Instruction in Latin and Greek was the foundation of Padiea in all European countries. In some places it was rationed but where scholars were poor but numerous, the rudiments of the thing were available for a very moderate outlay. A more stringent course of study was part and parcel of Theological training and competition between sects or monastic orders meant that, in places, the net was cast quite wide and thus many poorer boys benefitted. Some of the more pious of them became missionaries, and after a more strenuous course of studies- such that they might not fail in controversy or themselves falter in faith- they were sent out to the four corners of the globe and translated the Bible into vernacular language. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, an English Jesuit prepared a Konkani version of the Bible.
It is certainly true that many School or even College leavers retained few scraps of of such knowledge in later life. However, there was a ready market for new translations from such languages and those of a literary bent retained a great love for the texts, translating which in the school-room, they had first acquired the rudiments of literary style and polish.
What is false is the notion that classical paideia was causally connected in any way to Western European colonization of the Americas or the Indies.
In an essay titled 'Classic India' Phiroze Vasunia takes a different view-
The British colonisers who travelled to India from the 18th century onwards were steeped in the Classics;
those who had attended Public Schools or Dissenting Academies had some such scraps. But Tommy Atkins did not. Neither did Jolly Jack Tar or the chaps who set up indigo factories or breweries or banks. A medical man needed to know some Greek. A lawyer needed to know some Latin. A missionary needed more than a smattering of both. But Latin had ceased to be the language of the learned by the end of the Seventeenth Century. The Roman Church retained it, but Protestants wished to enrich their mother tongues. French, however, was prestigious at a time when France was the most prosperous and populous Kingdom in Europe.
they knew their Greek and Latin (if not the languages of India) and quoted liberally from Horace and Virgil.
and Shakespeare and Milton. Some also quoted Sa'adi & Kalidasa. So what? Book-keeping mattered because money mattered. Writing or reading books did not though some may have hoped to gain reputationally by such exertions.
Not all Britons, of course – but it wasn’t just a small contingent who took ancient Greece and Rome with them to the subcontinent.
It was a small contingent. The vast majority of Britishers in India were soldiers, sailors and tradesmen with little education.
In part, Classics was affectation; speaking Latin was a sign that you were polished, well-read and sophisticated.
At some time in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, Latin was replaced by English as the language of instruction in Universities. You spoke French or Lingua Franca abroad. Previously, lectures had been given in Latin and it was that tongue which was used when travelling on the Continent. The disadvantage was that women could not speak it whereas boors from remote villages might have learned it from the parish priest. French, on the other hand, was the language of polite society. The Russian and the Rumanian and even the Turk or Egyptian readily took it up. Pedants and parsons might speak Latin. The polished gentleman or lady of fashion aspired to Parisian French.
Showing off was part of the point, and acting like a gentleman was important to English self-regard in the days of the Raj.
Nonsense! Making money or gaining promotion was important. There was little point showing off your erudition to your syce or khidmatgar more particularly if the chaps at the Club gave you the cold shoulder if you indulged in such displays. Everyone knows those ancient Romans and Greeks were all raving sodomites.
But connections with Greece and Rome went deeper: the British saw their actions in India through the lens of their classical educations and understood their decisions in the light of Graeco-Roman antiquity.
No. You may say that of Camoen's Lusiadas. Thankfully, English literature has nothing quite so wearisome. The English understood their decisions with respect to India in the light of what the Portuguese and the Dutch and the French had done or were doing.
Some imagined themselves as marching in the footsteps of Alexander the Great,
None did so because they arrived by sea. If they travelled into Punjab or Afghanistan, they did so from the direction opposite to the one by which the great Macedonian had arrived.
while others preferred Julius Caesar or Augustus as their model.
The British Empire was maritime and mercantile. The Tzar or the Kaiser might think of himself as the Caesar of the modern age. Wellesley, a fine classicist who had attended both Eton and Harrow, did not think of himself as a Caesar. His job was to curb the French and their allies even if this meant greatly expanding the territory ruled by John Company. The question was, how to make the thing pay for itself?
For some, the epic poems of Homer bore startling similarities with Sanskrit epic
the differences were more important. Sanskrit epics are theistic. Greek epics are thymotic.
and were a basis for cultural comparison, and for others, Virgil’s Aeneid offered guidance on how to be imperial and civilised at the same time.
