Responding to time

Did Indians notice and assess British conduct as a whole? Europeans and Indians still occupied different worlds. My suggestion is not that they interacted as friends, though some did. 1 Nor am I denying that British rule could be confrontational and resented, though on this occasion I have not sought evidence to support what is a common assumption, with many examples: slavery, opium addiction and so on. Yes, modern Europeans took existing evils and multiplied them, far from their own lands. It criminalised some traditional practices. But even all that does not prove that everything they touched was equally damaged. One contemporary context was a brazen justification of imperial dominion; another was the belief that economies and public well-being could and should be improved. In this book, finding that increasingly significant changes in time seem to have been largely accepted by Indians, I looked for British attitudes and policies that might contextualise and explain that reaction. My conclusion is not really surprising: mutual influence came through sharing space and activities, as for Indians engaged in European projects, and Indian scholars, merchants, traders and artisans, suppliers of materials, clerks, teachers, sepoys, hosts of public workers or servants. Local as well as European merchants and entrepreneurs became wealthy under Company rule, though business fortunes were often fragile. 2 All such Indians had to experience Europeans in the round, their good and bad attitudes and behaviour. Their reactions were not straightforward nor always respected. A good instance is Indians’ early adoption of British legal process in their own interest, often overcoming their well-known reservations, for example about swearing an oath in court, thought ‘a disgrace for a good Hindu’, as Blechynden put it. 3 Consider the example of the surveyor, Colin Mackenzie, when his ‘Bramin’ complained about the conduct of certain men. He had been ‘exceedingly distressed’ but reluctant about raising the matter as a woman was involved, thus showing typical ‘delicacy of this class of people in not wishing to bring their domestic affairs before our Court’. Mackenzie thought him ‘highly injured’ and urged him to act to ‘prevent the inconvenience’. One of the culprits was eventually given a dozen lashes and then ‘put [to hard labour] on the high roads for three weeks’. 4