Feel-Good History: A Reply to William Dalrymple's Response

William Dalrymple suggests in his response to my article in this symposium that I think "that eighteenth-century India was full of aloof Curzon-like British men, of the sort found in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India"; and that I reflect "this stereotype back onto the very different world of the East India Company during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."¹ As evidence, he points to my "references" to "the growing tyranny of the church and the club"—institutions that he claims "certainly regulated colonial life in the later period" but "were almost unknown outside the coastal enclaves during the Company period."²

Did I imply that the church and club existed outside coastal enclaves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? The following sentence from my article contains my only reference to the "tyranny of the church and the club":

These men—the white Mughals of Dalrymple's title—were probably happy to escape the drab white ghettos of the coastal towns, the growing tyranny of the church and the club, and to embrace the hedonistic ways of the Indian ruling classes that they were in the process of supplanting.³

Thus, Dalrymple misrepresents me on the only specific issue he raises regarding my article. In his long response, he gives many examples of individual British men acquiring Indian concubines and adopting Indian dress. He leaves us in little doubt that the affections inspired by such improvised relationships were sincere and deep. It even seems possible that, as Dalrymple asserts, "in the 1780s over one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions either to one or more Indian companions (or bibis, as they were known) or to their Anglo-Indian children."⁴ But Dalrymple loses us when he asks us to believe in something called "Company multiculturalism."⁵

The first question such an ambitious formulation provokes is: Were the early British multiculturalists and polygamists in India numerous enough to create a racially mixed population, such as the one produced by the Portuguese in their colonies? If such a population existed, where should one look for its traces?

In any case, Dalrymple deploys the word multiculturalism much too loosely, often implying, approvingly, that it means cultural assimilation. But the concept of multiculturalism emerged in the modern era, when immigrant populations in liberal democratic nation-states of the West demanded the right to maintain their separate cultural identity. To define interracial sex and concubinage as multiculturalism, and to posit a happy mingling of cultures in a historical period marked by largely one-sided exploitation and plunder, may console those readers in the contemporary West who are rendered uneasy by their imperial past and present. But such a feel-good view of history is unlikely to explain the motives and desires of British men in the feudal world of late-eighteenth-century India.

I fear that Dalrymple sees this world too narrowly. He celebrates the sensuous pleasures of the Indian elite that the British tried, briefly, to embrace. But he has scarcely a word to say about the destruction and pain inflicted upon the vast helpless majority of Indian population by East India Company officials, whom Edmund Burke as well as his great rival Tom Paine denounced as predators and vandals.

Dalrymple asserts that "the freedom of interracial exchange, and the scale of cohabitation, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation during the earlier period of the East India Company, is clearly still not understood, even by scholars."⁶ Perhaps. But scholars examining early British involvement in India have understood and explained well many of its immediate and long-term effects—mass poverty, extreme inequality, and the death of millions in famines.

Dalrymple may make his British heroes appear more complex by setting their emotions and sexuality against the backdrop of the brutal system of exploitation that they served. He may give them even more historical and existential depth by placing them in the world they originally came from, by showing how their demeanor in India both altered, and was altered by, attitudes in Britain toward race, class...