Chapter V. The Three Bureaus of Information, Excerpt from "Influential Centres of Disaffection": Indian Students in Edwardian London and the Empire that Shaped Them
by William H. Cowell
2015
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Hara Prasad Shastri ... is most known for discovering the Charyapada, the earliest known examples of Bengali literature.The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism.
-- Charyapada, by Wikipedia
Shastri studied at the village school initially and then at Sanskrit College and Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata)...
Shastri ... received a BA in 1876 and Honours in Sanskrit in 1877.. he was conferred the title of Shastri when he received a MA degree...He then joined Hare School as a teacher in 1878....
He became a professor at the Sanskrit College in 1883... [and] worked as an Assistant Translator with the Bengal government. Between 1886 and 1894... he was the Librarian of the Bengal Library. In 1895 he headed the Sanskrit department at Presidency College.
During the winter 1898-99 he assisted Dr. Cecil Bendall during research in Nepal...In 1894–1895 he was in Nepal and Northern India collecting oriental manuscripts for British Museum. During the winter 1898–1899 he returned to Nepal and together with pandit Hara Prasad Shastri and his assistant pandit Binodavihari Bhattacharya from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the team registered and collected information from palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library belonging to Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher J. B. Rana, and here he found the famous historical document Gopal Raj Vamshavali, describing Nepal's history from around 1000 to 1600.
-- Cecil Bendall, by WikipediaThe Gopal Raj Vamshavali is a 14th-century hand-written manuscript of Nepal... a genealogical record of Nepalese monarchs...
One of the most important and popular chronicles in Nepalese history... Cecil Bendall found the manuscript "in the cold weather of 1898–99 in Kathmandu's Durbar Library"...
The original copy of Gopal Raj Vamshavali is now stored at National Archives, Kathmandu in an "unsatisfactory" state, in contrast to an "excellent" condition, when Prof. Cecil Bendall found it at the turn of the 19th century.
-- Gopal Raj Vamshavali, by Wikipedia
He became Principal of Sanskrit College in 1900, leaving in 1908 to join the government's Bureau of Information.
Also, from 1921–1924, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit at Dhaka University.
Shastri held different positions within the Asiatic Society, and was its President for 2 years. He was also President of Vangiya Sahitya Parishad for 12 years ...Bangiya Sahitya Parishad is a literary society in Maniktala of Kolkata... to promote Bengali literature, both by translating works in other languages to Bengali and promoting the production of original Bengali literature...
Romesh Chunder Dutt was the first president...Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE was... writer and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.
-- Romesh Chunder Dutt, by Wikipedia
and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London...
He was first introduced to research by Rajendralal Mitra, a noted Indologist, and translated the Buddhist Puranas... Shastri was also Mitra's assistant at the Asiatic Society, and became Director of Operations in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts after Mitra's death.
Shastri was instrumental in preparing the Catalogue of the Asiatic Society's approximately 10,000 manuscripts ...
Shastri ... ended up visiting Nepal several times, where, in 1907, he discovered the Charyageeti or Charyapada manuscripts. His painstaking research... led to the establishment of Charyapada as the earliest known evidence of Bengali language. Shastri wrote about this finding in a 1916 paper... "Buddhist songs and verses written in Bengali a thousand years ago"...
He also discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of Skanda Purana in a Kathmandu library in Nepal, written in Gupta script.The Skanda Purana is the largest Mahāpurāṇa... The text... is of Kaumara literature... The text has been an important historical record and influence on the Hindu traditions related to the war-god Skanda...
The Skanda Purana that has survived into the modern era exists in many versions. It is considered as a living text, which has been widely edited, over many centuries, creating numerous variants....
This Mahāpurāṇa... is attributed to the sage Vyasa.
-- Skanda Purana, by Wikipedia
-- Hara Prasad Shastri, by Wikipedia
The manuscript of Ramacarita was discovered by MM. Pandit Haraprasad Sastri in 1897. It contained not only the complete text, but also a commentary of the first Canto and 85 verses of the second. The portion of the manuscript containing the commentary of the remaining verses was missing.
MM. Sastri printed the text and the commentary from this single manuscript in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. Ill, No. 1. The scope of his work may be described in his own words: “The commentary, as may be expected, gives fuller account of the reign of Rampala (sic) than the text. The other portion of the text is difficult to explain, and I have not attempted to make a commentary of my own. But I have tried, in my introduction, to glean all the historical information possible by the help of the commentary and the inscriptions of the Pala dynasty, and other sources of information available to me In the introduction I have attempted to write a connected history of the Palas of Bengal from their election as kings in about 770 A.D. to the end of Madanpala’s (sic) reign” (pp. 1-2).
