Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is fundamentally an examination of the consciousness of the colonial imperative, alternately the drive for conquest over the Other. This is accomplished primarily within the discourse of subject relocation, as the author provokes in the reader a desire to reclaim the Other, a gesture enacted as a requisite for the understanding of the Self. In a very real sense, this examination is not only a manifestation of the Foucauldian conception of the science of ordering, itself fundamental to the ideation of Enlightenment philosophy as espoused by Kant and Hegel, onto an imagined colonial identity. In other words, by speaking through the colonized Other and looking back at the Self, Hamilton’s text suggests a project of forgiveness and purification on the part of the imperial project, or at least the progressive elements of the consciousness of said project, which mirrors the ritualized forms of purification championed by Hindu society, according to several characters in the novel. That this conception of a subjective consciousness is examined within both the (relatively concrete) narrative field as well as the (conceptually abstract) structural field itself reflects the author’s awareness in the totalizing gestures of cultural and economic imperialism. Such a totalizing conception of the imperial project should not be taken as itself a absolute, but rather as a mode of cultural interpretation, for Hamilton herself problematizes the degree to which any ideological structure can be universalized.

The epistolary structure of the novel is itself a means by which the colonial experience is represented. It is not a travel narrative in the sense typical for English popular literary interests, in which a civil Englishman enters into a realm of the unknown and forcefully controls it, despite the little moments de jouissance in which the protagonist is on the verge of being consumed by a violently threatening Other. In a very real sense, cannibalism represents the limit to which the violence of colonialism can be exteriorized and projected onto the subjects of that violence (those who receive its effects). Colonialism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the impetus for controlling a subjugated population is inscribed onto imperial subjects as a defence mechanism against the perceived irrational barbarities of the former. Hamilton utilises fictitious correspondence between members of the Indian aristocracy as the organizing principle for her text. This structure serves to demonstrate the ramifications of colonialism from the subjective position of the subjugated, contrary to the typical literary practice exemplified by Robinson Crusoe. In her novel, consumption as a psychological anxiety precipitating and resultant from the drive to colonize is turned in upon itself, as the act of cannibalism is one involving the subjective localization of the colonial (Indian) subject. Accordingly, the narrative gaze is that of the colonized Other examining the customs of English society from an ostensibly exterior subjective position. In this sense, the voice of the Other is used as a means by which the reader can enter into an exotic and romanticised alterity, a field in which the self-reflective gaze of the imperial subject reifies both colonized and colonizer. Ostensibly this is done as an apologetic gesture, an attempt at reconciliation while simultaneously masks and reifies the guilt felt by the subjugation of a society to imperialism.

In this capacity, it is not surprising that rituals of cleansing and forgiveness are highlighted throughout the text, be it Sheemaal’s comparisson of the English and Indian ceremonies of the Purekah on p. 136 or the various purification rituals performed by the Rajah before eating, holding “court”, and other social phenomena. Throughout the text, references are made to the Rajah’s interest in the institutions and offices of English society, and this curiosity serves to elaborate a more fundamental concern. Following Foucault’s archaeologies of Western culture in both Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, institutions can be understood as ritualized behaviours made concretely manifest in very openly political terms, or more precisely, in obvious economic terms of power and control (who gains agency over banking, religion, and education, for example). Late in the text, the Rajah describes what he believes to be one of the principle ideological structures which governs the English economy. He is highly critical of the degree to which non-religious, and in his eyes consequently amoral, sentiments inform the behaviour of the citizenry. Christianity is not wholly accepted by the English, who do not truly practise the Christian doctrine: “if this is really the religion of Christ, how falsely are people often called Christians” (240). Early in the text, Sheermaal accuses them of mistreating their servants, contrary to the more enlightened practises of the Hindu people. In the fourth letter, he describes the manner in which humans are stored and traded like any other trade commodity, with no importance save a healthy return of investment. Later in the text, the Rajah is appalled by the slave trade surrounding the navy, in which forced conscription is exercised by press gangs. In the tenth letter, he comments on the English (and more widely the European) proclivity for war, and accords the degree of control over the minds of warring Christians to an almost fundamentalist zeal for individual gain: “when a significant number of Christian men are united together, to form an army ... they shall be licensed to commit murder, at the command, and by the authority, of their religious superiors.... [This] shall no longer be termed, Murder; but Glory!” (170). Indeed, it seems as though he is reacting to the institutionalization of a certain kind of violence; it is not the ritualized and violent annihilation of the self which is fundamental to a thorough understanding of the Hindu Vedas, but rather the violent control of the Other, which is enacted in order to limit the degree to which Otherness informs the Self. Early in the text, Maandaara prefigures the Rajah’s letters toward the end of the text by expressing a degree of abhorrence toward the forms of violence ritualized in English culture, and the extent to which such beliefs and practises can disrupt Hindu culture, for example, the British slaughter and consumption of sacred cows described on p. 104. Indeed, his fear of infiltration from the English parallels similar feelings in English consciousness, which serves as fundamental to the impulse of social domination evidenced by colonialism. He indicates that this corrupted religion – these “Christians of the new system” – is heavily tied to a mercantilist ideology of individualism and the aggressive accumulation of wealth: poverty is consequently “stigmatised with a degree of infamy ... by their very laws, and under the immediate inspection of their sage magistrates, it is punished in the most exemplary manner ... [and] is evident throughout the tenor of law”.

