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Article Excerpt
In the early twentieth century, English-Canadian schoolchildren learned to divide the British Empire into "the white man's country" and "the coloured man's country." According to one geography textbook, India clearly belonged in the latter category. "In the vast peninsula of India we find [a] ... coloured man's country, densely populated by nearly one fifth of the world's whole population, all of dark skin, but varying in civilization from the most degraded savage to the highly-cultured Hindu." Following from this division, a region's facility for self-government was explained in racial terms. While all the "white man's lands of the Empire have Parliaments of their own" and a citizenry "free to elect" members of government, in "the coloured man's country the natives have no such rights, for in many cases they are mere savages, and in others they could not yet be trusted with such power." (1) The imperial logic that associated the absence of home-rule in India with "racial character" mirrored broader currents of understanding in Canada. A strong affection for "Mother Britain" among Canadians of British descent, and a firm belief in Britain's divinely inspired benevolence, fueled a racialized rhetoric of empire. According to a popular imperialist narrative, Britain had brought order, enlightenment, and civilization to a formerly backward territory of the globe, and Britain's imperial project in India was an "inevitable" outcome of the "march of the Anglo-Saxon race." (2)
These depictions reflected intellectual and political trends in Britain. Quasi-scientific theories of racial difference--increasingly popular in Europe and North America in the latter half of the nineteenth century--combined with the mythology surrounding the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (British heroism versus Indian barbarism), confirmed British ideas about Indian racial inferiority. Such sentiments, as South Asian historian Judith Brown observes, "bred an elaboration of stereotypes of Indians which helped to justify imperial rule.... Indians were, for example, often described as weak and effeminate, deceitful and deficient in character, and incapable of leadership: and thus needing and benefiting from rule by Anglo-Saxons displaying opposite and desirable qualities." (3) Coupled with Britain's considerable strategic and economic interests in the region, these attitudes created tremendous obstacles along India's path to self-government. The political demands of India's growing educated classes from the 1860s on, and the work of the Indian National Congress after 1885, brought some concessions, including limited enfranchisement, election to municipal government, and opportunities to join the Indian Civil Service, if only as minor officials. (4) Yet by the turn of the century, scant gains had been made in the direction of self-government, and Britain's grip on India showed few signs of faltering.
This article explores the discursive production of an imagined India in the work of English-Canadian educators, intellectuals, politicians, and other public commentators in the first three decades of the twentieth century. (5) Intellectuals such as Alfred Baker, James Morison, George Wrong, J. Castell Hopkins, and George Sidney Brett, for example, wrote enthusiastically about Britain's imperial project in India. These men, and many other commentators, identified themselves as imperialists--or, at the very least, loyal British subjects. Particularly influential were Wrong's various books on the history of Britain and the Empire (almost always including content about India), which circulated in public schools across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba and British Columbia during the first half of the twentieth century. The ideas of these authors, moreover, were generally disseminated through organizations and publications that were imperialist in orientation (or at least imperial-friendly), such as the Empire Club of Canada, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs.
In the two decades before the First World War, the narratives these authors produced contained traces of ambivalence about the ideological basis of the civilizing mission in general, and India's place within the Empire in particular. Like the imperial project itself, constructions of India in English-Canadian public discourse were always plural, contested, and internally contradictory. In the years following the war, these ambivalent meanings shaped a new hegemonic discourse that supplanted the primacy of highly racialized narratives of Britain's civilizing project. Although a belief in the "benevolence of Empire" maintained its cultural currency, commentators generally disassociated this benevolence from assumptions about "racial character," and they increasingly related India's path to self-government to the Canadian experience. Accordingly, postwar representations of India were less imperial and more egalitarian, internationalist, and politically focused. References to "imperial equality," "suitability for self-government," and the "rights of the Indian people" replaced (although not entirely) references to Indian "backwardness," "ignorance," and "feeble-mindedness." Shifts in imperial thinking in postwar Britain no doubt informed these changing representations. The war critically undermined the tenets of the civilizing mission ideology, and thus the British government, with increased demands for self-government in both India and at home, was compelled to redefine its imperial purpose in India. (6)
Because the majority of these commentators were white, educated men of British heritage from Ontario, it is important to recognize that their imaginings of India--or of Canada, for that matter--were not representative of all Canadians. Depictions of India's peoples in British Columbia, for example, where the "menace" of Asian immigration continued to inspire racialist rhetoric and policies of exclusion well into the twentieth century, (7) were markedly different from those expressed in other regions. To the working classes in particular, the idea of imperial "inclusiveness" (and its implications for imperial migration and labor) was abhorrent regardless of region. Race mattered in discourses about India in provinces other than British Columbia, and federal politicians remained committed until after the Second World War to limiting (and most often to restricting) immigration from Asia. However, the construction of these discourses was more detached from the crude anti-Asian immigration sentiment that inspired representations of India on the west coast.
