Edmund Burke's Indian Idyll

E d m u n d B u rk e 's In d ia n Id y ll R E G IN A J A N E S onmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Most of us who think of Burke at all think of him as the political philosopher in action, a man firmly grounded in the real. He has for us the allure that Cabrera Infante says action has for intellectuals, the appeal of sex to the impotent. Because we cannot do it ourselves, we attribute magical powers to those who can, and we secretly suspect that it provides them with miraculous enjoyments and fulfillments from which we are forever excluded. Burke humiliates us more than most men of action because he was also a powerful writer and thinker: he not only did what we can’t, but he also did what we can do b etter than we do. It all seems a little unfair. But there is a chink in Burke’s practicality. That exquisite grasp of general priciples and concrete particulars masks a view of civilization as idyll. The value that earlier and some contemporaneous and later writers attributed to virtuous pastoralism, Burke attributed to civilization itself. The same element of projection so evident in others’ pas­ toral fantasies and utopian visions appears in Burke’s representations of society in general and, for our present purposes, of India in particu­ lar. For Burke’s India, like his France, his America, even his Ireland and his England, is an imaginary world, but unlike his France or his America, Burke’s India is a pastoral landscape, stable and dynamic, enduring through time, yet pitifully vulnerable to external attack. 3 4 / ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA R E G I N A J A N E S In his treatm entof India, Burke elaborated an image of an Indian golden age that is preeminently a pastoral of civility. Images of gar­ dens, fields carefully tended, considerate paternal rulers, flourishing industry and manufactures, trade and commerce work together to flesh out his portrayal of a dynamic and self-sustaining organism. He constructed that image out of books, conversations, and records in conscious opposition to other equally forcible interpretations of In­ dian society, and his rendering of that society is clearly idealized and clearly polemical. In D a n iel M a rtin , John Fowles observes that “The desire to create imaginary worlds . . . this desire, or need, has always been strongly linked, at least in my own experience, with the notion of retreat, in both the religious and military sense; of the secret place that is also a redoubt.”1 For Burke, the imaginary world that is his In­ dia served as the secret place and redoubt from which the force of his disapproval of the present emerged armed and invigorated, fresh for battle with justifications at the ready. In prosecuting Hastings, Burke had to refute both Hastings’ defense of his own behavior and the image of India that Hastings and his counsel presented in order to justify that behavior. The interpreta­ tion of Indian society offered by Hastings and his counsel was a popu­ lar one with considerable support in the literature on India and in the public mind. Regarded as a ruinous civilization, age-old, unimagin­ ably rich and unimaginably decrepit, India also appeared to many a war-torn, despot-ridden anarchy. Focusing on the disruptions in the Mogul empire and the quarrels among Muslim princes, such return­ ing travelers as Francois Bernier had argued that India had no system of law, no security for property, and a plethora of ruthless despots, ruling arbitrarily with no restraints upon their will, impoverishing their people, and keeping them in subjection only with the whip. Ac­ cording to this view of Indian society, when there was peace, which was hardly ever (Bernier said there had been none since 1200 and the first Mohammedan invasions),2 the Mogul plundered the Nabob who plundered the Phousdar who plundered the Zemindar who fleeced the Havildar who plundered the village.3 To maintain production of agricultural and commercial goods, the whip and the army were the only means. When this happy state of affairs was disturbed by war, as B u rk e ’s...