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Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke

2008; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cul.2008.0007

1460-2458

Sunil Agnani,

Australian History and Society

Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English ParliamentFearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke Sunil Agnani (bio) Our Government and our laws are beset by two different Enemies, which are sapping its foundation, Indianism and Jacobinism. In some cases they act separately, in some they act in conjunction: but of this I am sure; that the Wrst is worst by far, and the hardest to deal with; and for this amongst other reasons, that it weakens[,] discredits, and ruins that force, which ought to be employed with the greatest Credit and Energy against the other; and that it furnishes Jacobinism with its strongest arms against all formal government. —Edmund Burke, 1796 Just what did Edmund Burke fear in the Jacobins of France, and what might that tell us about concurrent events taking place in far-off colonial Bengal? Perhaps the question is better answered if we reverse it: just what can colonial Bengal—or, more broadly, events occurring at Britain's mercantile colonial frontier—tell us about Burke's fear of the emergence of modernity and revolutionary aspects of the Enlightenment that he saw in France? This paper aims to raise questions of one field (eighteenth-century studies or studies of the Enlightenment) in tandem with another (postcolonial thought): this dialogue is implicit for the most part but follows a question raised by others in the pages of this journal on critical practices "in the wake of Eurocentrism."1 The question will be not just how to read Edmund Burke but how to read the French Revolution though colonial India—provincializing Europe in this sense.2 Burke is instructive for showing how the basis for this reading is already present (if latent) in central authors of the period—one does not even need to go to purportedly marginal texts to bring out this fact. Clarifying the subtitle to this essay, what Burke [End Page 131] feared is something overlooked by many who read his work on Europe or India in isolation: the coevality of the transformations taking place in many parts of the colonial world and metropolitan Europe that he captured in the couplet Indianism/Jacobinism. We can learn from this fear to challenge the frequent if implicit notion of a "colonial lag time" whereby a revolution occurs in Europe and then spreads elsewhere. These transformations were seen early on, by one who wished it were otherwise. Conservative in some contexts and liberal in others, Edmund Burke's political views make much more sense in the context of a body of Enlightenment thought in which a passionate hatred of empire coexists alongside—indeed, seems to depend on—intellectual projects for which empire is a defining feature. My aim will be to explore this context by recuperating the global vision that Burke's notion of Jacobinism implied in tandem with Indianism (his own neologism). The concepts of custom and manners, which take on an ethnographic function in Burke's thought, explain to a degree the astonishing contradictions of his political writings: his eventual support of the secession of the American colonists in 1776; his scathing attack on the Jacobin revolutionaries in 1790; and his even more passionate denunciation of Warren Hastings and the East India Company, which he undertook long before, during, and after the attacks on the revolution in France that seem to mark such a definitive break in his political thought. I would like to propose, however, that Burke's notion of Jacobinism was crucially shaped by his prior writings on India, where he saw a revolutionary form of modernity emerging in the upheavals caused by the East India Company—and this a decade before the events of 1789. Travelogues, philology, ethnographies, vivid paintings, and descriptions regarding Europe's colonies—in short the kinds of knowledge practices associated with orientalism as Edward Said understood it—had been growing in number and flooding Europe for decades by this period.3 For Edmund Burke, the effect of this colonial knowledge on European thought prompted a curious mixture of imperious aspiration and critical self-reflection, forms of self-division that speak directly to contemporary experiences of global cultural and political life. My contention is that colonialism in the Enlightenment was...