Steven Patterson. The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. x + 263 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-61287-7.
Reviewed by Peter Robb (SOAS)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)
British Rulers in India
Steven Patterson’s The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India comprises four main chapters: two discuss the subject generally; the third concerns the influence of the idea of classical Rome; and the last is mainly about servants, based (curiously enough) not on evidence of actual practice but largely on the would-be comic Behind the Bungalow of Edward Aitkins (1920). Patterson’s general propositions are that “ideas about honor shaped imperial thought”; that honor “provides the best and most complete framework for understanding”; and that several aspects of British colonial attitudes are “all, in one sense or another, derivatives of honor” (pp. 18, 25, 39). This is an exaggeration that implies a limitation. Duty, prestige, class, racism, muscular Christianity, the cult of the gentleman, and so on, all need to be considered separately because their influence differs and can be contradictory. Of course, many self-serving myths were invented in Britain’s Indian empire, as in the former Soviet or the current American hegemony. The book brings together many examples. It says much that seems more or less true. But it also contains many half-truths.
A decline in dueling gives an interesting perspective, for example, but the Victorian shift to bourgeois sobriety (chapter 2) was less sudden and less complete than suggested. Some dutiful Georgians existed, disdainful of the nautch and of all “Oriental decadence,” and in more prosaic times so too did certain passionate scholars of Indian languages and religions. Patterson is probably right, too, that “honor” played a part in the atrocities perpetrated by General Dyer in the Punjab in 1919, as well as in deeds by others in 1857 and 1858; but again there is more to it, not only because such actions were repudiated by some, but also because Indians thought such behavior “un-British,” in other words contrary to British claims about their own goals and character.
So too, in an epigraph to chapter 1, Patterson quotes William Lee-Warner on Indians as citizens with a shared right to peace, liberty, and honor (sic; he would presumably have written “honour”). Unidentified here, Lee-Warner (1846-1914) was a distinguished Indian Civil Service officer and then member of the Council of India; regardless of his own political position, his conventional formula suggests a complexity in British colonial attitudes, not their single-mindedness. Similarly, the book is most coherent and interesting in its treatment of the model of classical Rome (chapter 3), but even then there are similar gaps. Queen Victoria as empress and her relations with princes are not mentioned at this point, and nor are the supposed promises of Victoria’s famous proclamation.
Throughout the book, the British are referred to as “Anglo-Indian,” a term of changing meaning, but here it is a symptomatic conflation that would have amazed Scottish and Irish civil servants even more than their English fellows. Europeans resident in India for a long time, planters, old commercial interests, temporary civil servants, professionals, journalists, the military, missionaries, and so on should not be lumped together; nor should the traditions of different services and provinces; nor the many different political persuasions and enthusiasms. This is the same kind of mistake that characterizes as monolithically “British” a regime that, while serving selfish interests, often ruthlessly, was nonetheless influenced by local needs and ideas, employed a great preponderance of Indians, and eventually had to concede Indian representation and to Indianize at its highest levels.
Patterson has written a book without using archival sources, and the works of some key scholars who have studied the records are not to be found in the bibliography. “The Raj,” we are told, “was not noted for its profound thinkers” and could not afford to be “self-reflective” (p. 43). Let us not debate the profundity of, say, T. B. Macaulay or Henry Maine, or the large intellectual as well as socio-political impact that came from encounters with difference and possessing an empire. Ask only if one can read the extraordinary social, economic, political, and legal treatises crammed into the British colonial archive without finding much that is thoughtful, intelligent, and self-aware.
Some remarks thrown up in the book are puzzling. For example, the “liberal” Lord Lytton is hard to square with the career diplomat and conservative viceroy who resigned along with Benjamin Disraeli and opposed William Gladstone’s policies in the Lords, and the Winston Churchill who spent three years in India cannot be the one who arrived in late 1896 and was sent to Egypt in 1898 (pp. 116, 170). Is it true that postings in the mofussil (rural districts as opposed to the center) had so much prestige for Indian Civil Service officials (p. 109)? It would be interesting to check how many high-fliers actually had early service in the headquarters secretariats.
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Citation:
Peter Robb. Review of Patterson, Steven, The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29756
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