top of page

How did moral panics inform British colonial policies in India during the nineteenth century?

By Daniil Alexseev [Edited by Megan Saunders and Tertia Bloor]


How did various kinds of moral panics inform British colonial policies in India during the nineteenth century?


Despite its territorial expansion and magnitude of successes, the British state in India remained continuously insecure. Prone to decision-making based on what was feared, many policies in the nineteenth century were inspired and influenced by moral panics as reactions to major colonial revelations. This essay will focus on three cases – the abolition of sati, the suppression of thugs and the legislative war on fanatics – as evidence to support that notion. Likewise, it will recognise a similar idea of information panics as a valuable factor for thuggee and fanatics. Lastly, by presenting the examples in chronological order, the essay will argue that despite changed framings of the issues, the British ultimately always encountered a similar crisis in principle, from which the complete case will be built.


The abolition of sati provides a perfect starting point for assessing the influence of moral panics on colonial policies. By its simple definition, a moral panic would be a phenomenon of arousing social concern over an issue, usually exaggerated.[1] Brown, however, stresses, that in the British empire’s context, cases like sati ‘pointed toward incivility and inhumanity lying just below the surface of Indian society and culture’, to which the British inability to deal with it efficiently enough led to a ‘crisis of governance […] reflecting deeply felt British anxieties about their tenure on the subcontinent.’[2] The moral panics from this point on will be seen as that, then – a crisis of governance threatening the British rule.


It is within that context that we should approach the abolition of sati: despite the initial appalled but willing tolerance of voluntarily, scripture-fitting sati, the emergent aspects of a moral panic inevitably led to the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829.[3] According to it, the government deemed the termination of the practice as ‘rational and civilised’, continuous sanctioning of which would be unjustifiable to ‘thousands of victims’ and incompatible with ‘future happiness and improvement […] of this eastern world’ under the British rule.[4] Unpacking this statement, we first can look at the ‘thousands’ figure. The document purposefully glosses over a specific number, and its overall message makes it sound much worse than it was: according to official statistics, ‘fewer than 1,000 widows were burned each year’, and although appearing through an entire subcontinent, the practice was partaken by only a small fraction of widows in certain lineages.[5] Colonial officials, however, occasionally witnessed resistance to it, with the widows coerced by their relatives and particularly male Hindus, likely creating the figures based not off the victims, but off the density of Indian society that seemingly worked against the widows.[6]


Further emphasis on ‘happiness and improvement’ is the most notable aspect of the moral panic’s influence here. Given the theological nature of the practice, the government’s position by 1829 would be devised from viewing the Indian society as aligned to scriptures interpreted by the brahmins. Walter Ewer, a superintendent of police in the Lower Provinces, assessed that it was thus the ‘hungry brahmins’, being the ones to officiate sati, who applied pressure on widows for their own virtuous and monetary rewards.[7] By this rhetoric, sati would be a crisis of specifically moral governance for the British, one where they, technically in charge, stood by exploitation. In such a scenario, any legislation emerging would carry the paternal essence of the civilising mission – ‘giving back to the natives the truths of their own’ – and in the case in sati, it evidently did.[8]


The notion is furthered by the document’s passionate use of rationality and civility against sati. Whilst a reading within Christian morality is possible, the emphasis here should be on a broader Western morality related to women. An emergent Victorian gender ideology at the time saw women as the ‘weaker sex’ and ‘passive, serene and spiritual guardians of moral virtue.’[9] Logically, their protection would be essential to securing the fabric of society itself, but the very idea of sati flew in the face of that ideology, undermining passiveness with self-sacrifice and protection with coercion. Noting the crisis of moral governance, in tandem with the aforementioned factors, the moral panic’s influence on the policy becomes undeniable.


Turning to thuggee, a separate dimension of information panic has to be introduced. The two are not mutually exclusive: information panic arises from the lack of intel on the matter at large, creating a greater sense of anxiety regarding a possible threat, exacerbating the crisis of governance observed in a moral panic. At large, it manifests itself in two aspects, as Fischer-Tiné outlines: ‘the frustration of trying to understand another society and environment felt by colonising powers’ and ‘the fault-lines of [mis]communication’ permitting the spread of panic.[10] By viewing the thuggee situation through these two aspects, we see that the legislation was influenced primarily by the information panic.


