Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [277]
And there was an extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1793: ‘We have lost our colonies in America by imparting our education there; we need not do so in India too.’42 This loss was very fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very general who had delivered the British surrender to George Washington in 1781, went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley, governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in 1799:
… with relation to powers of banishing Europeans from the British possessions in India … those powers appear to me still to be too limited.
The number of persons [not in the company’s service] resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in Europe. Their occupations are principally… at Calcutta, the lowest branches of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public entertainment, or the superintendence of newspapers… Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed…
In Madras, the evil resulting from Europeans not in the Company’s service is still greater. The advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the principal instruments of his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that class of Europeans.43
British settlement in India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampanī Sahib, as it was known, proceeded to expand its financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, Śri Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of speakers of its own directors’ language.
Protestantism, profit and progress
In the end, the wider spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British Protestant missionaries.* The company was in general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same grounds—and with better evidence—as those on which they shunned other Europeans. The bloody mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 was associated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference to Christianity, demanding ‘every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit of our native subjects’; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore (Śrirampur), near Calcutta, ‘Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans’.44 India has long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.
Nevertheless, there had been churchmen at the company’s settlements from the earliest days. Early on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made explicit in the company’s renewed charter of 1698.45 But soon they began to found English-language schools, primarily