Without discounting the implications of this sentiment, this article shifts the focus to a primarily Ontario-produced, English-Canadian discourse about India that was not explicitly informed by the question of Asian immigration. The public school educators, politicians, and intellectuals who wrote about India were not, of course, culturally immune to this question. But it is significant that many of them did not engage the subject of immigration in their depictions of India. This is not to suggest that (to borrow the words of social anthropologists Elizabeth Hallam and Brian Street) their "ideological work of representation" was not implicated in the project of constructing "otherness" that so engaged Canadian critics of Asian immigration. They, too, sought to "emphasise boundaries which map zones of inclusion and exclusion." Interrogating representations of India in the years before and after the First World War helps to expose what Hallam and Street describe as "the uncertainty and vacillation between the foreign and the familiar" in the project of colonialism, and, in so doing, further underline the cultural and historical specificity of race. (8)
The Canadian historiography has been slow to reconceptualize imperial identities outside the boundaries of Canada's relationship with (and conception of) Britain. Since the publication of historian Carl Berger's seminal study, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914, scholars in increasing numbers have moved beyond the intellectual and political articulations of imperial identity in their analyses, and have considered how ideas about gender, race, and nation operated in the negotiation of imperial and colonial meanings. (9) In assessing how these factors contributed to the imperial experience, however, these studies have focused exclusively on Canada's relationship with Britain--the "metropole," or center of the Empire--and have not considered the importance of intercolonial imaginings in the formation of imperial identities. (10) By moving away from conventional methodologies that conceptualize British imperial history in terms of discrete relationships between the metropole and each individual colony, and by engaging the histories of Britain's colonial peripheries, we can reconceptualize the processes through which imperial identities were formed. (11)
Questioning the assumed sameness of imperial identities in Canada and Britain provides a good starting place. As British historian Catherine Hall has observed, the "different theatres of Empire, the different colonial sites, constructed different possibilities. Metropolitan society, white settler societies, societies with non-white majority populations, each provided sites for the articulation of different relations of power, different subject positions, different cultural identities." (12) English Canadians appropriated British ideas about the "Orient" and certainly participated in the project of "othering" India's peoples, but this project was complicated by Canadian interest in, and affinity for, India as a "fellow colony" and "sister-nation" of the Empire. Efforts to locate Indians in colonial and racial hierarchies were consequently rife with contradiction.
Before the First World War, a number of themes informed depictions of India in English-Canadian public discourse. These included a belief in the inferiority of India's peoples, the notion that India's place within the Empire was distinct from that occupied by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and the contention that India was incapable of self-government. To many imperialists, these ideas were inextricably connected to notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and providential mission. Indeed, many Canadians of British heritage "believed that the Anglo-Saxon race had demonstrated a singular capacity for self-government, for creating an ordered and progressive society, and for responsibility and service." And it was the Anglo-Saxon mission to spread this culture throughout the world, thus enabling "weaker races"--such as the peoples of India--to move toward a progressive civilization. (13)
Contemporary books, public speeches, newspapers, and school textbooks disseminated an imperial logic of racial and cultural difference that identified Anglo-Saxons in a superior position and located "dark" and "uncivilized" peoples in subordinate positions. The Public School Geography, a textbook authorized for use in Ontario public schools, high schools, and collegiate institutes from 1900 to 1909, taught students to employ methods of racial classification to understand human geography. In order to answer successfully the questions that followed each lesson, students required a well-developed vocabulary of race. "What peoples of the Caucasian family rule North and South America?" they were asked. "Have you ever seen people who were not white? Tell what you know about Indians, Negroes, and Chinese. Do you know the name of any missionary who has gone from Canada to Asia or Africa? Why did he go? ... Where is the home of the red race of men? ... Describe a Mongolian as correctly as you can." (14) Many textbooks employed race or systems of racial classification to construct geographical and historical meanings and reinforce notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority But these meanings were sometimes contradictory.
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