CONJECTURING RUDENESS: JAMES MILL'S UTILITARIAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND THE BRITISH CIVILIZING MISSION

Introduction: The History of British India as an Exercise in Futility

A deep ambivalence characterizes James Mill's The History of British India. Mill, the historian of India who never went to India, wrote ostensibly in the style of Scottish conjectural history, grafting this short-lived mode of historiography and onto a particularly rigid strand of utilitarian thinking. The result of this philosophical amalgam was a ponderous narrative now infamous for its disparaging comments about the 'rude nations' of the world, and a work of purportedly 'standard', 'canonical' or 'hegemonic' status, often being assigned the position as the single most important work in the historiography of South Asia. The ambivalence running through the History is a result of its 'rude' subject matter combined with the difficulty of aligning this rudeness with Mill's aim of providing the world with utilitarian knowledge, for it seems that Mill himself considered the work, along with its subject matter, regrettably inutile. The History was a book that need not have been written and a work of limited utility, for it could, in the eyes of its own author, only teach about the rude people of India. Mill offered the History as a 'service' to spare the utility of future generations, encompassing everything one could need to know about India 'once and for all'. In carrying out this service, Mill established many of the ideological and textual underpinnings for the British civilizing mission, which was still inchoate when the History was first published in 1817. Mill's work became a cornerstone for establishing discourses of colonial difference that supported the colonial civilizing mission.

Despite his seeming concern for reforming India, Mill perceived colonialism as an endeavour counter to utilitarian ends. 'The love of domination', Mill reminded the reader, 'has always the greatest sway in the most ignorant state of the human mind'. The irony was intentional and was rooted in the allegorical nature of the History, through which Mill intended to awaken British readers into recognizing their own rudeness. The History was supposed to serve as a mirror which British readers held up to themselves to feel embarrassed about their own rudeness and love of domination. The ambivalence of Mill's work was thus twofold: the History only retained its utility as a justification for colonial rule, yet colonial rule as a whole is anti-utilitarian. As a result, the book was intended to lay the groundwork for its own elimination. Nonetheless, despite Mill's qualms with colonialism, he could still enjoy a profitable job at the East India House and actively participate in strengthening Britain's hold on India. As long as the colony existed, it should at least be governed as well as possible.

With the peculiar confluence of philosophical strands woven into the History, Mill worked within an idiosyncratic strain of thinking seemingly running counter to many of the basic notions of the European Enlightenment. The History conforms neither to Mary Poovey's characterization of the Enlightenment as relying on 'neutral' facts gathered through calculation, nor to what Martin Jay has characterized as the 'ocularcentrism' of the Enlightenment, since Mill trusted his principles over his eyes. This mistrust of needing to see his subject in order to form an impression of it was deepened by Mill's tacit assumption that a carnivalesque atmosphere of chaos was rampant in India, a veritable miasma of impressions which would permanently taint the eyes, and thereby the reason of anyone who experienced it, including those who lived within the carnival. Whereas the festival or carnival formed the ideal of transparency for Rousseau, it was the bearer of a contagious opacity for Mill, thus exemplifying Stephen Greenblatt's claim regarding colonial knowledge production that 'the explanatory power of writing repeatedly tames the opacity of the eye's objects by rendering them transparent signs'. In the face of this dense opacity, Mill's rationality revealed itself to be fragile and constantly susceptible to jagged partial impressions. This rationality was at once the robust infallible reason of the Enlightenment, but it was also violable, open to incursions and pollution wherever inutility reared its ugly head, including in the mother country. For its part, Mill's India was woefully wrapped up within partial impressions of itself, unable even to grasp itself, unable to know what it was without being gathered together in the fold of a Western rationality that risked polluting itself by gathering together such a raw mass of rude material into a cohesive whole. Working under the sign of what Edward Said referred to as 'radical realism', the assertive and creative power of the copula in Orientalist texts, Mill first had to think what India was, write it, then allow others to see it through the gaze of the reformer. In this manner, Mill served as the tabulator of a grid of faults and sketched a topography of rudeness, establishing a blueprint for those preparing the 'sweeping away' that would allow a civilizing mission to supplant what came before it.

Under Mill's peculiar concept of...