What a false quote about Bengal reveals about our past

For more than a century now, Bengalis have proudly quoted Gopal Krishna Gokhale as saying that “what Bengal thinks today, India will think tomorrow”. This line can be found in countless essays and speeches, and none that have cited it, whether from Harvard or from Howrah, have cared to check with the source. Apparently, it was enough for them that another Bengali had said that Gokhale had said it. What Gokhale actually said at the Indian National Congress meeting at Benares in 1905 was that “what educated Indians think today, the rest of India thinks tomorrow”.

The ease with which Bengalis believe, and have convinced others to believe, that they have played a unique role in the making of modern India, is symptomatic of a deeper problem. It is widely held, especially by Bengalis, that modernity originally arrived in India under the auspices of the so-called Bengal Renaissance. This is the period in the early 19th century when Bengali initiative and British aid led to the creation of English-medium schools and colleges that allowed the bhadralok to acquire and then transmit to their compatriots the ideas and methods prevalent in industrialising Europe.

There is one problem with this story — it is false. The first school to offer natives “European learning” was founded in Tanjore in 1784. The idea for a school originated with John Sullivan, the East India Company’s Resident (or representative) in Tanjore, who then got his aging translator, Christian Fredrich Schwarz, a prominent Prussian missionary, to manage it. But the land and initial funding for the school came from Tuljaji Bhonsle, the Raja of Tanjore, who gifted the school an annual revenue of 500 pagodas (or about £200). Sullivan wanted literate clerks and Schwarz wanted converts. But what did Tuljaji, a learned patron of classical learning, want from the school? He, and his successor, Serfoji, wanted their subjects to acquire the knowledge — locked away in English-language books — that was helping the British “terminate every event” in their favour. This ambition acquired particular significance after the Second-Anglo Maratha War (1803-05) left the Company in control of the Deccan. By 1806, a decade before Calcutta began to stir, Serfoji had already set up in Tanjore a public school system, capped by a college within his palace, in order to create a new Maratha elite fluent in English and aware of the scientific methods current in Europe.

Serfoji did not entirely get his way. Alarmed by his ambition, the Company scuttled his plans to revive the Maratha cause. But the Company could not prevent the English-speaking graduates of Tanjore’s schools from being eagerly recruited by other kingdoms. Over the next half century, the most important and effective dewans in Southern and Western India, from Travancore and Mysore through to Baroda and Indore, originated from Tanjore. These ministers not only argued with the English in English — they also helped their Maharajas take advantage of emergent technologies. Thus, before Thomas Macaulay had even arrived in India, Swati Tirunal, the Maharaja of Travancore, and his tutor and dewan, English Subba Rao, a graduate of Schwarz’s school in Tanjore, had already begun establishing schools to teach English, hospitals to dispense “European” medicine, and an observatory that aimed to be “second to none in the world”. Travancore also surged ahead in experimenting with “Western” music, in commissioning translations and printing literary works, and even in employing Shakespeare. For instance, the first drama in the English language was composed not in Bengal, as is commonly claimed, but in Trivandrum in 1825. Written by English Subba Rao, the great polymath of that era, the play, entitled Krishna Kumari, shed light on the vices that had led the Rajputs to lose their hallowed independence. So while the denizens of British India were learning English to obtain employment as clerks, the dewan of Travancore was using the very same language to help the Native States understand why they were succumbing to the British. Little wonder, then, that the Company repeatedly tried to banish English Subba Rao, its officers fretting that his education meant that he “is not unacquainted with our policy”.

The fact that “modern learning” began not in Bengal but in Tanjore, and not in British India but in a Native State, invites us to reassess our relationship with the English language and the ideas it carried to our shores. Because we have hitherto focused on how Bengalis in British India greeted education in the English language, with their characteristic excess of either enthusiasm or disdain, we have been encouraged to see the arrival of English as a welcome or unwelcome imposition. The eager or embittered babu may have been the most visible consequence of English learning in Calcutta, but the same books produced a very different outcome in the Native States. There, modern education helped Maharajas and their ministers preserve their sovereignty and devise reforms to adopt new technologies and advance commerce. For the Native States, the English language was not a gift or a yoke but a weapon.

Of course, as the decades passed, British India was able to outstrip the Native States — the latter were prevented from seeing their most ambitious educational ventures through. But it is worth noting that even as English education spread in British India, Bengal did not play an outsize role. Bombay and Madras more than kept pace from the 1830s onwards, and so did the remainder of India from the 1850s onwards — as we can see from the hundreds of periodicals and newspapers that circulated in these regions during this time. This is why, by the time Gokhale spoke in Benares in 1905, all educated Indians were becoming a problem for the British — not only those in Bengal. What we need to remember is that long before Indians in British India began talking back to the English in English, it was the Native States that showed how words could be used as shields and swords.

Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. This essay draws on his new book, Krishna Kumari: The Tragedy of India. The views expressed are personal