Nonsense! The Brits understood that what mattered was paying your soldiers and ensuring that any native General who surrendered his fortress to you without a fight got a good pension paid punctually in saecula saeculorum.
The fact is, the East India Company was a commercial enterprise. Only money mattered.
When Indians and Britons encountered each other from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, the ancient Greeks and Romans were also present.
No. Money was present. If it vanished, so would every stripe of foreigner- the Armenian as much as the Englishman.
For the early administrators of the East India Company, as for other European adventurers and travellers in India, Alexander the Great and his journey through the region was a source of fascination.
His entire career was fascinating. But he didn't do much in India proper though he spent a lot of time killing Greeks who had established cities in Afghanistan under the protection of the Persian Emperor. Then, he himself married into the Persian aristocracy.
Alexander provided a point of contact between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Indian civilisation.
There already were Greeks in the Indian portions of the Persian Emperor's domains.
Sir William Jones, the Welsh philologist and orientalist, is famous for having devised the theory of Indo-European languages while he was a judge in Calcutta in the late 18th century. In 1793, he also identified the figure of ‘Sandrocottus’, a ruler mentioned in ancient Greek texts, as Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauyra Empire and a slightly younger contemporary of Alexander.
If he hadn't done so, some French or German savant would.
This offered historians a means for synchronising ‘European’ and ‘Indian’ chronologies. The synchronisation was an exciting moment in the development of European understandings of Indian history as it enabled European intellectuals to find an acceptable (to them) point of reference in Indian narratives of the past and to give Gregorian dates to events in Indian history.
This did not matter in the slightest.
Chandragupta, henceforth, could be said by European historians to have begun his reign in 320 BC. But Alexander’s appeal was not only historiographical. He was a world-historical figure, the greatest conqueror of antiquity, and his movements in the Indus Valley were interesting for that reason alone. As Iskandar, he was the subject of Arabic and Persian tales that had made their way to India long before the arrival of Europeans;
Greeks are Europeans. They had arrived in India centuries before Christ. There were Indo-Greek Kingdoms in North India.
as Sikandar, he was the subject of Indian
Persian and Arabic
romance and poetic traditions that went back centuries. British operatives embraced these traditions, but also spent a whopping amount of time and energy thinking about his route and trying to make sense of the surviving accounts of his travels.
No. British operatives spent a whopping amount of time sitting on the toilet because they had the trots. They also made money. The fact is, if you get dysentery just when you are trying to get your books to balance, your enthusiasm for Alexander tends to wane.
These ancient accounts, written by figures such as Arrian and Plutarch, are hard to interpret and sometimes contradict each other – the challenge of deciphering them generated a vast number of responses. Every modern traveller and agent of the East India Company in northwest India seemed to have – or develop – his own theory about Alexander’s route and motives.
Only if they wrote about it. Plenty didn't. Dysentery can do that to a man.
What was the precise route that he took through the mountains of Afghanistan? Did he come across a cult of Dionysus on his march toward India, and if so, where was that cult? Where was the camp on the Hydaspes (the Jhelum river), and where precisely did he cross the river? The soldier and archaeologist Charles Masson, who in the 1830s collected thousands of IndoGreek coins
Everybody is interested in coins. Also, hidden treasure.
that he discovered in the North West Frontier. Masson said that Mittun, or 2 Mithankot, was the site of an Alexandria established by the conqueror in antiquity and was therefore a suitable trading post for the Company; he also thought that the ancient site of Harappa was the Sangala mentioned by the ancient historian Arrian. Alexander Burnes, or ‘Bukhara Burnes’ as he was known, wrote Travels into Bokhara, which was prefaced with an epigram from Horace and sold 900 copies on the first day of publication in 1834.
West Europe had prospered greatly from its dominance of trans-oceanic trade. There was a big demand for travel books. No doubt, Vasunia thinks Dr. Livingstone in darkest Africa was looking for Alexander's catamite who had run off in that direction.
He claimed to be the first modern European to navigate the Indus. In his coin-collecting, Masson was accompanied by Mohan Lal, a Kashmiri Brahmin,
Lal worked for Masson. He had learned English at the newly set up College in Delhi.
who wrote his own accounts of his travels in the northwest and retained an interest in Alexander and the Greeks.
and anything else which might make him some money.