The manifestation of these aspects can be first traced in EIC’s reliance on intelligence and databases within its operations, primarily coming out of the formal native sources such as district offices.[11] Underneath those formal sources, however, were ‘old intelligence communities’, of which the British were aware, but unable to tap into: their nature of loyalties, situated within those same communities, simply did not answer to the British.[12] Under these circumstances, unable to account for common highway robberies happening outside of EIC’s jurisdictions in a centralised bureaucratic way, the ‘thug scare’ was born from ‘the British fear of all wandering people.’[13] In reality, some of them were religious mendicants, others – Pindari raiders, or worse still, dacoit bands – mobile, well-organised armed robbers, ‘often work[ing] hand-in-glove with village chowkidars.’[14] In the Company’s imagination, however, with many princes and communities refusing to cooperate in catching these ‘criminals’, a mix all of these unaccounted groups together took hold of rationale, assuming chronic immorality, disorder and crime to be the norm beyond their reach.[15]


These mixed assumptions seemed to have been confirmed by an early confession of a captured thug, describing ritualistic and generational aspects of the crime.[16] The rapid filling of the information void allowed for a theory of an organised criminal framework in the Indian underbelly, reflecting the British failure ‘to know the subjects of their governance and identify threats to their rule.’[17] The notion of paternal civilising mission comes back here, as just as sati, thugs were claimed to be a threat for the native population, but the dimension of information panic allows us to further understand the British anxieties within the specifics of the thuggee legislations.[18]


The legislations in question were Act XXX of 1836 and XXIV of 1843. Codifying the punishments to anyone associated with thugs, heavy emphasis has to be noted on the approvers system within those acts, ‘wherein captured thugs could provide evidence against their partners in crime.’[19] The method is clearly a tactic to tap into the criminal underworld of India first-hand, through which the British sought to repair their patchy and incomplete knowledge.[20] Yet in further consideration of policy, we are finally able to link the information and moral panic together: testimonies against their colleagues were traded for a pardon.[21] Not only does this detail eradicate the notion of native protection but furthers the argument of governance crisis – the legislation was about the British affirming their powers in judicial and criminal worlds alike, to which the information deficit was an obstacle. Thus, the influence of information and moral panic can be seen once again.


Still, the legislative war on fanatics was the greatest example of combining both moral and information panics. Following the Rebellion 1857, the British continuously reinforced policies of ‘special protection’ ‘of the ‘ruling race’, especially in parts of India where […] crimes were commonplace.’[22] This ‘special protection’ of Europeans in the British Raj in the latter half of the 19th century, however, was no different to the earlier crises of Company governance – the only difference was the lack of pretence of protecting the subjects. Thus, the legislation in particularly troublesome regions such as frontiers – ‘remote, physically inaccessible regions populated by supposedly ‘backward’, ‘jungly’, and ‘tribal peoples’ often unaccountable for, like thugs – transpired the supposed Western principle of treating their subjects equally.[23]


It is within those boundaries that the fear of fanatics first emerges. Although Punjab’s North-West Frontier witnessed 703 murders between 1851 to 1857, it was the sixteen Europeans and their servants killed in sudden and unprecedented attacks in broad daylight betweem 1849 and 1867 that catalysed fears.[24] These murders were connected only by religious undertones such as ‘want[ing] to kill an infidel’, as confessed by one of the perpetrators, or by those of race, certain of killing a European being a ‘meritorious action’, as confessed by another.[25] Unable to investigate properly, the rushed conclusion of the officials was Islamic fanaticism, obsessed with revenge for the events of 1857 – an imagined conspiracy that portrayed a profound threat to imperial security, to which simple codified legal boundaries of the British rule did not extend.[26]


A major example of this would be the Murderous Outrage Act of 1867, wherein branding of fanaticism extended to anyone who carried out an attempt on a European’s life, with immediate sentencing of only two options: execution or transportation for life, all carried out with no jury.[27] Such drastic sweepings of uniform procedures and any resemblance of due process for this one legislation shows that the policy towards ‘fanatics’ was justified purely on the British position of insecurity, of not being able to do enough conventionally within the set legal boundaries of its own codified laws.[28] Kolsky highlights John Lawrence’s words, of necessitating ‘an overwhelmingly forceful response to teach the people “a lesson of obedience.”’[29] Stating this as an argument for transgressing the boundaries which the regime in power imposed, however, is the same as admitting defeat of the colonising mission and admitting a crisis of governance where the morality of the coloniser becomes simply unsustainable in his own realm. That was what the British did. Thus, in the combined influence of both moral and information panics, the legislation on fanatics was created.