Ever since its publication the Ramacarita has been regarded as the most important literary document concerning the history of the Pala rule in Bengal. It has formed a subject of critical discussion by notable scholars, and many of its passages have been interpreted in different ways. Scholars have, however, experienced great difficulty in dealing with the text on account of the absence of any translation either of the commented or of the uncommented portion. The difficulty was rendered all the greater by certain readings and interpretations of MM. Sastri which proved to be erroneous on a closer examination of the manuscript. A new and critical edition of the text, with a running commentary and an English translation of the whole of it, was, therefore, a great desideratum.
-- The Ramacaritam of Sandhyakaranandin
-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath
-- National Indian Association, by Wikipedia
-- Personal Intelligence, from Journal of the National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress and Female Education in India, by Sir M. Monier-Williams, KCIE
-- Northbrook Society [Northbrook Indian Society] [Northbrook Club] [Northbrook Indian Club], by The Open University: Making Britain
-- Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, by Wikipedia
-- Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia
-- William Lee-Warner, by Wikipedia
-- Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton, by Wikipedia
-- Theodore Morison, by Wikipedia
-- Thomas Walker Arnold, by Wikipedia
-- John Wallinger, by Wikipedia
-- Mansfield Smith-Cumming, by Wikipedia
-- Indian Political Intelligence Office. by Wikipedia
-- India Office, by Wikipedia
-- India House, by Wikipedia
-- Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, by Wikipedia
-- Madan Lal Dhingra, by Wikipedia
-- Royal India Society [India Society] [Royal India and Pakistan Society] [Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society], by Wikipedia
[The final chapter will return to the imperial government, examining what became of the India Office’s final attempt to actively control visiting students. The Bureau of Information for Indian Students remains an understudied institution that reveals a surprising amount about the government’s attitudes towards these students; namely, its shifting functions and relevance are treated as emblematic of the India Office’s changing role within a new global network of intelligence. The Bureau of Information was the empire’s spirit made flesh, the endpoint of an intelligence trajectory that began as amorphous information networks in India’s Northwestern Frontier and concluded as a single concrete building in downtown London. As the India Office incrementally centralized, systematized, and made manifest its information network, it became less useful. It’s a counterintuitive narrative: more active attempts at control and influence corresponded with less real power. Why the India Office’s methods failed is perhaps a testament to John Darwin’s decentralized view of empire, as explaining the department’s ineffectiveness requires an understanding of how it functioned within its place in a larger British society.]
“I cannot help feeling a little worried about Indian Students in this country and Cromwell Road...”1 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1707 file 6900, “Official Correspondence.”]
– E.S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 1920
Millions of historically-minded visitors to London pass by it every year, but the unassuming building at the corner of Cromwell Road and Cromwell Place is hardly a sight that sticks in the minds of the city’s tourists. The Natural History Museum across the street captures most of their attention, and the French flag hung outside the cornerhouse that ripples lazily at the light touch of a cool August afternoon’s breeze registers as little more than a momentary break in the sea of Union Jacks that surrounds it. 21 Cromwell Road is still a bustling government hub these days as the location for France’s consulate in England; situated deep within the affluent borough of Kensington, it stands only about two blocks south of the site where Madan Lal Dhingra and Sir William Curzon Wyllie had their deadly encounter.
Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie KCIE CVO (5 October 1848 – 1 July 1909) was a British Indian army officer, and later an official of the British Indian Government. Over a career spanning three decades, Curzon Wyllie rose to be a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Indian Army and occupied a number of administrative and diplomatic posts. He was the British resident to Nepal and the Princely state of Rajputana, and later, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. Curzon Wyllie was assassinated on 1 July 1909 in London by the Indian revolutionary Madan Lal Dhingra, who was a member of India House in London.
-- Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia
A blue plaque on its eastern exterior wall marks it as the longtime residence of nineteenth-century architect and philanthropist Charles James Freake, but the building has a significance beyond this official designation of historical heritage. The four-story building that blends seamlessly into an imposing row of identical off-white facades that stretches down the street was once the seat of another government agency, a branch of the India Office that for a few short years occupied the premises during its last attempts to establish a measure of active control over Indian students. Within its walls were private offices, a government bureau, and twenty-five beds, forming a thoroughly strange imperial space situated somewhere within the dissolving boundary between metropole and periphery. The significance of this space in the years between 1910 and 1912 has been lost on historians as completely as it is on the few passersby who glance momentarily at the unassuming, unrelated blue marker as they hurry along the sidewalk; this chapter is an attempt to bring some meaning to 21 Cromwell Road and the ghosts of its inhabitants.
