A local vernacular newspaper and a controversial letter

What exactly was the Simla Akhbār? Accounts differ in their descriptions of the linguistic medium of the newspaper, variously described as Hindi, Urdu, or Persian; according to Garcin de Tassy, it was printed in the Devanagari script.Footnote ³ At a time when the politics of language in India was in considerable flux, it is not surprising to find such shifting characterisations. Evidently, the targeted subscribers were mostly aristocratic Hindus and a few Europeans. The paper was managed by Sayyid Abdullah ‘Shabnam’, and it began bimonthly publication in 1848 in the hill station of Simla, the summer administrative capital of colonial India. The number of issues published is uncertain, since hardly any copies survive.Footnote ⁴ Reports indicate that the paper continued to be published until 1852, with a gap of several months in 1850. Its circulation was quite limited (in 1851, there were just 98 subscribers, of whom 46 were Hindus, 3 Muslims, 33 Christians, and the remainder institutions).Footnote ⁵ But as one of the first native newspapers in British India, the Simla News enjoyed some prestige, receiving patronage from the British Resident in Simla, William Edwards, who had subscriptions set up for leading colonial officials.

By 1849 the newspaper was losing money, and the proprietor was forced to sell it. The new owner was Shivaprasad (1823–1895), trained as a munshi and successively employed by a series of Indian aristocrats (including the Raja of Benares) and highly placed colonial officials, notably Sir Henry Elliott. Sayyid Abdullah was hired back to help run the paper, which now proceeded under the editorial direction of Shivaprasad.

Regarding the content of the newspaper, only a few contemporary remarks about it can be found, but surviving references indicate that it published articles of scientific and historical import, especially translations from English; it was described by a contemporary publication as being ‘of the Useful Knowledge order’.Footnote ⁶ Examples include translations of an article on a medieval copper plate inscription in 1848, of H. H. Wilson's introduction to a translation of the Rig Veda, and of an archaeological article in 1849 by Alexander Cunningham, director of the Archaeological Survey of India.Footnote ⁷ The Simla News, and the later career of Shivaprasad, may be considered examples of the transmission of British scholarship into the modern languages of India, with an emphasis on history and the related fields of geography and archaeology.Footnote ⁸ Shivaprasad would become a passionate spokesperson for this project and an admirer of the British officials who directed it (Cunningham calls Shivaprasad ‘my friend’). Moreover, Shivaprasad would become one of the major advocates of the use of Hindi against Urdu by the late 1860s, and he seems to have fully subscribed to Sir Henry Elliott's hostile depiction of the ‘Muhammadan’ period of Indian history, together with its thinly veiled use of that critique to justify the benefits of British colonial rule.Footnote ⁹

Shivaprasad's later ideological position is not yet apparent in the text under consideration, which seems to belong to an earlier phase in the development of identity politics and the internalisation of colonial epistemology. His remarks form part of a compilation put together by a little-known munshi, Ganga Bishan Kawl (known by the pen name ‘Fikrat’), which is to be found in a small manuscript anthology in the British Library.Footnote ¹⁰ This short text, entitled ‘The Spirit Explained’, consists of the following sections: (1) a preface by Fikrat, describing a letter to the editor of the Simla News, questioning the immortality of the soul, and the discussion that followed, which he decided to preserve in this document; (2) a cover letter from Shivaprasad to Fikrat, dated 2 June (1850?), requesting his assistance in conveying the article to Sital Singh; (3) the text of the article; (4) Sital Singh's response; and (5) a closing epigraph supplied in the margin by Fikrat. All of these sections are in Persian, with the exception of the letter itself (see section 3 below), which is in Hindustani in the Persian script. There is no indication which script the original letter employed, and it draws upon a vocabulary that includes both Sanskritic and Perso-Arabic words. If the letter was printed in Devanagari, it would be interesting to see whether it differed from the text in the manuscript version. The munshis (presumably all Hindus) deployed Islamic formulas in Arabic with their customary aplomb. A few marginal terms and comments in Hindi and Sanskrit are written in unconnected Devanagari characters, although a couple of letters are in the Nandinagari style. A complete translation and a diplomatic edition of the original texts follows at the end of these remarks.