Fascination with Alexander also had a strategic and military dimension; the British were concerned that Napoleon or the Russian tsar might be tempted to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and invade India.
After 1868, they had a border with Afghanistan. They didn't need to follow Alexander's circuitous route.
If you were a land-based invader, the reasoning went, would you not be tempted to follow the very route into India that had been taken by the most successful conqueror in the ancient world?
No. You would take the shortest route. The Tzar would follow the footsteps of the Uzbeks.
The title of David Hopkins’ book, published in 1808, sums up the author’s concerns
which were also the concerns of Whitehall
at length: The dangers of British India, from French invasion and missionary establishments: to which are added some account of the countries between the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; a narrative of the revolutions which they have experienced, subsequent to the expedition of Alexander the Great; and a few hints respecting the defence of the British frontiers in Hindostan.
The only 'hint' we need is that if the thing is unaffordable, don't do it. Stay the fuck away from Afghanistan.
General Sir Charles Napier, who captured Sindh with brutal force in 1843, knew Alexander’s history all too well.
No. We know it better than he did. Historical research has greatly advanced.
His dispatch to Lord Ellenborough makes for a good story, but he probably never sent the message that simply read peccavi (‘I have sinned’, implying ‘I have Sind’, or ‘I have conquered Sind’).
Outram may not have sent the message 'Vovi' (I have Oudh) either.
If a good story is what you’re after, however, look no further than Kipling’s ‘Man Who Would Be King’(1888), a masterpiece which draws much of its emotional force and colour from Alexander’s regional fame.
Nope. It is about freemasonry. The indigenous people have a religion based on a lower grade of Masonry, while the British soldiers have received instruction in the higher grade. They are taken for Gods. As Masons, they knew it was wrong to create a lodge because they themselves had never held office in one.
The inhabitants of Kafiristan in that tale believe the rascally Dravot to be a descendant of Alexander and worship him accordingly
He tells them he is the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis and a god to boot. Kipling does not say the local people have heard of Alexander.
Interestingly, the Muslims Afghans would conquer Kafiristan and turn it into Nuristan as a bastion of orthodox Islam a few years later.
—until things go awry, of course.
His mistake is to marry a local woman who reveals he is not divine at all. But, sooner or later the people would have discovered that he farts and shits. Gods do no such things.
Earlier, in 1808, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) had been sent to Kabul precisely on account of anxieties over Napoleon’s intentions, which seemed real enough. His Account of the kingdom of Caubul, which appeared in 1815, was in turn weighed and analysed by scholars of Alexander and by Company officials and administrators. Elphinstone was a voracious reader, in many literary traditions including Indian and Persian, and was also widely read in the Greek and Roman authors.
He turned down the chance to be Governor General of India to complete his history of that country. Sadly a relative of his , who commanded the British Indian Army, died as a captive in Kabul during the First, utterly disastrous, Afghan War.
The diaries and journals he composed in India and Afghanistan include references that range from Homer, Sophocles and Euripides to prose authors such as Thucydides and Xenophon and the orator Demosthenes.
He had attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh. It had very high scholastic standards.
His observations and casual asides show how far things have changed in the last 200 years.
Or not changed at all. Invading Afghanistan is a bad idea. Just say no.
It is difficult, despite the various wars in the Middle East, to imagine any officer from the past 50 years writing in their diary such a sentence as: ‘I breakfasted with Kennedy, and talked about Hafiz, Saadi, Horace, and Anacreon.
But not Byron of whom he was a fan.
At nine I left him, and went to the trenches.’
Elphinstone hadn't been to University. Thus he was capable of both useful work and an intelligent appreciation of literature.
British officials in India weren’t shy about telling their correspondents how industrious and diligent they were right from the crack of dawn, but the frontrunner in this field was surely Thomas Macaulay, the historian and colonial administrator, who on some mornings in India read Greek and Latin for three or four hours before breakfast.
He composed the 'lays of ancient Rome' while in India. It was a best-seller. People went to India to make money though, sadly, they might die of dysentery first.
Reading his diaries and letters can be an intimidating experience. The latter, especially, also reveal a pompous person, a man who took himself and his influence very seriously. His influence was immense and long-lasting. The so-called ‘Minute’ of 1835 helped put English at the centre of educational policy in India;
This was the demand of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore. Oddly, it was later taken up by the founder of Aligarh Muslim University. The feeling was that writing in a Persianized or Sanskritized style rotted the brain. The Edwardians began to feel this was also true of the Augustan style.
it championed the use of English over Indian languages in schools and colleges.
