Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Kingsley Martin's critique of imperialism was born out of socialist rationalism and long overseas lecture tours. But in Leonard Woolf, his friend and periodic replacement at the offices of the New Statesman, we have a confidant who had, for several years before 1914, abandoned the rarefied circles of Bloomsbury, to become a civil administrator in Ceylon. Woolf's experience of colonial government had soured him from the beginning. He came to feel that the British were eternally shut out from knowledge of the lives of the Ceylonese subjects by an almost palpable curtain of ignorance and racial prejudice. Those temples of accumulated colonial knowledge, the district offices where he worked, were ‘great monuments of official incompetence, bottlenecks of delay’. When he tried to galvanize into action these places of sacred lore, the squeals of rage, from Briton and Ceylonese alike, were louder than if he had trespassed into the holiest Buddhist shrine. Yet, for all that, Woolf remained a devout believer in the individualist myth that sustained colonial rule: the ideal of the lone colonial officer and sage, standing at the centre of a web of untainted knowledge, the man who ‘knows the country’.British rule might be saved from damnation if liberal judgement were based on pure information. The problem was that, at some level, information hadto come from a ‘native informant’, an agent, a spy, an ‘approver’ who turned King's Evidence, and, by their very nature, such agencies could not be trusted.
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8 Ibid.
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57 Examination of Mahomed Wauris, ibid.
58 Edmonstone to Elphinstone, December. 1808 encloses, Brooke, T., Benares, to Edmonstone, 20 June 1808, Home Misc. 657; Edmondstone's minute, ‘Memorandum respecting the credibility of the supposed intrigue between Raja Runjeet Singh and Amrut Row’, 28 Aug. 1808. Home Misc. 592. There were doubts whether the runner could actually have travelled these vast distances (Lahore Benares in 35 days; Kabul Agra in 38 days) in the time stated, but not that communications were still open.Google Scholar
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107 I am indebted to Joanna Innes for information on this issue and also to her unpublished paper ‘The Collection and Use of Information by Government [in England] circa 1690–1800.’
108 See, e.g., Home Misc. 556, 557, 577, ‘Notes on Europeans and Asiatics’, and other similar personal intelligence files used both in London and Calcutta; Cf. The Asiatick Annual Register, or a View of the History of Hindostan for 1799 (London, 1800).Google Scholar
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115 This point has been made by Seema Alavi; the ‘invalid thana’ which she discusses below was evidently also useful as an intelligence gathering institution.
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125 Cited in Dilks, D., Curzon in India, i, Achievement (London, 1969), pp. 221–48.Google Scholar
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129 Ibid., pp. 3–20, ‘Agrawalon ki Utpatti’ which is based upon oral tradition, vanshawalis and literary sources British and traditional. Much of his knowledge of the history of Benares and its temples was built up by simply talking to priests, pandas and gosains.
130 For a recent example of a social study based on the concept of communication see, Steele, Ian K., The English Atlantic 1675–1740 (New York, 1986).Google ScholarMy attention has also been drawn to Habib, I., ‘Postal Communications in Mughal India’, Procs Ind. Hist. Congress, 46th Session, pp. 236–52;Google ScholarSiddiqi, M. Z., ‘The Intelligence Service under the Mughals’, Medieval India, a Miscellany, 2 (London, 1972), pp. 54ff.Google Scholar