This review is reproduced here by kind permission of the online journal Review 19, where it was first published. The original text has been reformatted and illustrated for the Victorian Web by Nigel Finch. Click on the images for larger pictures.
n 1870, four members of a noted Bengali family published in London an old-fashioned, if not thoroughly outdated, collection of poetry. The Dutt Family Album, authored by three brothers, Govin, Hur, and Greece Chunder Dutt and their nephew Omesh, might stand as an antithesis to the disaffections investigated by Tanya Agathocleous. Or, alternatively, as further proof of her thesis. For Agathocleous's project is to investigate how law and loyalty were intertwined in the British Raj. This book shows how the policing of "disaffection" in the courts of the British Raj shaped dissensus, mimicry, and "sly civility" among India's literate elites and in the colonial and metropolitan press (12-16). Through detailed case studies of the periodical press in both Britian and India, Agathocleous compellingly explains how the redefinition of sedition—in terms of loyalty and disaffection—shaped both imperial power in late colonial period and the contours of Indian nationalism. And in a coda, she shows how the British policing of disaffection remains the basis for Hindu nationalist punishment of dissent in Narendra Modi's India.
Though Agathocleous chiefly mines the periodical press, her work can also shed light on a poem such as Govin Chunder Dutt's "To Lord Canning, During the Mutiny" from the Family Album. Govin's poem is the work of an ex-civil servant, an ardent Anglophile who was disillusioned by the East India Company's treatment of its Indian employees. As a prequel to the periodicals Agathocleous examines and a test case for her method, Govin's poem exemplifies a "loyal" intervention in the politics of the press. In 1857 Charles Canning, Governor-General of India, was harshly criticized for what the British press viewed as a too lenient path in dealing with the Sepoy uprising. For his adherence to due process, he was derided as "clemency Canning." But Dutt's poem defends him. Like many Bengalis, Dutt did not support the violent insurrection of 1857; but even though a Christian, he also opposed the violent retribution meted out to the rebels by such zealous evangelical actors as James Neill. Steering between these two extremes, Dutt writes of Canning:
Though a thousand pens condemned thee, mine still should write thy praise.
For fractious clamours heeding not, that only call for blood,
True to thy duty and thy race, Lord Canning, though hast stood.
What is the meed of thy deserts? Let history blush to tell!
A foul memorial of recall sent o'er the ocean swell.
And from the press--a press, alas, long held in honour, too—
The daily sneer for justice done, as God hath taught to do.
(Dutt Family Album, London: Longmans, Green, 1870, p.102)
In deriding the jingoist British press, Dutt implicitly attacks both Anglo-Indian and British papers. To praise Canning, he decries not only the press but also the British reprisals, the British Parliament, and the East India Company. Yet the poem loyally salutes Canning as a man who abhors "India's evil day" and the men who caused it. In the words of the poem, the now dismissed Canning (and the Christian God) defended "guiltless blood, where'er it flows, in black or white men's veins" (104). Rosinka Chaudhuri has characterized this sort of verse as the production of "loyal hours" (Gentlemen Poets of Colonial Bengal [Calcutta: Seagull, 2002]). Yet since it sprang from an hour that was also distressed, Dutt's poem shows how difficult it was for highly Anglo-assimilated Bengali to say just where his affections lay.
Caught between loyalty and dismay, if not disaffection, "To Lord Canning" was fittingly published in London in the same year, 1870, in which the Indian Penal Code was amended by Section 124a. The passage of this amendment, which begins Agathocleous's story, allowed prosecution of newspapers and journalists (and those about whom they reported) for disaffection, not just sedition. The author of this amendment, Fitzjames Stephen (an uncle of Virginia Stephen Woolf), was an intransigent imperialist devoted to the supremacy of (white) British civilization. Maintaining this supremacy required shoring up the British empire in the face of dissent, dissensus, and increasingly violent opposition. As Agathocleous shows, prosecutions for sedition as well as the wider regime of censorship from which they arose shaped the possibilities of public discourse. But as her examples demonstrate, a compelled civility was no civility. Nor was a compelled affection actually felt.
