Since its inception cinema has served as a powerful medium that both articulates and intervenes in visions of identity. The experiences of British colonialism in Ireland and India are marked by many commonalities, not least in terms of colonial and indigenous imaginings of the relationships between colony or former colony and imperial metropolis. Cinematic representations of Ireland and India display several parallels in their expressions and contestations of visions of Empire and national identity. This book offers a critical approach to the study of Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial heritage through a comparative exploration of such filmic visions, yielding insights into the operations of colonial, nationalist and postcolonial discourse.
Drawing on postcolonial and cultural theory and employing Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, the author engages in close readings of a broad range of metropolitan and indigenous films spanning an approximately fifty-year period, exploring the complex relationships between cinema, colonialism, nationalism and postcolonialism and examining their role in the (re)construction of Irish and Indian identities.
Jeannine Woods teaches and lectures on the Irish language and film studies in Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests include comparative studies of colonialism, postcolonialism and Irish language, literature and film.
PETER LANG www.peterlang.com
Visions of Empire and Other Imaginings
Reimagining Ireland
Volume 21
Edited by Dr Eamon Maher Institute of Technology, Tallaght
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
PETER LANG
Jeannine Woods
Visions of Empire and Other Imaginings
Cinema, Ireland and India 1910–1962
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Woods, Jeannine, 1969Visions of empire and other imaginings : cinema, Ireland and India 1910-1962 / Jeannine Woods. p. cm. -- (Reimagining Ireland)
Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-3-0353-0067-3 (alk. paper)
1. Imperialism in motion pictures. 2. Nationalism in motion pictures. 3. Ireland--In motion pictures. 4. India--In motion pictures. 5. Motion pictures--Ireland--History--20th century. 6. Motion pictures--India--History--20th century. I. Title.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
For Ann and Brendan, and for Odhrán, with love
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many people for help with the research and writing of this book. Heartfelt thanks to Sean Ryder for his excellent guidance and direction and for steadfast encouragement. Deepest thanks to Luke Gibbons, Lionel Pilkington and Tadhg Foley for insights, advice and suggestions. Thanks to Steve Coleman for inspiring my enthusiasm, not least for the work of Bakhtin, and to Tony Ballantyne for a wonderful introduction to the study of India. Thanks to the staf f of the James Hardiman Library in NUI Galway, Sunniva O’Flynn and the Irish Film Archive, Máire Aoibhinn Ní Ógáin in TG4 and Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge, OÉ Gaillimh.
Research for this book was made possible by the generous support of a Government of Ireland Scholarship awarded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
For their support, belief and encouragement I am deeply grateful to colleagues, friends and family. Thanks to Terry O’Sullivan for a beginning and much more, to Michael Murphy for inspiration and to Susan Lindsay for assistance with writing management. Thanks to Máire Grif fith for unfailing support and to Sonja, Martina, Niamh and Margarita and to Deirdre and Caleb Cairns and family for endless generosity. Profound thanks to Fiona and Andrew, Vanessa and John and especially to my son, Odhrán.
Introduction
At first glance, Irish and Indian cinemas might not appear as obvious subjects of comparison. Originating in socioculturally diverse societies, the cinemas of Ireland and India have followed specific and often divergent paths. The dif ference in the scale of the cinematic industries in each country is vast; Ireland’s very small – and at times almost non-existent – industry but a fraction of the size of the smallest of India’s twelve regional cinematic industries. Yet a study of the cinematic representation of Ireland and India during the first half or so of the twentieth century highlights commonalities, particularly in relation to the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial discourses of Empire, nation and community. Ireland and India’s experience of British colonialism, though not identical, shares many similarities, not least in terms of colonial and indigenous imaginings of the relationships between colony (or former colony) and imperial metropolis. Cinema serves as a medium which not only articulates but actively intervenes in discursive constructions of identity, whether imperial, national or post-colonial. Screen imaginings of Ireland and India share many similarities and parallels in their articulations and contestations of established visions of Empire, Irishness and Indianness.
Relatively few comparative studies of Irish or Indian cinemas exist, such comparative work tending to focus on regional comparisons, locating Irish cinema within the context of a Celtic cinema and placing Indian cinema within the parameters of Asian cinema. In comparing early cinematic representations of Ireland and India in terms of their common relationship to British colonial discourse and to the dynamics engendered by that discourse, this work provides insights into Irish and Indian cinemas in which the dynamics of each informs our understanding of both cultures and of the broader operations of colonial, nationalist and postcolonial discourses and representations. The comparative model adopted here of fers a valuable approach, not only to the study of cinema, but to broader explorations of
the cultural histories of Ireland and India. In looking at Irish and Indian cultural history, this work draws on models and approaches originally developed by the Subaltern Studies group in relation to India. Utilising and developing this approach to explore Irish and Indian cinemas’ dialogic relationships to dominant and popular history and historiography and to discourses on tradition and popular memory, it suggests that comparative models have a significant role to play in the development of Irish Subaltern Studies in particular.
