Ideas Matter: Debating the Impact of British Rule on India

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This volume argues that concepts and ideologies shaped the practice of British rule in India; impacted policies and laws, and were embodied in institutions and practices, affecting both governance and Indian experience. Engaging with questions of historiography, it calls for a balanced assessment of India's growth or decline under British rule. Ideas Matter examines revenue policies and their consequences, generally but particularly in Bihar, stressing continuities from precolonial times but also discussing major changes deriving from British laws. Two chapters analyse the rationale and impact of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. Others discuss communal identities and the effects of colonial categorization, probing the significance of interpretations of the 1857 revolt and the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and considering the overtly non-communalist Abdul Latif (1828-93) and educational reforms intended to benefit Bengali Muslims.
The book examines British and Indian nationalism; commemorations of colonial rule and Indian resistance; the reification of politico-religious identities; and concepts and misconceptions that shaped policy and law, especially those affecting rural India.

Peter Robb is Professor Emeritus and formerly Professor of the History of India and Pro-Director, at SOAS (University of London). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow and former President of the Royal Asiatic Society. His monographs include The Government of India and Reform (1976); A History of India (2002 and 2011); and three books on early Calcutta (2011 and 2014). He has written four books partly or wholly about Bihar, including Ancient Rights and Future Comfort (1997) on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and its impact.

I have published three collections of my pre-published essays, one on my own initiative and two by invitation. Half the chapters of The Evolution of British Policy towards Indian Politics had previously appeared, as had 60 per cent of the two volumes commissioned by Oxford University Press as Empire, Identity, and India, namely Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation and Peasants, Political Economy, and Law.¹ I had not even considered producing yet another volume until approached by Primus. It was in the aftermath of their bid to bring out an Indian edition of my Ancient Rights and Future Comfort, a project thwarted (on price) by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, who inherited the book from its original publisher and continue to produce occasional copies on demand, The setback persuaded me to think about another collection. For me, this new set of essays provides, among other things, a way of making some of my work on the subjects and themes of 'ancient rights affordably available to a South Asian audience. Therefore, I have chosen essays that represent this body of work, even some earlier published in India. I also included essays on other subjects, so as to make them more widely available as well-and in order to develop and round out the themes of the book. One or more of these criteria explain the essays selected.
All of them discuss aspects of India's governance or of Indian experience during British rule. I chose the book's name to reflect a common strand in the essays. Ideas matter for all who try to interpret and understand; they need to take into account ideas of the past and of their own times. Certainly, ideas mattered for the British impact on India: ideas in their own right and ideas embodied in institutions and practices. This book explores such issues, mainly in regard to agrarian history and the history of political, social and economic identities. Deliberately, there are a lot of common themes, and hence references and arguments, surprisingly many perhaps given that the essays were written over a long period.

India and Britain
In some senses, Indo-British relations have always been insignificant, and they have mostly diminished since 1947. During British rule, bilateral trade and investment made up a surprisingly small proportion of the two economies as a whole. Cultural and personal ties were peripheral despite many close associations among the elites and the common heritage of the English language. Now, the two peoples, I once wrote, are 'exceptionally close, as history made them, but also their closeness is an illusion, as it also was in the past the relationship is wrought not only in personal compatibility but also in mutual incomprehension. The British press and popular opinion, for example, have too often confined themselves to crass stereotypes about India, and the compliment has been returned.
However, those are not the only ideas that have mattered. Without British rule in India, both countries would be different today. They have been connected, as complementary or antagonistic civilizations, evolving together and colliding as forces of great weight. Despite their apparent distance, each still contains much of the other. Neither has fully recovered from the experience of empire. Today, Britain may be thought to have been changed more than India, given its prominent population of South Asian origin, inward investment by Indians and culinary and cultural borrowings. But continuities can be found in India's law, politics, institutions and attitudes.
Many old problems also remain. Nostalgia and triumphalism still compete with guilt over empire. Britain has not abandoned aspects of its self-image, nor an establishment represented and preserved by secrecy and private codes of behaviour.