as other European states') imperialism, it was the British Empire in India which became the focus of Great Britain's imperial grandeur and splendour. To commemorate the announcement of Edward VII as Emperor of India, the then Governor General and Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon (1898–1905), declared in 1901 his intention to organize a Coronation Darbar to be held at Delhi. The Delhi Darbar of 1902–03 was a massive demonstration of Britain's global military power, almost 40,000 soldiers including Indian regiments having just returned from the African and Asian theatres of war paraded in front of the Viceroy and the assembled dignitaries of Britain, Germany and India. The Delhi Darbar was also a lucid demonstration of colonial cultural patronage, collecting and displaying the best samples of contemporary Indian artefacts at the Delhi Arts Exhibition, which was part of the huge official programme accompanying this rather pompous imperial function.

The Delhi Arts Exhibition was part of a rather young tradition of industrial and art exhibitions, which began in 1851 with the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’ in London, to be followed by the Paris International Exhibition of 1855.

Introduction

It is by now a well established fact that transnational interaction and communication on a global scale is by no means a recent phenomenon. According to prominent historians, such as C. A. Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel, the intensity of globalizing processes in modern times had reached a first peak by the end of the nineteenth century. As they persuasively demonstrate, this holds true not only for the economic, political, and cultural level, but also for the emerging religious and philanthropic organizations that could be seen as forerunners of today's INGOs. Some scholars have argued that this new type of internationalism carried by organizations and agents belonging to the realm of the civil society was important inasmuch as it was able to ‘challenge state power’, and emphasize its inherent aspirations ‘to a more peaceful and stable world order through transnational efforts’.

Building on Kathleen Wilson's important insight showing that the British Empire provides us with a particularly striking example of interdependent sites that ‘allow us to rethink the […] historiographies of national belonging and exclusion’, the present case study tries to question such an hypothesis by analyzing the ideology as well as the practical endeavors of one of the most successful global philanthropic movements in a transnational context: the Salvation Army.

Introduction: The History of British India as an Exercise in Futility

A deep ambivalence characterizes James Mill's The History of British India. Mill, the historian of India who never went to India, wrote ostensibly in the style of Scottish conjectural history, grafting this short-lived mode of historiography and onto a particularly rigid strand of utilitarian thinking. The result of this philosophical amalgam was a ponderous narrative now infamous for its disparaging comments about the ‘rude nations’ of the world, and a work of purportedly ‘standard’, ‘canonical’ or ‘hegemonic’ status, often being assigned the position as the single most important work in the historiography of South Asia. The ambivalence running through the History is a result of its ‘rude’ subject matter combined with the difficulty of aligning this rudeness with Mill's aim of providing the world with utilitarian knowledge, for it seems that Mill himself considered the work, along with its subject matter, regrettably inutile. The History was a book that need not have been written and a work of limited utility, for it could, in the eyes of its own author, only teach about the rude people of India. Mill offered the History as a ‘service’ to spare the utility of future generations, encompassing everything one could need to know about India ‘once and for all’. In carrying out this service, Mill established many of the ideological and textual underpinnings for the British civilizing mission, which was still inchoate when the History was first published in 1817.

When discussing the attitude that the Government of India should take to the Hindu Child Marriage Restraint Bill, proposed by Rai Sahib Harbilas Sarda in February 1927, Home Member Sir James Crerar commented that they should regulate child marriage through a Government measure, rather than a Private Member's Bill, because ‘Governments are invariably held responsible in the end for all legislation, whether they have promoted it themselves or merely acquiesced in it. If any odium is incurred it will inevitably fall on the Government and we may as well have the merit’. Crerar's remarks epitomize the ambivalent relationship between colonial state and social reform in early twentieth century India, encapsulating both the desire to legitimize imperialism through ‘improvement’, and the need to reconcile, and even subordinate, reformist projects to political expediencies. Such tensions between justificatory discourses and pragmatic considerations shaped the colonial state's engagement with social reform in the nationalist era; Sarda's Bill existed at an ideological intersection between emergent discourses of Indian nationalism, colonialism as ‘civilizing mission’ and the survival strategies of a colonial state under growing social and political pressure. Its history reflects the ambivalent role of the colonial state as it attempted to mediate impulses for and against reform, from Indian society, the international community and its own regional representatives. The result was a more complex colonial engagement with social change than is usually allowed in the dichotomy of reform or reaction that epitomizes traditional and revisionist accounts respectively.

On the Legitimacy of the Civilizing Mission

More than 100,000 Indian soldiers, most of them hailing from the Panjab, fought in Great Britain's army on the battlefields of Belgium and northern France during the Great War of 1914–18, also known as World War I. Along the vast system of trenches criss-crossing Flanders and the Champagne region they were witness to how nations that understood and defined themselves as the most civilized ones of the world waged the most barbaric war that had hitherto been fought on the European continent if not worldwide. However, by far the largest numbers of Indian soldiers, namely more than 600,000, were sent to Mesopotamia to attack and ultimately invade the Ottoman Empire's eastern provinces, which later came to form Iraq. Furthermore, since the ‘Western powers’ regarded the Ottoman Empire to be an ‘Oriental’ state, which was by definition (again according to Western understanding) a despotic regime and for that reason not a part of the world of civilized nations, military campaigns in the ‘East’ did not receive the same attention as did the west-European theatres of war, even though warfare in the former was as gruesome as in the latter.

Despite the disastrous warfare in Mesopotamia killing tens of thousands of Indian soldiers, it was the gruesome war in Europe which deeply influenced the Indian soldiers' perception of European powers, their ‘culture of warfare’ and, more generally, their civilizations.

Introduction

The turn of the twentieth century marked a critical watershed in the history of Indian public discourse about the ‘social question’. For the best part of the nineteenth century, the Indian intelligentsia had concentrated its energies on ‘social reform’, a term that denoted a desired transformation amongst highstatus castes and communities of cultural practices that were perceived as being both irrational and the root cause of India's decline as a civilization. The attention of social reformers had focused on ‘traditional’ indigenous customs such as prohibitions on female education, child marriage, polygyny, female infanticide, sati, purdah and the pitiable state of widows and devadasis, all of which were characterized as ‘perverted, twisted, distorted practices born of ignorance and fear and followed without recourse to common sense’. Social reformers were particularly concerned with the oppressed condition of women and viewed their emancipation ‘as the first step towards progress’. However, from the late 1890s onwards, members of the largely upper-caste Indian intelligentsia widened the debates on the ‘social question’ to include the condition of the lower orders of society. Thus, alongside the rhetoric and practice of ‘social reform’ there gradually emerged a new discourse of ‘social service’.

Those who took to ‘social service’ sought to ‘civilize’ the urban poor by eradicating ‘vices’ such as drunkenness, gambling and prostitution, and inculcating in them ‘enlightened’ values regarding sanitation and hygiene.