In comparing cinematic visions of Ireland and India, I utilise a postcolonial perspective which highlights the systematic operation of colonial, nationalist and postcolonial discourses. In this I am indebted to Said’s work on Orientalism1 and to much of the critical work following on from Said’s observations regarding the construction of colonial discourse and representations. Said contends that Orientalism creates the colonised object that it purports to describe, his argument being that Orientalism refers not only to a body of scholarship about ‘The Orient’ which operates within a dialectic of information and control, but to a type of sub-discourse which sets the parameters for representing the colonised and the relationships between colonised and coloniser within the discourses of history, literature and culture, politics, social science and military and colonial administration. The concept of Orientalism is pivotal in the examination of the relationships between imperial cinema and the cinemas of India and Ireland, both Orientalist and cinematic discourses being centrally bound up with questions of representation.
Certain limitations within Said’s work (especially its tendency to construct Orientalism as a totalising phenomenon) are addressed here through the ideas of Bakhtin, particularly that of dialogism. Bakhtin’s work, focused on language and literature, has become hugely inf luential in recent years, featuring in a diverse range of scholarship from literary and cultural theory to feminist, poststructuralist and postcolonial works. Bakhtin draws attention to the intrinsic sociality of language, arguing that language – and its
1 Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
social form, concretised through use, the utterance – is at once marked by discourses cultural, sociohistorical and political which invest it with meanings. The concept of dialogism contends that within every use of language, such meanings must be engaged and reinforced or contested. Bakhtin contends that any verbal performance ‘inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors, originating and functioning as part of a social dialogue’.2 The concept of dialogism suggests that the possibilities of the reinf lection of a language or discourse, the latter term used by Bakhtin to refer to language in its concrete totality, are limitless.
Robert Stam has developed a Bakhtinian model of filmic analysis which not only allows film to be understood as a composite of discourses (verbal, visual, aural, etc.) but allows us to ‘reappreciate the links of film to other “series” or semiotic systems, to reaf firm the af finities of film studies to other disciplines, and to re-envision the relation between film history and the larger historical trajectory of narrative and discursive forms’.3 The dialogic nature of Orientalism and cinema extends to a dialogic relation between both discourses; colonial cinema both draws on and reinforces or reinf lects colonial discourse, while indigenous cinematic representations dialogically engage colonial and colonial-cinematic discourse, drawing on extra-cinematic discourses which are themselves in dialogic relation with colonial and indigenous discourses and utterances.
The focus on Indian and Irish cinemas’ engagements with colonial discourse and representation is not an attempt to reinstate colonialism or imperialism as the starting point of Indian and Irish history or cultural production; rather it is a means of interrogating dialogic and hybrid processes which are particularly well illustrated by cinema. Cinema emerged within the colonial metropolis and was intricately bound up with imperial and Orientalist discourse in its representational forms. The product
2 Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 95.
3 Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1989), 56.
of a Western imperialist, masculinist, visualist imagination which ‘posited cultural facts as things observed or seen rather than heard, transcribed or invented in dialogue’,4 cinema could be (and was) ef fectively employed in the Orientalist project of constructing its representational object.
Soon after its emergence in Europe, cinematic production began in Ireland and India, with cinema as both symbol and discursive utterance of the colonial metropolis and at the same time a potentially subversive form which could be used to challenge the discursive pronouncements of Empire. Cinema’s status as a hybrid cultural form was clear from the outset in non-metropolitan contexts. Bakhtin directly employs the concept of hybridity, distinguishing between organic and intentional hybridity, where the latter tends not towards fusion but ref lects and foregrounds conf licts and struggles between discourses and representations by highlighting the dialogic relationships between them. 5 Young argues that ‘For Bakhtin, [intentional] hybridity describes the ability of one voice to ironize and unmask the other within the same utterance – directed towards another’s speech, unmasking it though a language that is “double-accented” and “double-styled”’.6 The hybrid, dialogic nature of cinema (in both its organic and intentional aspects, but especially in the latter) is thrown into relief by indigenous cinematic productions in Ireland and India.
The concepts of hybridity and dialogism disarm any simplistic division between colonial and anti-colonial representations; the most stridently colonial cinematic representations may express anxiety even as they project imperial certainty, while many anti-colonial nationalist representations reinforce elements of the colonial discourses they seek to reject. Connections between colonial and indigenous Irish and Indian cinemas operate as a series of dialogic relationships marked by internal fissures and slippages, reinforcements and challenges. Films featured in the chapters that follow span a range of genres, each illustrative of particular aspects of
4 Ibid., 19.
5 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 360.
6 Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 20.
those relationships and processes at specific moments in colonial, postcolonial and cinematic history. While most of the films analysed fall within the banner of ‘popular’ cinema, some also fall under the category of critical or ‘art’ cinema, working on the premise that ‘neither filmmakers nor film texts can be ranged alongside a divide separating “committed” from “commercial” … Any form of widely disseminated culture is an interface of history and politics, contingency and compromise, implicitly held and stubbornly contested views and values’.7
Alongside the shift beyond fixed polarities either between colonial and indigenous discourses or between popular and critical cinematic texts, the focus on the dialogic, discursive elements of metropolitan and indigenous cinemas highlights some of the pitfalls of bounded definitions of national cinema. Various scholars have problematised the concept of national cinema; Barton, for example, points to the dif ficulty of defining Irish national cinema along traditional lines given that the majority of cinematic images of Ireland have been produced within the cinemas of other nations and that many Irish figures have worked within cinemas outside Ireland.8 Rajadhyaksha and Willemen also highlight the dif ficulties of defining Indian cinema along national lines; citing the critique of fered by Seamus Deane of attempts to provide a history of any particular artform represented in terms of a nation-state’s achievements, the authors contend that:
Any account of Indian cinema cannot but run the risk of essentialism as outlined by Deane … India is and always was plural and diverse and … any attempt to essentialise it, to force a coincidence between territory and chronology, or between nation, ethnicity, religion and state, is un-Indian (in the sense that it betrays the struggle which achieved an independent state in the first place).9
The dif ficulty of the delineation of British, Irish and Indian cinemas along purely national lines is thrown into particular relief in this study, given its
7 Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 79.