Atheism is linked to the renunciation of Nature, and indeed perception itself in its once absolute (ie: religious, as per St. Augustine) and Platonic conceptions. Industrialization remains a shadow to this censoring of the Natural. By endeavouring to remove elements of (perceived) chaos from such rituals, thus ostensibly making them both more concrete and absolute, power is reclaimed away from the Other onto the Self, for it is the localization of subjective experience that allows the Foucauldian conception of knowledge / power to be realized. In a rather vulgar sense, it is absolute subjectivity which allows the performance of identity to occur at its most potent, and the institutionalization of subjects within the discourse of national politics serves to remedy the question of free will which serves as the basis of Enlightenment philosophy. To invoke a rather overused (at least in the polemics of Marxist interpretation) example, the interpellative gestures involved in the exercise of authority serve to qualify the interpellated subject as one whose identity is only fully realized in the act of sublimation to the state apparatus. It is for this reason that Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of self-annihilation were so confounding to the imperial apparatus of control, for there was no “subject” with which the state could respond; such, however, is the future of Indian colonial history which served as the illogical outcome of the process of colonization as elaborated in Hamilton’s text.

The quasi-scientific categorization of Indian culture which opens the text, book-ended with a functional glossary of Hindi terms, is emblematic of this gesture to order. It represents a quantification and hierarchization of the legitimate or authentic – data which is judged in- or admissible, itself a mark entered upon the archive of cultural legitimacy understood in the vein of Derrida’s censors in Archive Fever, where agents exercising varying degrees of power / knowledge legitimate themselves as guardians of culture by virtue of their exclusionary function. Any sense of truth, or indeed of subjective authenticity, emerges from the process of archiving that “truth”. The judgement of the censors reflects the structural apparati which created the archons themselves as agents of power, in the process reifying the very ideological field in which truth (and by extension, any sense of the real) is determined. Judgement is given sentimental value according to taste and education, and accordingly reflects a very clear ideological positions antithetical to the principles of the universalist impulse to which it gestures. Thus that which is deemed admissible into the archive is that which can be rationalized as authentic. Of course, that which is deemed authentic under such circumstances must be understood in the relative conditions for such an appraisal argued by the Rajah throughout most of the novel. It is this element of the text which is the most ontologically problematic, as this sense of relativism is in fact emergent from a universalizing principle of European rationalism. This is perhaps best represented in the character of the student Delomond, who speaks with the conviction and exclusionary self-aggrandizement of Enlightenment discourse: “the connection between philosophy and virtue is “so natural, that it is only their separation that can excite surprise; for is not the very basis of science, a sincere and disinterested love of truth? ... it promotes a detestation of everything that is mean or base” (208). In a very real sense, truth is ontologically dependent on this specific process of critical inquiry – the infamous scientific method which emerged in the 17th century. As Doctor Severan explains, “there are few predominant dispositions of the mind, which may not be analysed and traced through their origin and progress by any one who will give himself the trouble to pursue the necessary process” (214). Of course, Delomond’s last statement reflects the entry of judgement into discourse, and consequently the individual exercises its sense of evaluation along the principles outlined by Derridian thought, namely in a process which transfers meaning from context to subject as outlined a moment ago. In his opening letter, calls for a localist outlook relative to the whole of society, describing the utopian system of law as one of representational democracy: “all laws are therefore issued by the sanction of their representatives; every separate district, town, and community, choosing from among themselves, the persons most distinguished for piety, wisdom, learning, and integrety, impart to them the power of acting in the name of the whole” (85). This statement closely mirrors the thought of the period, from Locke to Hume, concerning the primacy of the individual subject for the legitimacy of the political system. The Rajah’s initial acceptance of English culture as a totality signals the inscription of colonial values onto his position within Hindu society. In other words, the most efficient manner in which the British could subjugate the Indian population was to convince the ruling class of the benefits of English civilization.

