Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (review)

The volume at hand, despite the order of words in the subtitle, is less about intelligence (in the sense of formal spying) than it is about social communication in a Habermasian sense. ¹ Bayly’s starting point is that late Mughal India was not a transparent society, but rather a complex network of intersecting communities of information to which outsiders did not have easy access. His question is how the British gradually penetrated those communities (or in some instances failed to do so) and how this process affected the colonizing of India. Among his more provocative theses is that colonial India of the mid-nineteenth century developed the “analogues” of a civil society in the Habermasian sense.

The British, as they spread outward from Bengal, encountered a largely pre-print, oral culture buttressed by specialized producers and keepers of written documents. The post-Mughal polities attracted a cloud of scribes, judges and clerics, and castes of specialized runners and couriers. In the economy of knowledge and information that they erected, both gossip and newswriting for the courts played key roles, and classical learning coexisted with local expertise. The British, despite their military superiority, initially found themselves at a severe disadvantage, ignorant of geography, languages, and local customs and beliefs, and dependent upon the few local informants who would attach themselves to the Europeans. Bayly gives us not a confident Oriental Jones but (East India) Company officials hampered by ignorance about key practical matters. Only in the course of a century of struggle did the British gradually come to know much of what they needed to know in order to rule. Even then they remained, in many ways, dependent upon newly Anglophone Indian intellectuals.

Bayly holds that the British effort to gain information was impeded by Orientalist attitudes that led them to underestimate the value of local knowledge and to overestimate the appeal of Western rule for the subjects of potentates that they thought to be tyrants. He depicts the British misadventures in the north of the subcontinent as a result of a lack of reliable information and inability to gauge local reactions, leading to military disaster for the British in Afghanistan in 1842, and the loss of 40,000 troops.

In his view, the political fragmentation of India after 1700, the challenges to absolutism implicit in Muslim (especially Shi’ite) and Hindu thought, the widespread interreligious debates, the rise of Hindustani as a public language, great multicultural religious festivals, and the ability of oral means of communication to substitute for a print culture all contributed to a north Indian ecumene that exhibited features analogous to those of Habermas’ civil society. These characteristics were complemented by the civil society that existed among the expatriate whites of colonial India, with its vigorous debates and polemics, newspapers, importation and printing of books, evangelical activities, promotion of schooling, and erection of an impressive bureaucracy. Bayly covers debates among British and Indian intellectuals about astronomy, medicine, language, and geography, seeking a middle path between those who saw colonial science as a quest for pure knowledge and those who saw it as an appurtenance of the colonial search for power. He concludes with a consideration of British intelligence gathering (often in the more traditional sense) both during and after the Great Rebellion of 1857/58.

Bayly addresses big debates in Orientalism, the equation of power with knowledge, and civil society with a wealth of primary documentation. The latter leads him to resist the totalizing implications of the first two themes, and to find new ways of seeing the third in an Indian context. His thesis of a dialectic between the pre-British ecumene of information in India and the new British techniques and technologies of communication is original both in conception and execution, and he provides impressive evidence to buttress his conclusion that these interchanges gave rise to a synthesis of communicative practices that have crucially informed the development of modern...