8 Irish National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 4–5.
9 Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.
focus on the identification and analysis of dialogic relationships between metropolitan and indigenous discourses and representations. In the Indian context, the approach adopted here follows Rajadhyaksha and Willemen in their espousal of a type of strategic essentialism formulated by Spivak, in ‘acknowledging the dangerousness of something one cannot not use’.10 The following chapters focus on films which issue from various regional centres within India but are confined to films made within the Indian nation state post-Partition; while Pakistani cinema might productively have been included here, considerations of space have necessitated its exclusion.
With regard to Irish and British (or, more properly, imperial-metropolitan) cinemas, the observations of Higson and Schlesinger are illuminating. Higson argues that the contingent communities that cinema imagines are more likely to be either local or transnational than national,11 while Schlesinger utilises Sorlin’s approach, suggesting that the best way to envisage a national cinema is not as a set of films which help to distinguish a nation from other nations but as a chain of relations and exchanges which develop in a territory delineated by its economic and judicial policy.12 Many early US productions made by Americans of Irish descent imagine a transnational community comprised of Irish and Irish-Americans alike, and such films are read here as discursively coterminous in large part with indigenous Irish cinematic representations, albeit that Irish-American cinema sometimes reinf lects indigenous discourses and perspectives. Similarly aligned perspectives are evident within many British and US representations of Empire. If one modifies Sorlin’s definition to focus on territories delineated by discursive commonalities vis-à-vis colonialism and imperialism, metropolitan cinematic representations of the British Empire are seen to issue from Hollywood as well as from British cinema.
10 Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York; Routledge, 1993); quoted in Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, 9.
11 ‘The limiting imagination of national cinema’, in Cinema and Nation, eds Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 64–9.
12 Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1986–1996; quoted in Schlesinger, ‘The sociological scope of national cinema’, in Cinema and Nation, 28.
The following chapters explore the dynamics of British/metropolitan, Irish and Indian cinematic Self/Other representations over a period of roughly fifty years, which encompasses the shift from the relative stability of the British Empire to the attainment of independence by India and Ireland and processes of the (re)imagination of the nation in each country. While allowing for specificities of culture, history, geography and colonial dynamics and relationships in Ireland and India as well as for particularities regarding cinematic production and reception, this work adopts a postcolonial approach, countering the colonial impetus to regionalism and particularism with regard to the colonial (and post-colonial) project by highlighting the systematic nature of cinematic discourse vis-à-vis colonial representations of Self and Other in relation to Ireland and India. It also seeks to highlight both particular and common facets of the dynamics of Indian and Irish cinemas as each engages with colonial discourse imbricated in the cinematic apparatus, its dominant forms and its representations. In focusing on discursive operations and dynamics rather than on cinematic history per se, chapters are organised around the examination of specific discursive articulations. Following on from an initial chapter exploring the development and dynamics of colonial discourse and Orientalism and Celticism, the remaining chapters focus on cinematic representations, exploring the interrelationships between Orientalism and other discourses and between those discourses and cinematic discourse. The sections dealing with cinematic representations are organised according to the primary discursive positioning of films rather than following a chronological order, centring respectively on imperial Self/Other representations both before and after the decline of the British Empire, on pre- and post-independence Irish and Indian cinemas and on a range of Irish and Indian films which can be termed postcolonial (this work follows the practice of postcolonial theorists such as Mishra and Hodge, using a hyphenated ‘post-colonial’ to indicate the period following independence and employing an unhyphenated ‘postcolonial’ as a reference to a positioning which of fers a critique of colonialism and/or of the continuities between colonial and nationalist
discourses, practices and power structures in formerly colonised states).13 In their critical engagement with colonial, nationalist and post-colonial discourses, the cinematic representations examined in the final chapter interrogate the legacy of colonialism in Ireland and India and raise questions regarding national and alternative definitions of community and belonging.
13 ‘What is post(-)colonialism?’, Textual Practice, 5:3 (1991), 399–414.
Orientalism, Celticism and the Emergence of Cinema
[Orientalism is] a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts … it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly dif ferent (or alternative and novel) world; … Orientalism is – and does not simply represent – a considerable dimension of modern political intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.1
Since its inception, cinema has proved highly ef fective in the representation of themes which figure large in colonial and later in anti-colonial nationalist discourse. Representations of racial, religious and ethnic dif ferences, of oppositions between East and West or metropolis and periphery, tradition and modernity, cultural or national authenticity and degeneration/infiltration, have featured significantly in imperial and anti-imperial representations of Britain, Ireland and India at various points in cinematic history. Exploring the dialogic relationships between cinema and colonialism at discursive and representational levels requires attention to the development and consolidation of Orientalism and Celticism in relation to India and Ireland during the nineteenth century. This chapter examines the development of Orientalist and Celticist discourses which would wield a major inf luence on both metropolitan and non-metropolitan cinematic representations.
