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The Challenge of Gau Mata: British Policy and Religious Change in India, 1880–1916

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Peter Robb
Peter Robb
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Extract

That people get the governments they deserve is a saying born out of the expectation of citizens to influence the choice of rulers, or that societies mould states. Perhaps, conversely, when governments are imposed on people, especially by outsiders, they are likely to be more than usually influential. Certainly, in India, social and religious changes are thought to have occurred under British rule. Official records provide much of the evidence for this. Yet British policy and attitudes in this area have not been very fully analysed. This essay is an attempt to start closing the gap, and it is hoped will provide some insight indirectly into how the records were produced and what was seen of social and religious change in the later nineteenth century—both matters ultimately of importance to the understanding of the period. Special attention will be paid to the cow-protection movements between 1880 and 1916.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 285 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Poll, H.. A 19–20, 04 1911.Google Scholar In this discussion I do not mean to dissent from the claim made by one scholar that the caste associations, in so far as they attended to ritual questions at all, did so to define their community or the illusion of one, as much as or more than to improve their position in the hierarchy. See Carroll, Lucy, ‘Caste, Social Change, and the Social Scientist’, Journal of Asian Studies XXXV, 1(11 1975), pp. 63–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 PCR 335, 33/3 (1881).

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11 See my ‘Officials and Non-Officials as Leaders in Popular Agitations: Shahabad 1917 and other “Conspiracies”’, in Pandey, B. N. (ed.), Leadership in South Asia (New Delhi, 1977)Google Scholar; Gyan Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpur Region, c. 1888–1917’, Occasional Paper No. 19, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, October 1981; Robinson, Francis, Separatism among Indian Muslims (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; and McLane, John, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar On social change, I am unable to follow Pandey when he assumes that his period saw the immiseration both of the rentier classes and the vast majority of labourers and cultivators (questions which are too complex to be thus glibly disposed of), or in his more or less unsubstantiated assertion that cow-protection among Ahirs in Shahabad was an ‘autonomous’ movement. He also argues that earlier approaches to this subject (including mine) reflect ‘elitism’, meaning they attend to leading or dominant roles in preference to those of middling or lower groups. I do not think this charge sustainable or that the opposite approach is in fact adopted by Pandey in his essay; but in any case I think the argument I advance here against ‘elitism’ is a better one than the rather tortuous reasoning of Pandey. The following paragraphs on the British view of cow-protection are drawn mainly from Public, H. B 309–414, 01 1894Google Scholar and Poll, H.. Dep. 4, 04 1912.Google Scholar They are not intended as a general history of cow-protection or the Arya Samaj. For general surveys see the works cited above (esp. McLane, chas 9 and 10), the works cited in notes 25 and 39 below, and, on the Arya Samaj in the Punjab, Jones, Kenneth W., Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab (Berkeley, 1976), esp. chas IV to VI.Google Scholar See also Parel, Antony, ‘The Political Symbolism of the Cow in India’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies VII (1969), pp. 179–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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58 C. R. Cleveland, 11 May, A. Earle, 26 May, and Jenkins, J. L., 26 05 1910Google Scholar, Poll, H.. Dep. 4, 04 1912.Google Scholar For a discussion of government policy on cow-protection, see Gene Robert Thursby, ‘Aspects of Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India’, Duke University Ph.D. 1972, esp. chas 3 and 4; the analysis, however, does not go beyond describing a policy of hesitancy and reluctance to be involved. For the 1920s see also Barrier, N. Gerald (ed.), Roots of Communal Politics (New Delhi, 1976).Google Scholar

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