In both the theoretical framing and the archive of her book, Agathocleous sheds considerable light on affect studies and the colonial press as well as on the workings of dissent and anti-colonial activism. She probes Indian Anglophone and British periodicals by analyzing double-coding, disidentification, and sly civility—a version of colonial mimesis. "What happens," she asks, "when the audience interpellated by a particular form of print culture was both bourgeois and oppositional, both public and counterpublic at once?" (16) What happens, in other historical terms, when the audience is the Bengali (or Bombay) badhralok—the sometimes oppositional and sometimes loyal bourgeoisie?
The Anglophone Indian press, therefore, had to address two audiences: the colonial government and a future nation. Even while working within the confines of colonial governance, it had to postulate a different national order. To elude charges of disaffection, and thus to evade censorship and prosecution, editors resorted to indirection. As Agathocleous writes, "Inhabiting print forms borrowed from British culture and speaking to that culture while simultaneously, and circuitously, addressing an audience disenfranchised by it, Indian periodicals practiced disidentification in order to elude charges of disaffection" (17). In imitating British periodicals, Indian ones also created openings for political difference, for oppositional perspectives. In a bow to Homi Bhabha, Agathocleous calls this strategy "print mimicry." The circulation of British periodicals in India and vice versa (along with other vectors of colonial circulation) shaped both metropole and colonies, but colonial governance, she says, "restricted and shaped that circulation" (18).
The regimes of censorship and prosecution Agathocleous describes were the necessary invention of late colonialism. In the 1830s and 1840s, freedom of the press was upheld by Charles Metcalf, acting governor-general of India. By the period examined here, the survival of the independent Indian press required strategies of indirection. Running and Anglophone Indian periodical at the turn of the twentieth century entailed multiple challenges and compromises. According to Agathocleous, the "proto-nationalism on view in Anglophone periodicals is impossible to fully disarticulate from the colonialism it seeks to critique, as well as from the chauvinistic Hindu nationalism that first took shape in this period and that currently dominates Indian politics" (27).
To support this thesis, the central chapters of Disaffection develop four case studies that chiefly juxtapose Anglophone Indian metropolitan British periodicals. The two central chapters, where this strategy works to great advantage, analyze neatly paired publications.
Comparing the British Punch with its Indian counterpart, the Indian Charivari, chapter 2 shows how the Indian periodical expressed disaffection by means of parody, and so evaded the law against voicing disaffection even while doing so. Indian parodies, Agathocleous argues, could thus draw "attention to the contours and limits of imperial citizenship" (81). Moreover, the combination of the visual and the verbal led to proliferation of "punches" in multiple Indian vernaculars—Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Punjabi. Agathocleous shows how the Hindi Punch shaped the public sphere "as a space of negative affect and bitter colonial contest" (120). As a tactic, parody allowed disaffection to elude colonial control. There are technical glitches here and there (for the British Punch, the author conflates woodcut with wood engraving and ignores further mechanization of reproduction by 1900). But despite these small matters, this chapter is in many ways a highlight of the book.
Chapter 3 compares W.T. Stead's Review of Reviews, a review of the world press founded in London in 1890, with the Indian World, edited by Prithwis Chandra Ray in Calcutta from 1905 to 1912. Both of these publications digested and excerpted the various monthly reviews that centrally informed metropolitan culture, making their contents available to readers who often has less money and leisure than the consumers of the elite monthlies. Agathocleous shows how the Indian World, which began by imitating Stead's periodical, came to partially reshape Stead's overtly white supremacist defense and empire. By 1908 Stead was republishing articles about anti-colonial violence from the Indian World and other Anglophone periodicals—articles that made the newsagents selling his review in India subject to prosecution for sowing disaffection. Incensed at this curtailment of British press freedom, Stead asked the British to censor his publication before its export to India, rather than rendering Indian newsagents liable for prosecution. Here we see in detail how British liberalism both contested and furthered curtailment of civil discourse in the context of the rising and increasingly violent independence movement. In uncovering the political implications of the global circulation of print, Agathocleous's work is a model for further study.