1 Said, Orientalism, 12.
The Development of Orientalism and Celticism
Said describes Orientalism as a discourse which developed in Europe from the Enlightenment onwards and which f lourished during the early to midnineteenth century. The term is taken from a field of scholarship which proliferated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain and France, focused on the study of all aspects of ‘The Orient’ (Asia and the East). Said uses term in reference to a discourse, produced and compounded from antiquity by the West about ‘The Orient’, which evolved into professional practices bolstered by major academic, political, legal, religious and scientific institutions in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, facilitating colonial expansion and administration.2
Scholarly Orientalist works were inf luenced by Enlightenment notions of the organisation of systematic, objective knowledge. While such works appear simply to describe or document knowledge of the Orient, they do so within a discursive field which always places the West in superior position. Orientalist scholarship was (and is) a heterogeneous field, ranging from representations which are wholly negative, seeing little of value in native culture and society, to those which emphasise the value of the ancient learned traditions and mysticism of the Orient, yet such evaluations are contained within an Orientalist framework, allowing the Westerner to be placed in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him [the Orientalist voice is overwhelmingly male] the relative upper hand.3 Within Orientalist scholarship and discourse as a whole, it is the prerogative of the Westerner to explain the ‘true’ (lack of) significance and value of Oriental culture in Western terms. In the colonial context, Said’s development of the concept of Orientalism as a discourse bound up with knowledge and power demonstrates its centrality in constructing the identity of both coloniser and colonised: Orientalism justifies colonial domination in constructing and fixing the Orient as the
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 7.
inferior, degenerate Other of the West, requiring the latter’s intervention, guidance and governance.
While Said’s original, eponymous work on Orientalism focuses on the geographical territories subsumed under the label of ‘The Orient’ (Culture and Imperialism extends the concept to other geographical and cultural settings, including Ireland), the formulation of the idea of Orientalism as a discursive field acknowledges its utilisation vis-à-vis other subordinated groups and populations:
Along with all other people variously regarded as backward, degenerate, uncivilised and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment. The Oriental was thus linked to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien.4
Critical scholarship on Celticism develops Said’s analysis in examining the construction of Celticism as a discursive construct applied to a range of geographically distinct groups in Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Wales.5 Lennon’s study of Irish Orientalism demonstrates how Orientalism featured in native representations of Ireland as far back as the ninth century and how both native and imperial Orientalist discourses impacted on the development of Celticism.6 Similarities between Orientalism and Celticism as discourses imbricated within relations of power are also highlighted by Leerssen, who observes that:
The construct ‘Celt’ carries with it, in its origin and original currency, the echo of a specific power relationship. Those who were called ‘Celts’ had no power over the fact that they were beginning to be called that name; they underwent, passively, a process of scrutiny, investigation and classification over which they had no control.7
4 Ibid., 207.
5 See Leerssen, ‘Celticism’, in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1996), 1–20.
6 Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004).
7 Leerssen, ‘Celticism’, 6.
Descriptions of ‘the Oriental’ and ‘the Celt’ can be seen to represent both populations similarly and variously as backward, feckless, childlike, indolent, ef fete, violent, barbaric and irrational prior to the development of Orientalism as a scholarly institution during the nineteenth century. With the advent of such scholarship and the parallel development of Celticism as a scholarly field, comparisons and similarities between Ireland and the Orient (and India in particular) were bolstered and reinforced.
Both Orientalism and Celticism owe their development to comparative philology, a discipline looking at the origins of various languages and language groups in search of evidence of common origins. William Jones was one of the pioneers of Orientalist scholarship in India and had a major inf luence on later Orientalist and Celticist scholars. Based in India during the late eighteenth century, Jones, like many other Orientalists, was in the service of the East India Company. On foot of his role in the formulation of Indian legislation in the early 1780s, Jones was appointed as a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court in 1783. Jones’s work on indigenous legal texts led him to the study of Indian languages and to the positing of a common origin for Sanskrit, Latin, Greek Gothic and Celtic, suggesting that Indians and Europeans shared a common origin. Jones’s work of fered representations of India as the seat of civilisation, yet the ‘positional superiority’ of the Westerner was evident even in such relatively positive constructions of the Orient:
The comparative method implied linear directionality: things, ideas, institutions could be seen as progressing through stages to some end or goal. It could also be used to establish regression, decay, and decadence, the movement through time away from some pristine, authentic, original starting point, a golden age in the past.8
Such an approach, focused initially on relationships between languages, was extrapolated into a framework for cultural comparison, and could serve to justify the British presence in India as an encounter between cultures with ancient af finities. If the Orient had been seat of the West’s development and
8 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 55.
progress, it had now declined, and the West was in a position to regenerate the East. The West’s rational, positivistic knowledge and methodologies might not only introduce the civilising elements of British culture into Oriental society but could also unearth the meaning and significance of Oriental culture, laying down the terms within which native culture might be valued or dismissed.