Concluding, the influence of moral panics on the British policies in India was undeniable. The continuous anxiety of allowing a ‘misinterpretation of religion’ in sati, the ‘wandering lawlessness’ of thugs, and especially the conspiracy of Islamic fanatics seeking to destroy the British rule in similar to 1857 fashion – all of these were much greater influences on policy than any facts and statistics ever could be. The changed framings, of civilising mission to the protection of the ruling race, likewise reveal to us that data was valuable in justifying the policies as protecting their subjects, but panics fuelled the imagination of extending the British control over India. For if they showed one thing for certain, it’s painting the British as weaker than they were, to which more power would be a natural remedy.[30] Thus, it is in these ways that the various kinds of moral panics informed British colonial policies in nineteenth century India.


Notes

[1] John Scott, A Dictionary of Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 492.

[2] Mark Brown, Crime, Governance and the Company Raj: The Discovery of Thuggee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 82.

[3] Anand A. Yang, Whose Sati? Widow Burning in Early 19th Century India (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 12.

[4] Yang, Whose Sati?, p. 9.

[5] C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 122; Yang, Whose Sati?, p. 23.

[6] Lata Mani, The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 129.

[7] Mani, The Debate on Sati, p. 125.

[8] Bayly, Indian Society, p. 127.

[9] Andrea Major, “A Question of Rites? Perspectives on the Colonial Encounter with Sati”. History Compass, 4/5 (2006), p. 792.

[10] Harald Fischer-Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 11.

[11] Susan Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 98.

[12] C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 143; p. 162.

[13] Bayly, Indian Society, p. 122.

[14] C. A. Bayly, Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 36; Lawrence James, Raj: The Making of British India (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 198.

[15] Bayly, Knowing the Country, p. 204; James, Raj, p. 195.

[16] James, Raj, p. 196.

[17] Brown, Crime, Governance and the Company Raj, p. 82.

[18] Brown, Crime, Governance and the Company Raj, p. 81.

[19] Brown, Crime, Governance and the Company Raj, p. 81.

[20] Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 167.

[21] Tom Lloyd, “Liminal ‘Criminals’: Re-Thinking Historiographies of, and Through, the ‘Thuggee’ Phenomenon”, History Compass, 5/2 (2007), p. 362.

[22] Mark Condos, Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 493.

[23] Condos, License to Kill, p. 483; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 4.

[24] Condos, License to Kill, p. 490-3.

[25] Condos, License to Kill, p. 479; Elizabeth Kolsky, “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India”, The American Historical Review, 120/4 (2015), p. 1218.

[26] Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatics in mid-Victorian India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 22.

[27] Condos, License to Kill, p. 481-2.

[28] Radhika Singha, Punished by Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 246.

[29] Kolsky, The Colonial Rule of Law, p. 1220-21.

[30] Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 146.



Bibliography:


Bayly, C. A. Empire and information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996


Bayly, C. A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988


Bayly, C. A. Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993


Bayly, Susan. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008


Brown, Mark. Crime, Governance and the Company Raj: The Discovery of Thuggee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002


Condos, Mark. License to Kill: Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015


Fischer-Tiné, Harald. Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016


James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making of British India. London: Abacus, 1998


Kolsky, Elizabeth. Colonial Justice in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010


Kolsky, Elizabeth. “The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India”. The American Historical Review. 120/4, 2015


Lloyd, Tom. “Liminal ‘Criminals’: Re-Thinking Historiographies of, and Through, the ‘Thuggee’ Phenomenon”. History Compass. 5/2, 2007


Major, Andrea. “A Question of Rites? Perspectives on the Colonial Encounter with Sati”. History Compass. 4/5, 2006


Mani, Lata. The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987


Scott, John. A Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014


Singha, Radhika. Punished by Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014


Stephens, Julia. The Phantom Wahhabi: Liberalism and the Muslim Fanatics in Mid-Victorian India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012


Yang, Anand A. Whose Sati? Widow Burning in Early 19th Century India. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989



Comentários


bottom of page