With the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra, the imprisonment of Vinayak Savarkar, and the dispersal of the remaining revolutionary students who had vocally supported its extremist cause to varying degrees, the India House had effectively been demolished by 1910. The British public still regarded Indian students with a distrustful eye, but the absence of any similar groups or high-profile events did a great deal to calm official British anxieties about the students as a whole. This absence was less a conveniently unfilled void than an actively inhospitable England; the tolerant safe haven of years past had been replaced by a decidedly unwelcoming and discouraging environment. This chapter is in part an examination of the forces that ensured another India House never took hold, and it requires backtracking to a point where Sir William Curzon Wyllie – and not just his memory – was still an active figure in Indian student affairs.
As discussed in Chapter III, the latent danger posed by the India House didn’t go unnoticed by bureaucrats in the India Office. In 1907, two years before Wyllie’s assassination, the Secretary of State for India appointed Sir William Lee-Warner to head a commission to investigate the condition of Indian students living across Britain. Tasked with quantifying the student population, identifying their problems as well as the problems they seemed to attract, and to formulate some possible solutions, the three heads of the committee spent three months travelling the island visiting universities and interviewing students, faculty, and people with a special knowledge of the issue. Upon submission of their subsequent report, its inflammatory language and provocative assessments of the problems raised concerns within the India Office about its power to galvanize educated Indians both in Britain and on the subcontinent. The report was left unpublished for over a decade, only appearing as an appendix to the report of a similarly tasked commission headed by Lord Lytton in 1922; the India Office, however, carried out most of its major recommendations. Though the commission itself was conducted in 1907, its most important effects wouldn’t be seen until after Curzon Wyllie’s death and should be considered a singularly important document in the history of India Office policy towards students, with its roots in the begrudging hands-off mentality before July 1909 and its more active effects in the years afterwards.
In particular, one implemented recommendation from the committee’s report especially illuminates both the changing role and strategy of the India Office between 1907 and the outbreak of the First World War: the Bureau of Information for Indian Students. Proposed as a paternalist arm of the India Office that would ensure students received accurate information about British education and were subtly imbued with pro-British sentiments, the Bureau’s function vacillated over the its four years of operation and its subsequent reconstitution in 1912. Rather than an agency with an unwavering mandate, the history of the Bureau of Information is composed of three discrete chapters that form a narrative arc of their own, as its functionality quickly reached a practical zenith after Wyllie’s assassination and then experienced a prolonged slide into ineffectiveness in the years after, due in part to the benevolent ideology of the man at its head2 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 11.] as well as to its increasing irrelevance in both an empire now straddled by an integrated intelligence network and a London no longer favorably inclined toward Indian students. Paul Schaffel argued that the Bureau of Information failed because of a linear shift in ideology from mistrust to benevolence, but this misses the underlying point: at its core, the Bureau was too reactive to succeed in a pre-Dhingra London, too voluntary to gather any meaningful intelligence afterward, and too tangible to contribute effectively as a surveillance agency within the empire’s shadowy new global information order.
It is this last point – the Bureau’s physicality – that signaled the end of the India Office’s own policy arc regarding information and Indian students. What was initially inspired by a nebulous and informal network in the Indian hinterlands had by 1912 become a single agency with a lone man in charge, located in a building in central London that advertised its presence to the very students it was intended to surveil. The India Office had systematized its own intelligence network and informally incorporated a handful of private English intermediaries with similar missions as part of its drive towards centralization. By creating its own constructed information order that was highly visible to all students but voluntary to engage with, it unavoidably exposed its own intentions and rendered itself fundamentally ineffective from the beginning.
The history of the Bureau of Information draws on all of the major themes established earlier in this thesis: the restrictiveness of liberalism, manipulations of the information order, and the role of privately-held soft power in allocating social citizenship to colonial subjects in the metropole. Its story is the story of both Indian students and imperial attitudes toward them, told in miniature; the building that it occupied in South Kensington, simultaneously home to the Bureau’s offices and private English groups as well as a temporary hostel for students, was a microcosm of the imperial dynamics at play between the three parties throughout their stormy decade-long interaction and a fitting conclusion to the India Office’s active attempts to control students.