Celticism f lourished in tandem with scholarly Orientalism during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While dif ferences between the British colonial project in Ireland and India resulted in somewhat dif ferential relationships between Orientalist and Celticist scholarship and governmental practices and policies, both fields operated on a similar discursive basis. As with Oriental or Indological scholarship, Celticism propounded fixed, essentialised notions of Celtic cultures and societies, suggesting the necessity for the regeneration of Celtic society by metropolitan culture.9 Similarly to Orientalist/Indological scholarship, Celticism drew on earlier colonial descriptions and conceptions of native culture and character, marking the indigenous character out within binarisms of savagery and civilisation, mysticism and materialism, tradition and modernity. In Britain, the comparative sensibility which grew up in the wake of the Enlightenment was bolstered and given credence by the development of a comparative method which focused not only on af finities between English and Celtic/Oriental cultures but also on the common origins of cultures such as those of Ireland and India.
Charles Vallancey, a military engineer later to be appointed as Chief Surveyor of Ireland, was inf luenced by Jones’s studies of Persian among other Orientalist works. Vallancey’s On the Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland (1786) claimed af finities between a large range of Irish and Eastern cultural traditions. While Vallancey’s methodologies and speculative theses were questioned by nineteenth-century scholars and
9 While mystical, spiritual ‘feminine’ aspects of Celtic culture had, like Oriental culture, a role in serving to reinvigorate the rational, materialist ‘masculine’ elements of metropolitan culture in some representations, such a position did not disrupt the ultimate superiority and dominance of metropolitan culture and society.
intellectuals operating within a framework which emphasised scientific rigor and objectivity, his basic premises were adopted by philologists and ethnologists. British ethnologist James Cowles Prichard’s The Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages. Forming a Supplement to the Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1857) claimed that the Irish had their roots in the East, pointing to the unity of Irish Druidism and Indian religious traditions.10 Similar comparisons were made by European scholars and writers, among them Ernst Renan and Matthew Arnold, who also posited the Asian origins of the Celts.11
Critiques of Said’s development of the concept of Orientalism point to its portrayal as a monologic discourse which does not allow of internal dissension, neglecting the role played by indigenous scholars and informants in the work of Orientalists and Celticists and the destabilisation of Orientalism by oppositional or conf licting metropolitan and colonised voices.12 Postcolonial historians and critics point out that the presence of indigenous knowledges and frameworks played a role in the construction of Orientalist scholarship and discourse vis-à-vis India; Brahmans, pandits,
10 In relation to Vallancey and Cowles Prichard see Ballantyne, ‘Ireland and the construction of knowledge in colonial India’, paper presented at the ‘Culture and Colonialism’ conference, NUI Galway, June 1999.
11 See The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies by Ernst Renan, trans. W.G. Hutchinson (Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1970); Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (New York: Everyman Library, 1976).
12 See e.g. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 119–40; Bhabha, ‘Dif ference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, in The Politics of Theory, eds Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 200. Peter Childs and Patrick Williams critique Young’s and Bhabha’s criticisms of Orientalism as simplifications of Said’s theories: see An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall, 1997), 115–17.
munshis and other indigenous agents participated in the construction of Indological knowledge through the translation and explication of texts, laws and customs.13
Although the production of Celticist knowledge in an Irish context has generally been portrayed as the imposition of British, Anglo-Irish and European scholars and antiquarians, Leerssen points out that Celticism also drew on indigenous knowledge:
Even in Ireland, where native culture was considered subversive and ruthlessly oppressed, the study of antiquity from Ussher and Ware onwards came to rely increasingly on native, Gaelic sources and native, Gaelic assistance; to the point that, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the discourse of Irish antiquarianism came to be dominated by nativism and began to ref lect a Gaelic rather than an English perspective on the country’s past.14
Acknowledging the power of Orientalism in the construction and fixing of the identities of the colonised, correctives to Said’s formulation point to dialogic elements of Orientalist and Celticist discourse from the point of their inception, which can be said to have undercut, if not fissured, Orientalism’s monologic ambitions by drawing on indigenous knowledges and perspectives (albeit within an asymmetrical relationship). Indigenous perspectives were thus not entirely absent from Orientalist and Celticist discourse but could be drawn on in challenges to colonial discourses and representations.
13 See Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ballantyne, ‘The Politics of Language: Philology and the Construction of Hindu Identity’ (doctoral thesis, Oxford University, 1999), 262; Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 21.
14 Leerssen, ‘Celticism’, 13.
The Rise of Race Theory
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Orientalist and Celticist discourses in Britain were closely articulated with race theory, which developed in the wake of Darwin’s and Spencer’s work in particular, utilising the work of comparative and historical linguistics in aligning and classifying language groups along racial lines.15 Young examines the way in which the concept of culture became linked both with the notion of civilisation and of education by Enlightenment thinkers during the eighteenth century; this view, which presented education both as a means of civilisation and enculturation, allowed for potential cultural equality.16 By the mid-nineteenth century, historical-linguistic and philological ideas were combined with scientistic notions of physiological dif ference in the development of racial theories which classified, codified and fixed racial dif ferences on the basis of physiology and language. After 1860, the systematic study of non-European peoples (and of Europe’s internal ‘Others’) and the study of the development of civilisation, which had remained as largely separate undertakings during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were integrated ‘in the context of Spencer’s evolutionary associationism … [which] compromised any possibility of a purely cultural interpretation of human dif ferences’.17
In the case of India, Orientalism and race theory were articulated in colonial scholarship on Arya, a concept originating in Vedic texts. While the notion of an Aryan fellowship, propounded initially by the German comparative philologist Max Müller, was projected by British scholars as a means of stressing Indian af finities with the British during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the concept became problematic after the Rebellion of 1857. Although less utilised by scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of Arya did not disappear from
15 Young, Colonial Desire, 64–5.
16 Ibid., 31–2.
17 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991), 142–3.