Once English became the language of the law court, there was bound to be an increasing demand for English instruction.
This document refers to the Greek and Latin classics but does so to underline the importance of teaching of English: ‘What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.’
Only if that tongue restricted itself to STEM subjects or topics of commercial interest.
It’s not too farfetched to say that the ‘Minute’ bears some responsibility for the widespread use of English in South Asia today.
It would be foolish. There's a reason the use of English has become widespread all over the world. That reason is the US of A.
Interestingly, Macaulay’s letters indicate that the idea for his most famous literary work, the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) came to him when he was in the Nilgiris, a mountainous region in the south of the subcontinent, and that he composed most of the Lays while in ‘exile’ in India.
He was seeking to reassure his readers that he hadn't been fucking the dhobin while in India.
Ostensibly about Rome and national character, the poems are really a British man’s reflection on service, valour and devotion to the country; an expression of English identity by a colonial administrator in India.
He had been given a sinecure in India so as to be able to repair his finances and re-enter Parliament. Macaulay takes up the ballad where Sir Walter Scott had left it. Learned philologists may have carped or quibbled. The reading public- especially school boys- ate it up.
It stands in the Comitium Plain for all folk to see; Horatius in his harness, Halting upon one knee: And underneath is written, In letters all of gold, How valiantly he kept the bridge In the brave days of old. And still his name sounds stirring Unto the men of Rome, As the trumpet-blast that cries to them To charge the Volscian home; And wives still pray to Juno For boys with hearts as bold As his who kept the bridge so well In the brave days of old.
Horatius was defending his city. He wasn't seeking to conquer the territory of the Volsci.
The Lays are the creation of a man who is
making money
marking time while serving in India, dreaming of his native land by writing about ancient Rome.
Is he a good poet? Good enough for school boys who like waving imaginary swords around.
While Alexander loomed large in British accounts of Indian history,
No. What loomed large was rival European powers as well as the threat posed by Marathas, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pindaris etc. Larger than all was Mammon. Could the Raj be run profitably? If so, how were the spoils to be divided? This political question gained increasing salience over the course of the nineteenth century.
there was a problem: his empire was short-lived. It splintered into several parts on his early death in 323 BC, and his generals more or less divided up the conquered lands among themselves. He did not provide a model for a long-lasting empire; for that, one needed to turn to Rome.
The Republic fucked up. What one had to turn to was Christianity- more particularly one expressed in the vernacular which would have no truck with Romish intrigue and superstition. Evangelical Christianity walked hand-in-hand with Benthamite Utilitarianism.
Athens and Sparta were frequently eulogised and studied by the Victorians, but their empires were small.
Philip V of Spain had an Empire over which the Sun never set. But England did not want to become like Spain or Portugal. The profit motive was preferable to Imperial pride because the latter might bankrupt the nation and render its people vulnerable to invasion or bondage to a foreign purse.
The Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian empires offered a kind of precedent,
No. One may mention the Chinese Empire. Instituting competitive examinations for posts in the Civil Service meant that you had a new class of 'mandarins'.
but they were not regarded as European or ancestral in the way that the Greeks and Romans were: their legacies to modern Europe were harder to grasp and define than the Greek and Roman.
Vasunia does not understand that the 'Kaiser-e-Hind' ruled in a manner similar to an Indian Badshah or Chakravartin. What was different about British rule was that Princes didn't murder their fathers or brothers. One Governor did not seize territory from another. The British were a nation of shop-keepers whose morals were similar to the better sort of banyan.
India was composed of Princedoms and large estates of a feudal type. Just as in Mughal times, there were elaborate court protocols and orders of precedence. This had nothing to do with ancient Rome or Greece. By and by, the Brits in India rediscovered its Buddhist heritage and made a paragon out of Emperor Ashoka.