The Lee-Warner Committee and its Imagined Bureau
Alongside Lee-Warner on the 1907 committee were William Curzon Wyllie and Theodore Morison, the latter of whom would go on to chair his own commission in 1913 regarding Indian students seeking industrial education and employment in Britain. Beginning in May 1907, the committee heard testimony in London before moving across the country to hold meetings at the universities in Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, interviewing ninety-nine people across the span of their inquest.3 [India Office, “Report of the Committee on Indian Students” (London: 1922), 73; hereafter cited as “Lee-Warner Report.”] The committee was well-staffed –- Lee-Warner and Curzon Wyllie shared a history of administrative service in India; Morison had spent nineteen years as a professor at a college in India and was regarded as an expert on Indian education reform4 [Batho, G. R.. “Morison, Sir Theodore (1863–1936).” G. R. Batho in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman.] –- well-funded, and enjoyed a large pool of interviewees and documents with which to guide their work, and yet “the findings of the Lee-Warner Committee … were so embarrassing and likely to offend Indians that the publication of the report was prevented. In 1908, the Viceroy of India Lord Minto thought the publication ‘would no doubt put fat into the fire again.’”5 [Thomas Weber, Our Friend, The Enemy: Elite Education in Britain and Germany Before World War I (Stanford: Palo Alto, 2008), 218.] “Much bitter feeling would be aroused, resulting in angry discussion and agitation, which would discredit any arrangements which Government might make for protecting and helping Indian students in England, to such an extent that no student would take advantage of them … it would be nothing short of disastrous to publish the report”6 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 “Minto to Morley” March 13, 1908] wrote in a telegram, fearing pushback against both the imperial government as a whole but also against the committee’s specific recommendations that, despite the inflammatory report, were generally considered sensible and fit for implementation.
The majority of the report is fairly inoffensive and dull reading. The committee presented the first official estimate of the Indian student population’s size –- approximately seven hundred, with over half residing in London -– and the bulk of the report’s first few chapters doesn’t amount to much beyond hazy depictions of the student experience in Britain. An early chapter reiterates public anxieties about Indian immorality and natural inclination toward vice, relaying a handful of vivid examples of young Indians who became
absolute wrecks, the short story of whose life in England consists of running with unabated energy one uniform course of the coarsest and most vicious pleasures, procured by means that would disgrace the cruellest savage, by bullying and frightening an ignorant and indulgent parent out of his last penny on earth and then rewarding his kindness by breaking his heart and ultimately sending him to his untimely grave.7 [Lee-Warner Report, 76]
Such passages stand in stark contrast to the committee’s official verdict on these types of stories: “…although the number of wrecks is not unimportant they constitute the exception … the majority of Indian students get through their time in London without disastrous results,”8 [ibid] setting the tone for a report chock full of backhanded compliments aimed at students. The imperial capital was home to the most worrying subset of the population. With its abundance of experiences unavailable in India and its myriad temptations, London could suck in any visiting student, whether an Indian from Bombay or a young Englishman from Birmingham. While students at Cambridge and Oxford fell under a great deal of university supervision, most students in London were studying for the Bar, a fairly self-motivated course of work that necessitated little in the way of frequent contact with educators who felt little need to intervene in students’ affairs unless they affected their academic standing.9 [ibid, 74]
They by and large lived freely and away from official eyes, a troubling prospect for a government now keen on monitoring them closely. Among the report’s stated consequences of the government’s inability to exercise an ideal amount of control over these semi-disappeared students was their increasing political radicalization, and it was the contents of the report’s fifth chapter – “Indian Students and Politics” – that drew most of the Viceroy, Lord Minto’s, justification for the report’s nonpublication. “We feel justified in asserting that a considerable proportion, probably a majority, of the Indian students who come to this country are imbued before leaving India with the political opinions of the advanced section of the Indian Opposition, and are animated by a feeling of discontent with British rule; and that these political opinions and this discontent are usually strengthened by their residence in England”10 [ibid 101] the committee asserted, describing a “’blood and thunder’ type of Indian” dead set in his deep-seated and long-fermented hatred of everything British. For this, the committee assigned only a modicum of blame to the British government; rather than students’ experiences with imperialism in India or mistreatment during their stay in Britain, it was allegedly the prominence of party politics in Britain and the ‘discord within harmony’ model that confused students who -– unable to distinguish party rhetoric from concrete promise –- were swept up in a tide of what appeared to them as political conflict.11 [ibid] Even then the committee placed hardly any blame upon Britain itself and rather determined that it was the -– possibly unavoidable -– naiveté born of an unfamiliarity of the workings of a democratic society that was causing the polarization among these foreigners, a paternalist pronouncement for the ages.