colonial discourse but was rather refashioned to stress increasingly racially essentialised and polarised visions of Indian and British identity.18
One of the main figures associated with Celticist discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century is Matthew Arnold. An intellectual concerned with the regeneration of English culture, Arnold’s work on Celticism ref lects the conf lation of civilisation, education and culture in racial terms, engaging with debates around the issue of racial hybridity and its implications for the Anglo-Saxon character and culture.19 Arnold presents the English race as a composite of races, Celt and Saxon, drawing on Renan in describing the Saxon race as masculine in its rational, active aspects and the Celts as feminine, characterised by mystical, emotional and imaginative qualities. Such a schema not only equates racial and gender dif ference, serving to naturalise colonial and patriarchal hierarchies, but also serves to naturalise the existing social order within British society. Through a series of discursive articulations between various scholarly and institutional fields, civilisation becomes the defining feature of whiteness, while culture, as its concomitant, is the defining feature of the upper and middle classes.20
Arnold’s work thus identifies culture with race and (sections of) the nation. Celtic culture has a role to play within English culture, which it can enrich and complement. In and of itself, however, the Celtic race lacks the wherewithal to make material progress, or to engage in self-governance; ‘as in material civilisation he has been inef fectual. So the Celt has been inef fectual in politics’.21 Indeed Arnold saw no intrinsic merit in Celtic culture, as his famous description of the Irish language as ‘the badge of the beaten race’ and his role in establishing English rather than Welsh as the language of Welsh primary schools attest. The colonial relation to the cultures of the colonised in the nineteenth century is clearly marked out in the work of Arnold. As Young argues:
18 Ballantyne, ‘ The Politics of Langauge’, 257–62.
19 See Young, Colonial Desire, 15–18.
20 Ibid., 94–6.
21 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 84.
The force of ‘modern civilisation’ destroys the last vestiges of a vanquished culture to turn it into an object of academic study, with its own university chair. The function of the chair is to transform the moribund culture of the colonizer, and even ‘to send a message of peace to Ireland’. So, even in his own account, Arnold’s appropriation of Celtic culture, despite his dismissal of the Gaelic revival, is political after all.22
Young’s description resonates with the concept of Orientalist discourse, constructing and fixing the culture of the Other in binary opposition to that of the coloniser. Racial theory, which was articulated with (it might even to have said to have been partially engendered by) the field of Orientalism was a further, related form of cultural and national-imperial self-definition. Racial theories and Orientalist concepts were not only prevalent in a variety of institutional contexts by the late nineteenth century, but were popularised in the service of the galvanisation of a collective British national identity which could occlude internal conf licts and divisions.
Said points to the discursive power of Orientalism in his distinction between ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ Orientalism. Manifest Orientalism refers to concrete scholarship, policy formation, etc. relating to the Orient which shifts and encompasses several varying concepts and ideas about the Orient, while latent Orientalism refers to the discursive positivity underlying such scholarship and notions or conceptions of the Orient, pervasive not only in scholarship and politics but also in literary production and popular cultural representations and understandings.23 Counter to a general reluctance to allow that political, institutional and ideological constraints act on the individual producer of cultural artefacts, Said contends that metropolitan knowledges produced in relation to the Orient, whether cultural, scholarly or institutional, inevitably issue from a colonial/Orientalist subject position, and thus argues that Orientalism emerges as:
a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American – in whose intellectual and imaginative territories the writing was produced … [The study of Orientalism explores] how philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory,
22 Young, Colonial Desire, 71–2.
23 Orientalism, 201–25.
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that many of the most puzzling questions with which the teacher is confronted arise in the teacher’s own mind.
Answers to All Questions
The question-answering power of the Britannica is therefore of cardinal importance to the teacher, and is to be considered not only in connection with the use of the work for reference, but also in the selection of such courses of reading as may be expected to supply information of the kind that questions most often demand. And this question-answering power lies in three characteristics of the work, and may be measured by the extent to which the three are found in it: broad scope, unimpeachable authority and convenient arrangement. Its scope covers the whole range of human knowledge, everything that mankind has achieved, attempted, believed or studied. Its authority is doubly vouchsafed. The fact that the Britannica is published by the University of Cambridge (England), one of the world’s oldest and most famous seats of learning, in itself gives such a guarantee as no other Encyclopaedia has ever offered, and the assurance thus given may be regarded as showing, chiefly, that there are no errors of omission, for against the existence of the errors of commission there is a further guarantee. The articles are signed by 1,500 contributors, including the foremost specialists in every department of knowledge. Among this army of collaborators, chosen from twenty countries, there are no less than 704 members of the staffs of 146 universities and colleges. This means that by means of the Britannica the youngest teacher in the most isolated village is brought into stimulating contact with the great leaders of the teaching profession. Its arrangement gives it the advantages of a universal library, providing the varied courses of reading outlined in this Guide, and those also of a work of reference which yields an immediate answer to every conceivable question. The index of 500,000 entries instantly leads the enquirer to any item of information in the 40,000 articles. No teacher could hope to form, in the course of a lifetime, a collection of separate books which would contain anywhere near as much information.