Sital Singh, a cosmopolitan munshi

Although the seeds of Shivaprasad's later development had already been planted, in 1850 he was still imbued with some of the cosmopolitan spirit of the munshi trained in the Persianate literary tradition. Having grown up in the shade of the Benares royal court, Shivaprasad still had the greatest reverence for one of the most eminent munshis, Sital Singh (1776–1854), who was renowned for his mastery of calligraphy, poetry, and philosophy, and had trained the most prominent munshis of the next generation.Footnote ¹¹ Sital Singh's erudite literary production, using the pen-name ‘Bīkhwud’, included a collection of Persian poems, mystical aphorisms, and commentaries on Sufi writings as well as the Arabic verses of Ibn Arabi in his influential Sufi treatise, Fusūs al-hikam. When asked by British judge John Deane to compile a census of Benares in 1800, Sital Singh took the opportunity to embellish it with descriptions of 48 different kinds of ascetic residing in Benares, to which he added a Persian philosophical defence of Vedanta, using only the Persian and Arabic vocabulary of later Islamic philosophers to make his points.Footnote ¹²

The first edition of the Persian poems of Sital Singh came out in print with the title Khayāl-i Bīkhwudī (‘Imagination of the Selfless’) in 1851, near the time the Simla News article was published, with the support of the Raja of Benares.Footnote ¹³ Then a second printing of Khayāl-i Bīkhwudī was produced in Benares at the Kashi Press in 1273/1857 (the title is a chronogram for 1273). The text was edited by none other than Shivaprasad, who described the volume in classic munshi style:

All this goes to show that Sital Singh was unquestionably viewed with the greatest respect among the munshis, so it is clear why he was the authority who was asked to clarify how to respond to the question of the immortality of the soul.

Responding to the letter

The identity of the author of the letter to the Simla News is not known. Shivaprasad evidently decided that the topic was too weighty for him to handle alone, so he sent two copies of the newspaper to Fikrat, asking the latter to show it to Sital Singh and request him to opine on the subject. The letter begins on a forceful note, announcing that it will deal with a scientific question, not a religious one, to be solved by reason rather than traditional authority. It questions the possibility of the soul existing apart from the body, pointing to modern medical findings that locate different mental and emotional functions in different parts of the brain. The English are cited as denying that animals have intellects, a conclusion that the letter writer finds doubtful, though he ends by denying that mind or consciousness can exist without the brain. Evidently this argument was initially considered scientific and ‘useful’ enough to be published, but it caused some consternation when it came time to compose a reply that could appear in the newspaper.

Sital Singh in his response did not take the bait of treating the immortality of the soul as a question susceptible to scientific proof. He acknowledged that he understood the point of the letter, pausing to digress by quoting a spurious verse by Sadi so he could make a pun on his pen name (‘selfless’). He then addressed the question of the immortality of the spirit as a fundamentally political one, following the Platonic notion of religion as a noble lie, a doctrine implicitly supported by Farabi and Ibn Sina in their philosophical writings. That is, the entire basis of morality and public order rests on the promise of reward and punishment in the afterlife. If the masses and the criminally minded can be assured that immortality is a fiction, disproved by modern science, then there is no limit to the damage that will be done to society. It is striking that neither Sital Singh nor the junior munshis bothered to refute the argument that the soul disappears at the time of the body's death. Indeed, Sital Singh is scathing in his portrayal of the masses being manipulated by religious authorities with such religious doctrines. He treats the fiction of the afterlife as a secret that, like the esoteric truths of philosophy in general, should be rigorously kept from the unworthy. Fikrat's closing verse simply emphasises this point. As a result, all indications are that the letter went unanswered, as the munshis decided that it was preferable to ignore it and avoid controversy.

The increasing irrelevance of the munshi

So what does this correspondence tell us about the position of the munshis at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, in the wrenching transition from the late Mughal cosmos to the brave new world of the colonial regime? Sital Singh had realised some years previously that there was no going back. In a comprehensive survey of Hinduism completed around 1809, entitled The Charm of Manifestation, he presented a summary of the Sanskrit curriculum on all major subjects of learning. In so doing, he supplied not only the Arabic or Persian equivalents of the Sanskrit categories of knowledge, but also the English ones (e.g. Sanskrit shastra = Arabic fiqh = English ‘code’).

In later years, Sital Singh followed this theoretical concession to the new epistemology with practical measures. He established a charitable trust in his own name in 1843, to be administered by the colonial authorities, with the funds to be used to support the education of Hindu boys in a modern scientific curriculum in schools run by missionaries.Footnote ¹⁵ His students seem to have been interested in the new technology of printing, judging from a treatise one of them published in Urdu in 1848.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet they do not appear to have appreciated the possible transformations that might result from widespread literacy and mass media. It is understandable that, with a newspaper like the Simla Akhbār, which had such a tiny number of subscribers, it might not have been easy for the munshis to grasp the potential effects of journalism on a larger scale.