Julius Caesar thus achieved a kind of heroic status in 19th-century Britain,
no. He achieved that when he conquered Gaul and invaded England.
and in the eyes of writers such as J.A. Froude
a spoiled Anglo-Catholic. I suppose a growing sense of unease at class conflict in Victorian England- more particularly as the main political parties sought to appeal to the newly enfranchised upper working class- caused some intellectuals to pine for a Caesar like Dictator.
was comparable to that other JC, Jesus Christ. ‘Strange and startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of the kingdom of this world and of the Founder of the kingdom not of this world, for which the first was a preparation,’ wrote Froude, in his book on Caesar. ‘Each was denounced for making himself a king. Each was maligned as the friend of publicans and sinners; each was betrayed by those whom he had loved and cared for; each was put to death; and Caesar also was believed to have risen again and ascended into heaven and become a divine being.’
Back then, lots of Kings were considered Divine. Alexander decided that his real daddy was an Egyptian god. The point about Christ was that he didn't kill or enslave people. He introduced a higher type of morality- that of 'Mussar' Judaism- but did so in a manner welcoming to the Gentile.
Even more relevant to the Victorians than Julius Caesar was Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and the founder of an imperial dynasty.
The Victorians were turning against the English of the Augustan age. Romanticism of a licentious type was curbed by a refining Evangelical spirit. But it was Utilitarianism that paid the bills.
It was he who laid the foundations for a long-lasting, multiethnic, multiracial empire – and he who faced the challenge of maintaining and consolidating the imperial expansion won by armies before him.
He appointed Tiberius his successor for the same reason Tiberius appointed Caligula his successor. Each appeared a model of virtue if only by comparison.
Perhaps the late Victorians identified with Augustus because they felt that the problems he faced were similar: developing an imperial bureaucracy, maintaining peace on the borders, and keeping colonial subjects happy.
England, quite suddenly, had a Queen Empress. It was a period of peace and of rising prosperity. Yet, as Gibbon had warned, the force that might upset this applecart were not be located in the sands of Arabia or the jungles of Brazil. It was in the warrens of the East End that a new idea, a new cause, might already have found expression. One might say that Christianity put an end to an aesthetic paganism but, in return, if had offered theological and ethical riches. Whatever force it might be that overturned the Victorian golden age, one thing was certain. It would be mean-spirited and intellectually meretricious.
In the magisterial 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, H.F. Pelham described Augustus as ‘one of the world’s great men, a statesman who conceived and carried through a scheme of political reconstruction which kept the empire together, and secured peace and tranquillity and preserved civilization for more than two centuries.’
Augustus was portrayed as a disciplined and hard working administrator. It took the Oedipal genius of Robert Graves to turn him into a mere tool of his sociopathic wife.
Along with Augustus another classical star shines ever brighter in the last decades of the 19th century: Virgil, poet of the Aeneid.
Virgil did influence Mahatma Gandhi who studied a bit of Latin while in London. Essentially, Gandhi believed that a golden age- where there would be no armies or navies or commerce or dirty pictures- was attainable.
Virgil’s reputation ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but his place as a ‘classic’ was never really in doubt.
Everybody at Public School learnt Latin tolerably well. The smarter kids excelled equally in Greek.
Readers such as William Gladstone had championed Homer’s epic and dismissed Virgil as a court poet or a minstrel for hire: ‘this crying vice of the Aeneid’, wrote Gladstone, in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age of 1858, ‘the feebleness and untruth of the character of Aeneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus’.
Gladstone was a Protestant. The problem with the Aeneid is that boys might think that it is the Church of Rome which fulfils its pseudo-prophetic portion because of the 'donation of Constantine' or some such shite.
But Gladstone was unable to drown out admirers of the Latin poet. The cult of Virgil and Rome (Christian and non-Christian Rome alike) reached new heights by the end of the 19th century in Britain.
After the expansion of the franchise in 1867, the cry was taken up 'we must educate our masters!' Maybe teaching them a bit of Virgil will get their minds of their demand for higher wages and better working conditions.
In an essay that the Encyclopaedia Britannica described as ‘the most famous English essay on Virgil’, Frederic Myers said that Virgil was ‘the earliest and the official exponent of the world-wide Empire of Rome,
It wasn't world-wide at all. The Han Empire was about the same size.
the last and the closest precursor of the world-wide commonwealth of Christ’. Aeneas was compared by the Victorians to Abraham and Christ, however overblown those comparisons seem now.
Keep in mind, London was supposedly founded by a Trojan named Brutus. There was also the notion that Christ, as a boy, had been brought to England by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea.