A Library of Text-Books
In another relation, the Britannica is of daily service to anyone engaged in educational work. It has already been
remarked that the teacher needs a “factor of safety,” a reserve of knowledge beyond that which is directly called for in the ordinary routine of the class room. But in the very course of that routine, there is also a need for co-ordinated knowledge, presented in a form available for use in teaching, of a more advanced kind than that in the text-books with which pupils are provided. And the Britannica is, in itself, a vast collection of text-books.
Professor Shotwell, of Columbia University, recently wrote to the publishers a letter in which he said: “I shall use the articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which deal with industrial processes as a substitute for a text-book in one of my courses in Social and Industrial History and have especially in mind the splendid treatment of the cotton industry by Professor S. J. Chapman and others.” A large number of Britannica articles have, by permission, been reprinted, word for word, for use as text-books; and it is impossible to say how many have been paraphrased, and, in a form less clear and vivid than the originals, similarly employed. The writers of the Britannica have, among them, done so large a share of the world’s recent work in research and criticism, that no one who is engaged in writing a text-book or in preparing a course of lectures should fail to use the work as a check to test the completeness and the accuracy of independent investigation.
Fortunately, the system of monthly payments has enabled teachers to purchase the Britannica to an extent which, in view of their limited resources, is a striking evidence of their earnest desire to perfect their professional equipment. In some cases two and even three teachers have combined their efforts in order that they might jointly possess the work. But whatever may be the difficulties to be overcome, it is certain that the Britannica is, for the teacher, an instrument as directly productive as a technical library is for a doctor or a lawyer.
A professor in an eastern college wrote to the publishers: “It has become ‘the collection of books’ which Carlyle might term ‘the true university’”; and the practical head of a business school in Pennsylvania says: “By its purchase, I have secured access to a university education.” A well known professor of German calls it “a Hausschatz of amazing richness and variety,” and adds: “I hope you will not be sued at law for an attempt to monopolize the market for
profitable and entertaining literature.” The president of a southern university wrote: “It is the first book to consult, the one book to own, if you can own but one.” And a Harvard professor says: “I have been particularly interested in some of the recent phases of European history. Concerning some movements, about which it is as yet extremely difficult to find material in books, I have found the Encyclopaedia most useful.” A teacher in a theological seminary exclaims: “What a university of solid training it would be for a young student, if he would spend an hour each day reading the work, volume by volume, and including all the articles except those of a technical nature belonging to other departments than his own!”
This is what teachers have said of the value to them of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Specialists in school-hygiene and school librarians have also noted the advantage of the light, handy volumes printed on India paper—one weighs no more than two monthly magazines—, which may be easily held at the proper angle for eyefocus on a large page.
The teacher will find in this Guide valuable suggestions about particular subjects which he may wish to teach or study,—such as history, literature, language and biology. In this chapter we suggest a general course.
The Theory of Education
Let him begin with the article E (Vol. 8, p. 951), which is the equivalent in length of 120 pages of the size and type of this Guide, and of which the first part is by James Welton, professor of education in the University of Leeds and author of Logical Bases of Education, etc., the sections on national systems by G. B. M. Coore, assistant secretary of the London Board of Education, and that on the United States by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University. This valuable article begins with a discussion of the meaning of the term “Education,” excludes John Stuart Mill’s extension to everything which “helps to shape the human being,” and narrows the meaning to definitely personal work, —the true “working” definition for the practical teacher.
The section on educational theory might equally well be styled a sketch of the history of education and will prove valuable to the teacher preparing for a licence-examination in this subject or for a normal training course. It discusses old Greek education with special
attention to Spartan practice, Plato’s theory and Aristotle’s, and the gradual change from the point of view of the city-state to Hellenistic cosmopolitanism. The older Roman education, practical and given by father to son, is contrasted with the later Hellenized training, largely by Greek slaves, largely rhetorical and largely summed up in Quintilian’s Institutio. The contest between the pagan system and Christianity is shown to have culminated in monasticism; and barbarian inroads stifled classical culture until the Carolingian revival under Alcuin in the 8th century and the scholastic revival (11th to 13th centuries) of Abelard, Aquinas and Arabic workings over of Aristotle. Scholastic education is considered especially in relation to the first great European universities and the schools of the Dominicans, Franciscans and Brethren of the Common Life, and in contrast to chivalry, the education of feudalism. The Renaissance is treated at greater length, and this is followed by sections on the influence of the Reformation on education, and the consequent growth of Jesuit schools. The keynote of the story thereafter is reform,—the movement away from the classics, toward natural science, and, especially after the French Revolution, by means of new methods and theories, notably those of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Herbart.
The remainder of the article E TION deals with national systems of education: French, German, Swiss, Belgian, Dutch, Scotch, Irish, English, Welsh and American, with an excellent bibliography. These, and other, national systems are also treated from another point of view in the articles on the separate countries.
Articles on Great Schools
The article E should naturally be followed by a study of the article U (Vol. 27, p. 748— about 100 pages, if printed in the style of this Guide) by James Bass Mullinger (author of the History of Cambridge, The Schools of Charles the Great, etc.) and, for American universities, by Daniel Coit Gilman, late president of Johns Hopkins University; and by a reading of articles on the great universities, as for instance, Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Dublin, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, Leland Stanford, Jr., etc. The student should then turn to the article S (Vol. 24, p. 359; equivalent to about 40 pages of
this Guide) by Arthur Francis Leach, author of English Schools at the Reformation, who gives a summary of what is known of Greek, Roman and English schools.
