At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (review)

Recent developments in cultural studies have raised new issues regarding the British Empire, especially the important question: was imperialism peripheral or central to Victorian culture? In this book, Antoinette Burton sides with those who argue that empire was not something that happened overseas while an insular culture developed at home; instead, Burton insists, close contact with Indians and other colonial subjects who made “the voyage in” meant that the cultural negotiations of the colonial encounter transpired in London and Liverpool as well as in Cape Town and Bombay. With an eye on the contentious issue of national identity in postcolonial Britain, Burton deftly explores the manner in which three Indians passed through the physical and cultural terrain of late-Victorian Britain, mapping out a space for themselves as resistant colonial subjects that presages later efforts by Britons of Asian and African descent to claim full rights to British identity.

A helpful opening chapter relates the South Asian presence in Victorian Britain to issues raised by those who insist that there has always been a multiracial, multicultural Britain. This sets the stage nicely for Burton’s next three chapters, where she analyzes the experiences of Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Behramji Malabari in late-Victorian Britain. Burton brilliantly delineates how each refused to remain confined to the cultural and even physical spaces allotted to them as colonial subjects. Ramabai opposed the religious and social views of her Anglican mentors, thus challenging the latent cultural and political assumptions of the British mission civilisatrice; Sorabji resisted missionary attempts to control her family, negotiated the difficult male world of Oxford, and fought preconceptions of Indians to become a self-described “ardent [. . .] little Tory” (111); and Malabari appropriated the gaze of the European social observer and embraced colonial representations of gender, in order to bring the Victorians under critical scrutiny and to advance his own cause (raising the age of consent for Hindu marriages).

But one wishes that Burton had devoted as much attention to colonial history as she does to postcolonial theory. A closer look at how cultural encounters in India shaped colonial discourses and even the English language could have helped her overcome the awkward problem that there really were not many Indians present in late-Victorian Britain. Her insistence that the issue is not one of numbers but of how Indians contested British discourses is unlikely to convince skeptics who will argue that the few thousand people of color (most of African descent) who possibly resided in late-Victorian Britain could hardly have had much impact on the culture and national identity of forty million Britons, no matter how intellectually resistant and culturally combative some of them were. Such critics will likely note that she presents little evidence that many Victorians—other than a few missionaries, reformers, former officials, and Oxford students—truly engaged with her subjects, let alone took notice of works such as Malabari’s The Indian Eye on English Life (1893) which she claims “may have contributed, however subtly and imperceptibly” (186) to growing British unease about the empire.

Burton’s argument would be more convincing if she had considered more carefully the construction of the colonial discourses she considers crucial for understanding the culture wars of the Victorians. These discourses were never the sole property of Britons, but, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, were fashioned together by coalitions of British officials and select Indian groups and individuals. A prominent example of this can be found in the case of Rammohun Roy, who helped forge the official consensus in Calcutta that led to the decision in 1835 to focus British efforts on English-language education alone. Besides contributing key ideas that Thomas Macaulay reiterated in his famous minute on Indian education (1835) and working with the influential missionary Alexander Duff to attract Bengali students to English-language schools, Roy’s plea...