Virgil’s hero made his own painful sacrifices for the gods above: he gave up his love of Dido, the queen of Carthage, in order to press on with his mission and found a settlement in Italy. Nation over self:
He was obeying a deity. His people were but one strand in what would become a nation.
the British Empire was built on such stories of personal sacrifice
No. It was built on Naval Supremacy which in turn depended on burgeoning trans-oceanic trade. On the other hand, sooner or later, an Iyer Empire will be built on stories of the personal sacrifice I made by giving up a job in Accountancy to concentrate on watching TV, eating Pizza, and farting melodiously. This is because stories are very important. Armies and Treasuries don't matter at all.
– think, for example, of General Gordon’s ‘last stand’ –
He disobeyed orders and Gladstone let him perish.
and the story of Aeneas’ valour was an exemplary demonstration of duty, piety, and heroism.
Stories of valour tend not to focus on negligence, impiety and cowardice. This is because British Empire was based on the Aeneid. Greenland will easily annex US if its people read Virgil incessantly.
The appreciation of Virgil’s sweeping tale was accompanied by a renewed appreciation of his language and versatility as an epic poet. His genius for the right turn of phrase meant that he was a reliable source of quotations, not least on matters of state. (Horace was the other Latin poet who was regularly ransacked by the mid-Victorians for memorable phrases. Verses from a single poem of Horace—poem 12 from Book 1 of his Odes—were recited by Burke in 1775, then by Fox some 23 years later, then by Marryatt in 1822, Grey in 1829, and by Gladstone, Lyndhurst, Huskisson, and so on.)
That fashion died out during the Great War. I suppose F.E Smith was the last legislator to receive plaudits for his reference to Ucalegon in his maiden speech. In after years, Churchill would be heard to growl 'English!' if any member started quoting Latin or Greek.
Jupiter’s words to Venus, recounted in Book 1 of the Aeneid, were a staple in Victorian classrooms: ‘For them I set no limits in space and time: I give them empire without end.’
That is what the Pope claimed. Spain may have lost Mexico and Portugal may have lost Brazil, but the Church abides all things- save Pentecostals. Fuck you Pentecostals! Fuck you very much!
No less resonant for the English reader were Anchises’ revelations to Aeneas in Book 6, here in Dryden’s magnificent translation: Rome, ’tis thine alone, with awful sway, To rule Mankind, and make the World obey; Disposing Peace, and War, thy own Majestick Way. To tame the Proud, the fetter’d Slave to free; These are Imperial Arts, and worthy thee.
This isn't magnificent. It is doggerel. Still, shite like that sold back then.
These prophetic words reverberated throughout the British Empire.
No. Settler Colonies were encouraged to become self-garrisoning and self-administering. Sadly, this experiment was given up in the West Indies but in India it had increasing purchase from the 1880's onward.
Robert N. Cust, who was a member of the Indian Civil Service, tells us in his Memoirs of past years of a septuagenarian that he recalled those very lines when he found himself ruling over millions in India before he had turned 30.
The good thing about doggerel is that it is easy to remember. What permitted Cust to rule Punjabis was that he delivered 'justice on horse-back' in a manner the Punjabis liked and respected. Also, he didn't try to fuck their daughters or sons.
Cust was far from alone in his recall of the poet, and numerous memoirs and journals of imperial service quote from Virgil or allude to his poetry. Field-Marshal Earl Wavell
like Allenby in Egypt, Wavell favoured handing over power to the natives.
followed his tenure as Viceroy of India by becoming president of the recently-founded Virgil Society upon his retirement in 1947 (the society’s first president was T.S. Eliot).
A popular choice. He knew a lot about 'Arms and the Man'.
The passages in Virgil that prophesied Rome’s greatness acted as a balm to British readers and assuaged their fears of decline and fall.
Macaulay had suggested that the English language would survive in India when the Raj was a distant memory. Sadly, this balm turned to bile when darkies like me started turning up in green and pleasant England. Boris Johnson wasn't exactly pleased when Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister. Previously only one Wykehamist had been Prime Minister. That was 220 years ago. Eton has produced 20 out of the last 55 Prime Ministers.
