Explained : Josh Ehrlich on the East India Company and the politics of knowledge and Its Impact

What do modern-day behemoths like Google have in common with the East India Company?

For Joshua Ehrlich, the answer lies in how such companies have justified themselves as promoters of knowledge. When they established Google in the late 1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin declared it their mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

More than two centuries ago, the East India Company (sans search engines and AI) used very similar language while defending itself against its critics. The Company argued that it was not just a commercial concern. Rather, as Ehrlich tells us, it “made the support of knowledge a cornerstone of its legitimacy”.

Ehrlich, associate professor of history at the University of Macau, joins Past Imperfect to discuss his recent book, The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge. Ehrlich presents a rich portrait of how scholars and scholarship played explicit political roles during the Company Raj. Simply put, colonial officials believed that patronising learned Indians and Britons would make their jobs easier. Through a policy of “conciliation,” the Company forged alliances with learned Indians and Britons while countering accusations of philistinism.

The main architect of conciliation, as Ehrlich explains, was Warren Hastings. A deeply controversial character in his times, Hastings was governor of Bengal when the Company had a positively infamous reputation. British critics excoriated the India-returned “nabobs” who bought up parliamentary seats and threatened to spread webs of corruption across British society. Indians, meanwhile, reeled under the collapse of traditional centres of power and catastrophes like the Bengal Famine of 1769-’70.

Coming to power in the aftermath of the famine, Hastings channeled Enlightenment sentiments to assert that knowledge production was the Company’s business. He cultivated Indian scholars, employed maulvis and pandits to compile translations of law, and established a madrassa in Calcutta. As Ehrlich tells us, these were politically savvy moves: in learned Indians, Hastings won powerful allies who helped him build up the Company’s administration (some of them later defended Hastings during his impeachment trial before the British Parliament).

Importantly, Hastings’s policy of conciliation was not just a nod to the Enlightenment but also quintessentially Indian. It drew upon ideas like sulh-i kull (Akbar’s policy of tolerance or “universal peace”).

Conciliation remained at the heart of Company policy after Hastings departed Calcutta. William Jones was one of the greatest beneficiaries. But conciliation came under sustained attack when Lord Wellesley became governor-general. Wellesley, the elder brother of the future Duke of Wellington, had a very different vision of how India should be run.

“To brand Wellesley a pro-consul, an instrument of the British state, or an architect of the Raj is to ignore his intention to rule as a king,” comments Ehrlich. Consequently, Wellesley used knowledge promotion as a prop for his own regal aspirations. He established the College of Fort William in Calcutta, a tool for wresting power away from Company directors in London.

Wellesley’s college became something quite like a royal court. It attracted students and visitors from across Asia, from Baghdad to Sumatra. During the annual “public disputation”, Wellesley, seated on a throne, presided over students’ oral examinations and delivered a speech which one observer compared to “the King’s speech in Parliament”.

Ehrlich points out that Wellesley’s college might also have been a response to someone who certainly outdid him in imperial bombast and achievement: Napoleon. The Corsican’s recent adventure in Egypt, complemented by a phalanx of scholars investigating the country and its history, cast a shadow on the Company’s scholarly patronage in India.

“Napoleon had thus thrown down a gauntlet,” comments Ehrlich, “and with the College of Fort William Wellesley took it up.” Wellesley’s college published hundreds of scholarly volumes. Its library included works ransacked from Tipu Sultan’s collection.

The Board of Control in London recalled Wellesley in 1805. His years in power, however, signaled the beginning of the end for the policy of conciliation. Knowledge retained its central place in the Company’s ethos, but was steadily elbowed out by the potentially radical idea of mass education. Instead of patronising learned elites, British colonial officials began talking about instructing the people. This, once again, had a clear political purpose, meant to shore up claims of the Company’s good government in India.

What ensued were furious debates, in person and on paper, over the scope and wisdom of mass education. In the Madras Presidency, the governor, Thomas Munro, actually set up a vast educational network, one designed to reach deep into the countryside and eschew caste prejudices. Munro drew upon Scottish Enlightenment ideas of civil society, seeing mass education as a prerequisite for building up an Indian public.

This ambitious scheme was ultimately wound back after Munro’s death in 1827. The fate of Munro’s schools, in some ways, serves as a fitting epitaph for the Company’s educational efforts. As Ehrlich notes, educational debates yielded very few on-the-ground results, and the Company’s few pedagogical ventures excited sharp opposition (John Stuart Mill, for example, admonished Munro for his policies). When it came to knowledge promotion, there was a sharp distinction between rhetoric and reality, underscored by the preeminence of commercial interests.

And that is one more thing that today’s tech corporations have in common with the East India Company.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.