Then,—to supplement these general articles,—he should read—
On Greek education:
P (Vol. 21, p. 808), especially p. 812 (on Meno) and 818 (on the Republic).
A (Vol. 2, p. 501).
S (Vol. 25, p. 609, particularly p. 611).
On Roman education:
C (Vol. 5, p. 535).
Q (Vol. 22, p. 761).
On early Christian education:
C A (Vol. 6, p. 487, particularly p. 488, on the Paedagogus).
A (Vol. 2, p. 907) and J (Vol. 15, p. 326), with especial attention to their early pagan education and their attitude toward it as Christians.
A (Vol. 1, p. 798).
M C (Vol. 5, p. 249).
B (Vol. 4, p. 116).
C (Vol. 5, p. 459).
I (Vol. 14, p. 871).
S . G (Vol. 12, p. 566).
B (Vol. 3, p. 615).
M (Vol. 18, p. 687).
On the Carolingian revival:
A (Vol. 1, p. 529).
A (Vol. 2, p. 9).
C (Vol. 5, p. 891, especially p. 894).
F (Vol. 10, p. 810).
On the Scholastic revival:
S (Vol. 24, p. 346).
A (Vol. 1, p. 40).
J S (Vol. 15, p. 449).
A M (Vol 1, p. 504).
G (Vol. 12, p. 617).
T A (Vol. 2, p. 250).
R B (Vol. 3, p. 153).
On the Renaissance:
R (Vol. 23, p. 83).
D (Vol. 7, p. 810).
P (Vol. 21, p. 310).
B (Vol. 4, p. 102).
M C (Vol. 6, p. 320).
M (Vol. 17, p. 624).
T M (Vol. 18, p. 822).
E (Vol. 9, p. 727).
J C (Vol. 6, p. 681).
T L (Vol. 16, p. 701).
On the Reformation period and Counter-Reformation:
R (Vol. 23, p. 4).
M (Vol. 18, p. 88).
L (Vol. 17, p. 133).
T (Vol. 27, p. 308).
R (Vol. 23, p. 204).
A (Vol. 2, p. 720).
R (Vol. 22, p. 769).
J (Vol. 15, p. 337), especially p. 342.
L S (Vol. 16, p. 231).
On the Modern period:
C (Vol. 6, p. 759).
R (Vol. 23, p. 775).
V (Vol. 28, p. 199).
P (Vol. 21, p. 284).
F (Vol. 11, p. 238).
H (Vol. 13, p. 335).
W V H (Vol. 13, p. 875).
A B (Vol. 3, p. 684).
J L (Vol. 16, p. 147).
S J F (Vol. 10, p. 438).
J B (Vol. 4, p. 34).
T. H. G (Vol. 11, p. 416).
F. A. P. B (Vol. 3, p. 409).
H B (Vol. 3, p. 410).
H M (Vol. 17, p. 587).
M H (Vol. 13, p. 684).
W T. H (Vol. 13, p. 21).
J S. M (Vol. 18, p. 869).
A M B (Vol. 3, p. 684).
S. C. A (Vol. 2, p. 591).
B T. W (Vol. 28, p. 344).
C -E (Vol. 6, p. 637).
B (Vol. 4, p. 66).
D D (Vol. 7, p. 887).
I S (Vol. 14, p. 533).
K (Vol. 15, p. 802).
M A (Vol. 19, p. 60).
M S (Vol. 19, p. 64).
P (Vol. 22, p. 38).
T E (Vol. 26, p. 487), an elaborate article, about 40 pages in the form of this Guide, by Sir Philip Magnus, author of Industrial Education, member of the Royal Commission on technical instruction (1881–1884) and, in 1907, president of the education section of the British Association.
The Study of Psychology
Of equal importance with this course on the history of education, for the student taking the licence-examination or for a teacher taking an examination for a higher grade licence or a principalship, is a course in Psychology in the Britannica. This will be found largely in the great article on P (Vol. 22, p. 547; equivalent in length to 200 pages of this Guide) by James Ward. The systematic treatment of the subject in this article is particularly valuable to the teacher, whether the object desired is to review the entire subject, sharpening one’s impressions from a longer course of reading; to get a general grounding in the subject—for which a careful study of this one article will suffice; or to make one’s self more certain of his comprehension of any part of the subject. It is not practicable to give an outline of this article here, but a few of its special topics are listed below:
General analysis of the subject
Attention
Theory of presentations
Sensation
Perception
Imagination or Ideation
Mental Association
Reminiscence and Expectation
Experimental Investigations on Memory and Association
Feeling
Emotion and Emotional Action
Intellection
Self-Consciousness
Relation of Body and Mind
Comparative Psychology
Besides the general article with its systematic summary of the subject, the Britannica contains many briefer articles on special topics, so that the teacher will find not only an excellent text-book of the subject in Prof. Ward’s article, but also an elaborate dictionary or encyclopaedia of psychological terms or topics. Among the topics treated in this “Dictionary of Psychology” are:
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A
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A
C
C
C
C
D
D
D
D
E
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M
M
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Furthermore, the teacher will find the Britannica a valuable biographical dictionary. This he will already have realized, if he has looked up the biographical articles mentioned in connection with the history of education. The following is a brief outline course in psychological biography:
