Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 by Joseph Sramek (review)

Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 begins with a puzzle that has dogged the study of the British Empire in India: how could a small group of British men rule over a large and diverse population of multiethnic, multireligous, and multilingual Indians across a disjointed group of territories on a subcontinent? The book spans from 1765 to nearly a hundred years later. However, the most compelling part of the argument is about the period between 1820 and the Indian Rebellion in 1857.

Joseph Sramek focuses on the importance that the East India Company’s officials placed in earning the positive public opinion of Indian subjects. They constructed a public image of British officers, soldiers, and civil servants as more trustworthy and morally superior than they were in actuality. As he explains, early colonial officials felt a great deal of anxiety about the debts that British Company men contracted while in India and their proclivity toward drunkenness and violence, so they presented themselves as moral figures, contradicting all evidence to the contrary. Once the British constructed themselves as civilized and moral, the East India Company was bound to uphold this fiction, even though it was continually challenged by the actual behavior of those who drank and gambled. The most interesting example in Sramek’s analysis focuses on the numerical imbalance between Indian sepoys and British soldiers, which was as high as five to one in some areas. Combined with the appearance of dissolute behavior by British-born soldiers, this numerical lopsidedness provoked a crisis of authority that was resolved in unexpected ways. Until the 1820s and 1830s, the British framed the upper caste of the Indian soldiers in the army (the sepoys) as analogous to the class of landed elites who were putatively the officers in the British army. British officials believed that sepoys were upper caste, respectable men of social standing; they did not drink, gamble, and seemed to be faithful to their wives, unlike British soldiers who were often found drunk, indebted, and diseased from visiting prostitutes in the bazaar. Although British officials by and large felt that Indian soldiers were less competent and disciplined, thus requiring British officers to oversee them, these “racist attitudes were offset by general characterizations among many Britons in India of sepoys as gentleman soldiers” (68).

This show of respectful recognition may have been a strategic response to being outnumbered, but sramek argues that there was an ideological consequence: it heightened the anxieties that British officers felt about their tenuous hold on the soldiers in their command. By the 1820s, after a generation of British officials had equated upper caste with class, army officials were arguing that Indian sepoys’ caste identities corresponded to religion and race. This shift, sramek argues, showed a marked change in attitudes and trust between British officials and Indian sepoys. Although scholars including Thomas Metcalf and Heather Streets have argued that 1857 led to the British army bringing in “martial races,” such as Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Muslims, who were seen to be more docile and physically strong, Sramek shows that this shift was already underway in the generation before 1857 (7). By equating caste to something that was anomalous to British society, the British could characterize the sepoy as a kind of superstitious figure whose religious and caste attachments made him insufficiently loyal to be trusted to a high-ranking position.

By focusing his study on the period before 1857, Sramek can argue that strategies and ideologies of colonial governance created a racialized and hierarchized discourse that predated the 1857 Rebellion, particularly as colonial observers, officials, and critics in Britain attempted to create a rationale for why a small group of merchants should rule a subcontinent. The goal of maintaining the image of British morality meant that the Company state actively produced and reproduced social distinctions between Indians and Britons, and class distinctions between those who were believed to possess virtue...