In describing the long decline of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon had evoked the prospect of imperial decline for modern readers in a style that was riveting, exquisite and grandiose, all at once. His grasp of detail was breathtaking, as was the lesson that he delivered to his many attentive readers. If even the Roman Empire came to an end, how could the British Empire hope to escape the same gloomy fate?
England lost an Empire in America which was destined to rise and rise during Gibbon's life time.
Macaulay turned the problem on its head and said in Parliament, in July 1833, that the day when the British handed back sovereignty to Indians would be Britain’s finest time.
Warren Hastings had said something similar before his death in 1818.
The task of imperial rule would be over, and Britons would return their nation to a grateful people whom they had themselves trained in the arts of government.
Fuck that. What the Brits hoped was that Indians would adopt Christianity. They genuinely believed that heathens burn in Hell fire.
‘It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions.
The Bengali Hindu wouldn't till, in a moment of madness, he forgot the Muslim threat.
Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.’ It wasn’t only Indians who found that sentiment disingenuous and condescending; and at any rate, the fear of decline haunted British writers throughout the second half of the 19th century.
Observers of the American Civil War realized that that nation would soon have no peer both in mercantile and military matters.
By the 20th century, commentators in Britain and India came to see the fall of the Empire as inevitable. Macaulay was implicated in another imperial innovation, the Indian Civil Service,
it existed by nomination previously. What changed was the system of open competitive exams of a Chinese type.
the ‘steel frame’ which was effectively responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Raj. Entrance to the ICS, which was founded in 1858, was based on competitive examinations, and the examinations were designed from the outset to appeal to – or favour – Oxford and Cambridge graduates.
No. The minimum age was 18. The hope was, this would keep out darkies and country-bottled Englishmen.
Greek and Roman subjects were given a significant weighting in the mark scheme. Benjamin Jowett, the scholar of Greek and Oxford luminary, joined Macaulay in 1854 on the committee that advocated reform of the previous style of examinations—they called for a wholesale revision of the old system of choosing civil servants. They were evidently successful in achieving their goals, as in the first year of the exam, 70 per cent of the successful candidates were from Oxbridge.
It must be said, recruiting 'College men' enhanced the reputation of a cadre. The Indian Education Service would do the same thing.
Jowett was in thrall to the idea that his students would run the empire in the mould of Plato’s guardians, and he encouraged his students to join the ICS. Between 1888 and 1905, three successive viceroys of India (Lansdowne, Elgin, Curzon) came from Balliol College alone and all were students of Jowett.
Balliol was fashionable and had long been closely associated with Eton.
Classics was for generations the subject of choice for the British élite,
but it was kids who were sent off to the Navy at the age of 10 who ensured Britain had an indigenous elite.
and to an extent the story of Classics and British India is also the story of how the British upper classes raised their young.
In which European country was the upper class not instructed in Latin and Greek and French? German too was added to the list by the 1880s.
Eton and Oxford play important roles in this account, as we would expect.
As did Edinburgh and Dublin.
Eton can count 20 odd Prime Ministers among its old boys, while Oxford can claim to have educated about 30 holders of the high office (some of whom went to Eton) and Classics occupied a dominant place in these institutions from the 19th century into the 1960s.
You could do well without knowing any Latin or Greek though, no doubt, you might have to 'cram' it for a couple of years. But STEM subjects became more and more important from the 1860's onward.
This conjunction of prestigious schools and Oxford Classics was responsible for shaping the British Empire, and especially the empire in India, in profound ways.
It had no effect whatsoever. What mattered was naval supremacy and whether the Raj could pay its way.
On the other hand, the fact that India's administrators had dicks is highly significant.
The historian Richard Symonds pointed out in his Oxford And Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (1986) that in 1938, six of the eight provincial Governors in India had read Greats in Oxford and the other two had also been students at Oxford.
They were generally ICS men. They read 'Greats' because they were too stupid to do Math. Still, no doubt, they were good enough as bureaucratic drudges in the most boring of countries.
And this was just before the Second World War, by which time British political elites were turning away from Classics to other subjects.
If you were smart you could do Math and Physics and so forth. If you weren't, you did 'Greats' which, admittedly, was slightly less shite than P.P.E.
Of the men and women who have been prime minister since the Second World War, only two read Classics at university, Harold Macmillan and Boris Johnson, both of whom went to Eton and Balliol.
Macmillan did not complete his degree. He volunteered soon after War was declared.
