The British in India

Hello hello :)

As I was reading Levine's "Britain in India" and trying to link it to the narrative of Passage, what struck me the most about Levine's essay was the bit where she says:

"...in the 1830s there was considerable debate over the wisdom of encouraging an English-style education among Indian elites...British interests lay with whether or not an English education would secure the long-term loyalty of this essential class of administrators...Without the work of Indians...British India simply could not have functioned" (69).

and also:

"Macaulay...argued that English should be the language of state in India, and that westernization would improve the condition of India and guarantee the loyalties of India's educated classes" (71).

I'm sure that educating Indians so that they could be equipped to serve the British was a necessary measure and happened for practical communication purposes. However, doesn't this make the "educated" Indians go through (for lack of a better term) second colonisation? Not only are they colonised physically [the land of India], they seem to now be undergoing ideological colonisation by studying "English-style". Come to think of it, our Social Studies textbooks in secondary school seem somehow warped. We know that we were a former British colony, but our textbooks seldom speak of our colonial experience in a negative light. In fact, the British were often praised and exalted! Think of Sir Stamford Raffle's looming figure at Singapore River... Think of how we were taught how well the British planned towns, how efficiently they administered and governed. Think of how esteemed Raffles Girls' Secondary and Raffles Institution are in Singapore! Somehow, I think we've undergone that same kind of ideological colonisation through "English-style education", and are still trapped in it today, to a certain degree. Our exams are certified by Cambridge, we have "Speak Good English" campaigns, and our unique Singlish is severely frowned upon (please never let Singlish die out, it'd be such a waste). Remember how Aziz found that "[t]he roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India" (Passage 14)? I think Singapore in many subtle ways is still caught under that kind of net. We even have Clive Street (named after Robert Clive), not to mention Hasting and Minto Road as well. Street names probably don't amount to much, but it's as if these names were like the British colonial ghosts still staking their claim on our land... hmmm.

Also, I found the last line of the passage I quoted from p.69 particularly ironic. For all their strength, might and hold over India, the British colonists actually had to depend on the "natives", the Indians. They were their odd-job labourers, their armed forces; they were their surrogate butlers. To me, the irony lies in that British strength in India is not actually British strength, but Indian strength. (If I may insert a crude, if not simplistic analogy + digression here, I am reminded of the table tennis matches in the Olympics that just passed. The logic doesn't quite match up, but I am just somehow reminded of my friend remarking that watching Li Jiawei play against China was like watching China vs China instead of Singapore vs China. I mean sure, yes, we can say she's officially Singaporean and all, but it just doesn't feel the same!) Anyway, back to what I was trying to say: if we can consider educating the Indians in the British style to work for the British to be a form of anglicizing the Indians, then the quoted passage reflects a certain anxiety over such anglicization. Aziz represents for me a fully, but not successfully anglicized Indian. He's well-educated, speaks good English, and knows British customs well ["I know everything about you" (130).] But his loyalties lie far away from the British. In fact, he seems anti-British most of the time. I'm reminded again of Levine's "Ruling An Empire" chapter, where she writes that Indians assimilating into British society "was considered contamination, not assimilation" (107). Characters like Aziz seem to pose such a "contamination" threat to the British in Forster's novel. For example, people like the Turtons look upon Mrs. Moore's friendship with Aziz in disdain. In the courtroom scene, we see how prejudiced the British are against Aziz, even though he had not yet been proven guilty. All in all, the more I read about the British in India, whether as described by Levine in her essays, or as narrated by Forster, the weaker and more caricatured they seem to become.