It is this Preliminary Explication which serves to most wholly exemplify the colonial project, as the agency and autonomy of the colonized (quantized, categorized) subjects are most blatantly denied. There is no examination of the contradictions and irrationalities evidenced by a social body, but rather one can interpret this section as an explanation of social characteristics within absolute terms. This section is far too reductive in outlook, and serves to oppose the beliefs of some post-colonial critics that “all identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical, or, in orther words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behaviour, and collective symbols”. Consequently, the social castes serve as a uniform entity ideologically mobilized in order to rationalize social control; in the very real history of English colonization of India, the controlling castes – the brahmin – were used to more efficiently control the Ryots, or Indian peasantry, which vastly outnumbered any military force Britain could station in the country. Similarly reductive is the distillation of English society into the three classes of People of Family, People without Family, and People of style. The degree of individuation espoused by Enlightenment philosophy is ontologically antithetical to this particular rationalist impulse. And yet the sequence involving the Rajah’s experience with the English legal system – localized as a Hall of Justice, and more specifically as “the Magistrate seated in his chair” (251) – demonstrates the degree to which enlightenment logic can deconstruct its own principles. Citing Locke and Berkely among others, the defence council argues that identity (and by extension truth) is not a constant, but is defined by the moment of its expression, and is consequently situationally based: “what is right? what is wrong? what is vice? what is virtue? but terms merely relative” (254). Reason itself is not an absolute entity existing a priori in human subjectivity. Rather, it is the system of meaning – Foucault’s science of order – emerging from the conscious subject and projected externally. It seems evident that this sequence is intended to serve as a parody of the judicial system and its ontological faults as a social institution intended to dictate the properly moral behaviour of humanity, especially in relation to the legal corruptions of justice within capitalist society, as outlined on p. 241.

As elaborated by Foucault, a society of control requires a consistent indoctrination of specific ideological practises. It is for this reason that Hamilton examines the nature of the English educational system, which for the most part excluded women from any degree of involvement. Through many of the letters, a philosophy of equal educational opportunity is elaborated. Indeed, the status of women is ostensibly juxtaposed with that of the colonial subject, each as a subject lacking agency due to the Enlightenment discourse of control. In a very real sense, women is socialized as being antithetical and in a binary relation to Enlightenment philosophy: “the education of boys is, in same degree, calculated to open, and gradually prepare the mind for the reception of knowledge; that of girls, on the contrary, is from their very cradles, inimical to the cultivation of any one rational idea” (221). Reason is itself a censoring of that which is not male, or perhaps more precisely, that which is male defines reason by virtue of an endeavour to control the influence of what is deemed outside of the subjective discourse of masculinity proper. As Julia Kristeva outlines in Strangers to Ourselves (and further elaborated in Nations without Nationalism), “women have the luck and the responsibility of being boundary subjects: body and thought, biology and language .... origin and judgement, nation and world” (STO, 35). Hamilton’s solution to this problem is itself highly problematic, for, in appealing to the importance of education for female agency and realization of ability, she invokes the same masculinized control of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The fifth letter perhaps best exemplifies this imperative, as it outlines the benefits of providing women with the same ‘rational’ education that men received. It is not the engendering of knowledge which is itself most problematic, but rather that Hamilton ignores the socio-economic aspects of education as well, namely that the poor did not have the means to be themselves educated.

As the philosophical trajectory of the novel – despite an ostensible relocation to an anti-imperial ideological position – remains tied to a discriminate assumption of the voice of the subjects of colonialism, I believe that it reflects a less than equitable relationship between England and India. The Indian subject, viewed in its most absolute sense, has no voice or sense of agency. Several breaks in the narrative suggest an attempt to provide an Other for discourse itself, as though Hamilton were aware of the conceptual limitations of her text. There are several temporal breaks in the Rajah’s correspondence, most easily evidenced by the editorial interjection on page 144. In the postmodern, this gesture might have taken the form of the annihilation of the medium itself; one can see for example, the dissolution of the structure of the film in regard to the ability to authentically represent a variety of subjectivities in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry for example, in which all narrative focus locus meaning with the interruption of the “real world” into that of the film itself, questioning the very notion of the “Real” to which representation is gauged. Concurrently, there is no Britain described in Hamilton’s text that is not the projection of a self-reflexive subjectivity onto the Other which is subject to imperial control; it is in many respects supportive of the subjugation of the Indian subjects which the novel ostensibly wishes to liberate. Consequently, the novel can be seen to sustain the dominant ideological position exercised by the imperial Will, thus supporting the repressive institutional structures of colonialism. That being said, there is a degree to which I liked the book...