Indophobia

How the enthusiasm was displaced

The American academic Thomas Trautmann examined the relationship between Indomania and Indophobia in Victorian British Indology and concluded that Indophobia had become a norm in early nineteenth-century British discourse on India as the result of a conscious agenda of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, pressed in particular by Charles Grant and James Mill.

Historians describe the mechanism plainly: evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimise and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilisation, and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that had been nourished by a belief in Indian wisdom.

Grant's controversial work of 1796 on the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain criticised the Orientalists for being too respectful of Indian culture and religion. He set out to determine the true place of Hindus in what he called the moral scale, concluded that they were a people exceedingly depraved, and held that Britain's duty was to civilise and Christianise them. The paper is often cited as a foremost example of Eurocentrism and as the ideological foundation on which colonialism was built.

James Mill, one of the most influential historians of India in the period, was criticised for prejudice against Hindus, and Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of his work was evil. Mill held that Indians and Chinese alike were cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious, and both he and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship for taking Indian civilisation seriously, regretting that a mind as pure and as devoted to oriental learning as Sir William Jones's should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilisation in the principal countries of Asia.

How the argument was settled

Lord Macaulay served on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838 and laid the foundations of a bilingual colonial India by persuading the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of higher education from the sixth year of schooling, in place of Sanskrit or Arabic.

His case for it was contemptuous and specific. He had never found anybody, he claimed, who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India, and he characterised Sanskrit and Arabic works as containing:

• medical doctrines that would disgrace an English farrier
• astronomy that would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school
• history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long
• geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter

The Indian politician Dadabhai Naoroji spoke against the sentiment. The decision on language stood.

Where the stereotype came from

Stereotypes of Indians intensified during and after the rebellion of 1857, known to the British as the Sepoy Mutiny and in India as the First War of Independence, when Indian troops rebelled against East India Company rule.

Allegations of wartime rape were used as propaganda to justify continued colonisation. Incidents of rape by Indian rebels against British women and girls were virtually non-existent, and the British press exaggerated them regardless. Newspapers printed apparent eyewitness accounts with little physical evidence behind them, and some were later found to be fictions written to present the population as savages in need of civilising.

One such account in The Times described 48 British girls aged as young as ten to fourteen being raped by rebels in Delhi. Karl Marx pointed out that the story was propaganda, written by a clergyman in Bangalore, a long way from the events.

The vandalism was not imaginary. When Delhi fell to the British the city was ransacked, the palaces looted and the mosques desecrated, in what has been described as a deliberate act of unnecessary vandalism. The stereotype the propaganda created outlasted the war and recurs through English literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What the word carries now

Anti-Indian sentiment is frequently a form of racism, particularly where Indians are targeted alongside other South Asians, and people who hold it commonly reach for stereotypes to justify the attitude after the fact.

The Russian commentator Minaev recorded that white Britons in colonial India used a racial slur for Indians, and cited it as evidence of the distance between rulers and ruled. The interesting feature of the word remains its history: it names a position that was argued for, published, and adopted as policy, rather than one that grew.