Perhaps that explains the traces of imperial fantasy and nostalgia one discerns in the words and actions of those two politicians.
Nonsense! Macmillan wanted shot of the Empire. His 'winds of change' speech deeply disappointed those racists who wanted to hang on to African colonies.
Macmillan, it should be said, volunteered for the war effort in 1914 and did not graduate. An anecdote involving Macmillan shows how classical antiquity continued to cast a shadow over the Raj well after Indian independence. In 1958, prime minister Macmillan attended a banquet in his honour in New Delhi. He and his wife, Lady Macmillan, were being entertained at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of India and formerly the Viceroy’s palace. Dorothy Macmillan found herself sitting opposite a portrait of her grandfather, Lord Lansdowne, who was a student of Jowett and himself the Viceroy of India for almost six years in the 19th century. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, turned to Macmillan and says: ‘I wonder if the Romans ever went back to visit Britain?’
Nehru studied Botany. He had no great taste for Latin and Greek. Also, being a politician, he was as thick as shit. India was still part of the Commonwealth. Indeed, the Admiral of its Navy was a Britisher. Moreover, his pal Mountbatten visited him virtually every year to get him to do what Whitehall wanted.
And the shadow extended further than that. In 1908, Mahatma Gandhi was in a prison cell in South Africa, translating Plato’s Apology into Gujarati, probably from an English translation rather than the original Greek.
He didn't know Greek.
Gandhi’s version appeared in Indian Opinion, the newspaper that he edited for the Indian diaspora community in South Africa. His translation was then circulated in India and, in 1910, banned for sedition by the British authorities along with Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Home Rule’), which resembled a Platonic dialogue, and some of his other writings. By 1915, Gandhi was back in India and,
tried to recruit soldiers for the Brits. The awarded him the Kaiser-e-Hind medal. This shows that Caesar was influencing Gandhi just as much as Plato and Aristophanes.
by 1919, the Indian National Congress was encouraging its members to read and circulate the outlawed material, with the effect that these texts, so obviously inspired by Plato, became part of the anti-colonial movement.
Which Gandhi had only belatedly joined. Previously he was a loyalist.
It wasn’t Plato whom the colonial administrators feared:
it was the Revolutionaries who might chuck a bomb at them.
many of them had read the Apology and the Republic in their student days and would have known the Greek.
Few knew Greek well enough to read the Republic in the original.
What troubled the regime was that these texts were written and presented by an Indian and that he was writing in opposition to colonial laws and attitudes.
No. What troubled the regime was the Non-Cooperation Program. If Indians had quit the military and the judiciary and the civil service, the administration would have been paralysed. As the Chief of the Imperial General staff was to say in a speech titled 'End of Empire', Britain didn't have the troops to hold India. It didn't have the Indian troops necessary to hold Egypt. It didn't have the troops to hold Ireland. Most fatally, it didn't have the troops to put down a Bolshevik revolution in England itself.
Thankfully, Gandhi surrendered unilaterally and went off meekly to jail and thus India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in 1922.
Gandhi saw the revolutionary power in Plato’s texts
No he didn't. Also, there was no such 'revolutionary power'. The man did know his Mazzini from his Garibaldi. He knew about Lenin and Ataturk. More importantly he knew, and loathed, the Indian Revolutionaries. He had some vague notion that Socrates was similar to Jesus Christ and that he himself, being a bania, resembled that cunning Jew.
– and turned them against the British Empire.
No. What happened was that the Loyalists dropped their loyalty to the British because after 1917 it was obvious that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. The only question that remained was whether there could be a secular, federal, India or whether the Muslims would go their own way. Incidentally, Muslims know Plato as 'Aflatoon'. In Urdu the term means a very pompous and crazy person. 'Falsafiya'- philosophy- is anathema to the Sufi. But so is erudition in dead languages. The story is told of the poet Bedil that when two rival Arabic tutors showed up to teach the young prodigy, they derided each other's scholarship in such intemperate terms that Bedil's Uncle dismissed both of them. Arabic is a sacred language. It is the language of Holy Scripture. But if learning it turns you into curmudgeonly pedant rather than a spiritually enlightened person, then it is better to avoid it.
I suppose, we may say the same thing about English of any refined type. Utilitarian 'Globish' better serves the purpose of Humanity.
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