The compilation of these texts by Fikrat remained very much in the courtly style of Persian culture. The Hindu munshis regularly use terms that echo standard Islamic religious language, such as the Islamic blessings at the beginning of the letter, and the expression ‘souls that command evil’ (nufūs-i ammāra, an allusion to Quran 12:53, and the phrase ‘the Hindus’ scripture’ (umm al-kitāb, Quran 3:7). The contents of the other treatises in the anthology reflect the mixture of cultural and administrative topics that defined the munshis’ activities: (1) a letter from Fikrat to another munshi, thanking him for sending a copy of the Dabistān, the well-known eclectic Persian treatise on religions; (2) Fikrat's narrative of his travels across northern India in 1850–1851; (3) an account of a meeting between a raja and the British governor-general in 1849; (4) a Rām Gītā in Persian composed by Sital Singh; (5) ‘The Spirit Explained’, the text presented here; and (6) an untitled work on metaphysics.Footnote ¹⁷

As far as the natural sciences were concerned, it was already clear to many that the new order had to be accepted. Yet it is doubtful that Sital Singh held the same view of colonial approaches to language, religion, and culture. His brief response to the letter in the Simla News steadfastly maintained the lofty tone of Persianate literature and philosophy inflected by Sufism, which he had spent a lifetime cultivating. His willingness to conceal the implications of modern medicine from the public, as a measure to shore up the religious basis of morality, owes more to Farabi than to David Hume. Sital Singh may have had some familiarity with European debates on philosophy and religion, through his close friendship with the maverick Greek Indologist, Demetrios Galanos (1760–1833), who spent decades in Benares translating Sanskrit texts into modern Greek. Sital Singh praised Galanos as ‘the Plato of the age’ in a Persian quatrain inscribed as an elegy on the tombstone of Galanos. Such perspectives could have furnished Sital Singh with parallels to the rationalist thinkers of the Persianate sphere, but he did not draw upon the radical implications of the Enlightenment to replace Sadi and Ibn Arabi.

For Shivaprasad things would be different. While his cover letter does not explain his thinking about the letter, in hindsight one might imagine him dealing with it as a policy decision on the kinds of communication that were appropriate to be published in a newspaper. Although the technology of print was creating new publics and new social imaginaries, the munshis’ reflection on this letter to the editor seems to have treated it as if it were a manuscript. Yet in other respects Shivaprasad was shifting his attitudes towards the styles of cultural production in which he had been trained. He had readily absorbed Sir Henry Elliott's wholesale condemnation of Muslim rule in India, and he began to move away from the acceptance of Hindustani as a common mother tongue of Indians, becoming a major advocate of replacing Urdu with a Hindi language suitable for a largely Hindu nation.

Gradually, the positions advocated by Shivaprasad became hardened, enhanced by the concepts of race, language, religion, and culture that had become the main currency of the colonial era. The Persianate culture in which he was still immersed in 1850, and which he celebrated by publishing Sital Singh's poetic works in 1857, became anachronistic after that date, marked by revolt against British rule and all the reprisals that followed. Explaining the reasons for Shivaprasad's alienation from the worldview of his early training is beyond the scope of this article, but his development into a spokesperson for new concepts of identity is unmistakeable. By 1868, his full-throated cry for the rejection of Urdu employed all the rhetoric of racial, linguistic, and religious purity that has become the hallmark of nationalism. Thus he could say, with bold defiance:

At this point, there is no longer any question about the successful transmission of European ideologies of modernity to India, although Shivaprasad ironically seems not to have understood that the British assigned Persian to the category of Aryan, not Semitic, languages.

But the other munshis retained habits formed by the earlier regime; their debates were still conducted in Persian, embellished with flourishes of Arabic and Sanskrit. Their discussion of the letter rejecting immortality is ironic. They treated the newspaper as though it were a manuscript destined to be restricted to an elite audience. And their discussion was carried out with little awareness that newspapers would soon become a medium of mass communication, composed in a vernacular language and increasingly disconnected from premodern canons. As a result, at this juncture the munshis did not fully realise that it would not be long until their services would no longer be required. And with no response to the letter being published, the spirit remained unexplained.

Translation of ‘The Spirit Explained’

Edition of ‘The Spirit Explained’Footnote ²⁴