Aside from the cursory pseudo-blame that the report allocated to British society, the majority of the problem resided with the “representatives of Extremists of Indian politics [who] spare no pains to win adherents to their cause among the Indian students as soon as the latter arrive in this country.”12 [ibid, 102] Clearly aware in 1907 of the existence and prominence of the India House and the widespread reach of the Indian Sociologist, the committee wrote with a pained tone that “while there is an active organization to create hostility against the British Government, there is no agency in existence in London which takes so much pains to get hold of Indian students or to counteract the effect of this political propaganda.”13 [ibid] Torn between the British liberalism described in chapter III and the desire to quash the spread of extremism, the committee flirted in several places throughout the report with recommending a ban on any Indian students at all coming to Britain before settling back into a familiar impotence: “Grave, however, as we recognise the situation to be, we have no specific remedy to propose,” instead issuing a minor recommendation about raising the age required for Government scholarships on the basis that older students would find less of a tendency toward political volatility. Ultimately, the committee had tacitly admitted defeat in the face of Indian extremism at home by admitting the scope of the problem –- “the men educated in England constitute an important section of the educated classes of Indian society, and their permanent alienation from the British Government would be a disaster” -– while dithering powerlessly around a series of solutions it was too scared to officially recommend and ultimately concluding that the best course of action was essentially to hope that student hotheads would mellow out with the passage of time.14 [ibid] Signed, Sir William Curzon Wyllie.
While the committee’s final report was quickly and unsurprisingly suppressed from public view, it did have some significant effects on India Office policy moving forward. Not all of its recommendations were of the ‘ban all Indian students’ variety, and most of what the report proposed was put into action within a couple years. Its three major proposals were all branches of the same general idea: subtly counteract anti-British influence by projecting goodwill in an official capacity. To achieve this, the report recommended the creation of both an Advisory Committee in London made up of Indians and Englishmen alike that students could contact with any needs or questions as well as the Bureau of Information for Indian Student that would serve as a liaison between British universities and students to ensure that prospective students were adequately equipped to apply for admission and well-prepared to adjust after enrolling. Additionally, it recommended that a pair of prominent private English clubs -– the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association –- work together to focus their efforts and avoid redundant overlap. To further concentrate the coordination between all involved parties, the report proposed the purchase of a building that would house the Bureau of Information, provide an office space for the three private groups –- though they would receive a significant government stipend -– and serve additionally as a short-stay hostel for newly arrived Indian students in need of temporary lodgings and information about further adjusting.
This plan eventually took form in the shape of 21 Cromwell Road, a standalone building in South Kensington across the street from the Natural History Museum and within minutes of the Imperial Institute. T.W. [Thomas Walker] Arnold-– the man appointed Educational Adviser to head the Bureau -– had used the space as early as June 1909 as a venue for public receptions in the ‘at home’ style for students.15 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/945, File 2294 “Proposed Reception of Indian Students by the Chairman of the Advisory Committee to be held at 21 Cromwell Road.”] The India Office and the private societies settled on the building as their shared permanent space not long after. In part the location was reportedly chosen for its proximity to established Indian student neighborhoods; a Times article announcing the building’s leasing to the government claimed that “Many young Indians live in the Western suburbs, and the house is nearer their homes than Westminster, or than the eastern end of Piccadilly, where the Northbrook rooms have hitherto been situated.”16 ["Indian Students In England." The Times (2 June 1910): 6.] In a strange quirk of London geography, the new location bore an eerie similarity to that of none other than the India House, the radical hostel at 65 Cromwell Avenue in Highgate; the two were separated by roughly seven miles and occupied entirely different streets that happened to share a name. Within its confines was the coexistence of Indian students, British government, and private English life; 21 Cromwell Road served as a unique physical space wherein three distinct spheres collided in an often uneasy balance of influence and independence. The three stages of the Bureau of Information’s history alluded to at the beginning of this chapter can each be characterized by the general conception of the Bureau in official circles at the time; this first stage was that of the ‘Imagined Bureau’ in which the new agency was a reactive body, a remedy for growing student unrest that functioned as a replication of existing hostile information structures. After Wyllie’s death, the Bureau would take on a more aggressive tone before finally lapsing into irrelevance after 1910.
Though bureaucrats would have been loathe to admit it, 21 Cromwell Street was conceived of as a government-sanctioned India House. While the India Office’s efforts had previously hinged on simply collecting information about students, India House had demonstrated that putting information in their hands was a more effective tactic. Even though Savarkar’s demands for active militancy eventually drove nationalist students away, they retained the leftist political views that the Free India Society had drilled into them, and that was perhaps more important than the few tangible actions that the group was able to carry out. The imperial government, clearly attuned to the value of information, had long recognized the importance that these England-returned students had on Indians upon their return, but had previously avoided official involvement for fear of stoking suspicion and instead left such responsibilities to private English clubs. In this light, perhaps the street address of the India Office’s 1908 physically-grounded attempt to establish a constructed information order wasn’t coincidental after all: a pro-British information hub on Cromwell Road to match the anti-British one on Cromwell Avenue.