Forging the Raj: Essays on British India in the Heyday of Empire, and: The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj (review)

Thomas Metcalf's Forging the Raj is a collection of essays, all but one previously published, that spans the varied and dynamic career of a leading historian of nineteenth-century British India and empire. While such compilations always threaten to appear disjointed, this is satisfyingly not the case here. No one piece is likely in itself to surprise those familiar with Metcalf's work, yet collectively the book offers students and scholars alike a vivid and complex vision of how one might conceive of the history of the raj. Here an image emerges of a British empire that was continually forced to negotiate the tension between what was "British" and what was "Indian." Moreover, whether redefining land tenure, erecting buildings and monuments, or facilitating and forcing the migration of peoples, the raj was an "instrument of imperial governance" (18) that was deeply transformative but rarely monolithic, and whose effects have been enduring but not intractable. The book is also a fascinating effort at academic biography. Indeed, perhaps the real gem is Metcalf's introduction, which reflects on a career spanning almost half a century and reveals just how much scholarship is shaped by a balance of intellectual principles, the more mundane, yet omnipresent, vicissitudes of historiography and the job market, and changing definitions of what constitutes proper "British," "South Asian," and "imperial" history in the first place.

The first section on "land" resurrects Metcalf's older work on revenue policy, land tenure, and the social history of the causes and aftermath of the rebellion of 1857. This serves as a brilliant reminder of the crucial importance of a subject, once dominant in the historiography of British India, that has now grown largely out of fashion. Questions about land tenure dominated the concerns of East India Company administrators, from obvious issues such as revenue collection to more abstract ones about the fashioning of a healthy society and loyal subjects. Quite famously, British policy both before and after the rebellion of 1857 transformed zamindars and taluqdars from holders of rights to revenue in the land and local political authorities to British-style property owners; still, as Metcalf shows, at least the taluqdars of Awadh remained somewhat resilient, maintaining their social status despite their conversion "from Raja to landlord" (51–70).

In the second section, Metcalf turns from social history to cultural history, and particularly to his work on the aesthetic expression of colonialism through art and architecture. Though Metcalf does not express it as such, debates about the proper forms for colonial art and architecture here mirror those about land tenure; both buildings and revenue policy were necessary for rule, but they were also expressions of power. As Metcalf writes, "Choice of styles, the arrangement of space within a building, and of course the decision by the government to erect a particular monument, all testified . . . to a vision of empire" (106). Like revenue policy, architecture and statuary in India reflected a colonial style, caught somewhere between Indian and British forms. Colonial servants used architecture to symbolize an empire that was "righteous and shall endure" (150), while monuments and memorials served to reveal empire's dependence on a particular kind of past. However, empire neither did nor could remake India wholesale; at every turn, the British had to appropriate styles of the "Orient," from those determined by climate to its most awesome manifestations, such as the Taj Mahal.

Metcalf also documents the emergence of a peculiar colonial architectural style, which, "hammered out in Pretoria, and refined in Delhi, could be carried to such places as Kenya" (150). In a sense, this section blends into the next...