In the other chapters of this book, the parallels between Indian and British periodicals are less neat. The first case study sets the trials of Oscar Wilde and their coverage in the British press beside the first court action prosecuting an Indian newspaper under Section 124a. I found this juxtaposition fascinating, particularly Agathocleous's brilliant comparison of the aesthete and the "babu," a term often disparagingly used of Indians who were educated in English. Just as the trials of Wilde made the aesthete and the criminal overlap, Agathocleous shows how the babu was read in the same way as the aesthete. Equally interesting is her discussion of the trial of the Indian newspaper Bangavasi over its negative coverage of the British decision to raise the age of consent. Agathocleous calls this proceeding a "show trial"—more or less Warren Hastings brought up to date. Given the conservative Hindu position of Bangavasi, Agathocleous compellingly argues, the proceeding "forestalled the progress of women's rights because the nationalist fervor it provoked turned gender reform into a third-rail issue for the government" and made a conservative understanding of Hindu conjugality the partner of militant nationalism (54). I would have loved to see this controversy have its own separate chapter, largely because the comparison to the Wilde trial eats the space that might have been devoted the significant history of contest over women's bodies among reforming Indians, various British administrations, and conservative Hindus.
The fourth case study in Disaffected doesn't compare periodicals, but instead reads together a speech from the Universal Races Congress of 1911 (London) with a periodical, East and West, edited by the Parsi journalist and poet, Behramji Malabari in Bombay. In essence this chapter documents the attempt at and (necessary failure of?) modernist cosmopolitanism. It explores what it reads as a general cultural and political failure of international friendship or understanding. That is, it shows us how "amity and animus were intertwined in early twentieth-century conceptions of East vs. West" (170). In what Agathocleous calls an "affect allegory" the language of friendship worked to "fudge the line between alliance and conquest for the colonized as well as the colonizer who, for opposing reasons, could pretend their relationship was strategically advantageous and consensual rather than coercive" (166). She goes on to demonstrate how the Congress leader G. K. Gokhale used the idea of amity only to undermine it in his speech at the Universal Races Congress—arguing that friendship is all but impossible in unequal relationships. The second half of the chapter focuses on Malabari's journal East and West, which printed articles by both British and Indian writers, some of each being critical of empire. Though Malabari initially promoted a "utopian internationalism" (174), over the course of its run the journal moved from promoting East/West dialogue to supporting "pan-Asian and nonaligned solidarities"—including labor solidarity (some of which, I assume, did involve Europeans and South Asians working together, rather than at odds).
Despite the contributions of this chapter, I struggled with its theoretical framing. The theoretical framing around the idea of syncretism resulted in a conflation of dialog, attempted or partial friendship, the practices of spiritualists, and modernist cosmopolitanism. Agathocleous's debt to Gauri Viswanathan's problematic use of the term syncretism created, for me, more confusion than clarity (see Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief, Princeton, 1998). Across its long history, the term syncretism typically tells us more about the user's binary thinking than about the phenomena described (see, for instance, Tony K. Stewart and Carl W. Ernst, "Syncretism," in South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, , ed. by Peter J. Claus and Margaret A. Mills [Garland, 2003]). In addition, while I admire the treatment of Gokhale in this chapter, some treatment of the Parliament of the World's Religions (Chicago, 1893) would have made a useful parallel to the URC. And finally, to be clear about differences among such figures as Blavatsky, Vivekananda, and Tagore, I'd suggest not referring to Tagore's religious practice as "spiritualism," perhaps leading the unsuspecting reader to put him in the camp of Blavatsky.
These modest reservations aside, I learned much from every chapter of Disaffected. In her careful attention to the circulation of periodicals, in the difficult work she has done in the vast archive of colonial print, and in creating a genuinely comparative theoretical framing, Agathocleous has provided scholars with a truly valuable resource. She has shown us the path from Govin Chunder Dutt's conflicted loyalty to Mohandas Gandhi's vigorous avowal of disaffection at his 1922 trial for sedition. In contemporary India, sadly, as in the United States, our moment has need of many more such disaffectionists.
Bibliography
(Book under review) Agathocleous, Tanya. Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere. Cornell University Press, 2021.
Created 25 August 2023