CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS Imperialism and Colonialism Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton is a collection of interviews that are being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost imperial and global historians. Colonialism is intrinsically linked to its imperial past. Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton, come alive through these conversations in this book. They offer a refreshing perspective to the actions of the colonizer and the colonized, often deriding the actions of the former. Bayly talks at great length about his Indian experience, Rathbone talks about the tempered indifference of the larger academic community towards African history and its oral tradition and Drayton engages his readers with anecdotes and interesting insights into Creole culture. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of History, Culture Studies, Ethnography and Comparative Studies and Literature but also to the uninitiated because of the lucidity which conversations bring to even otherwise opaque discussions. Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master’s degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012. CREATIVE LIVES AND WORKS Imperialism and Colonialism Christopher Alan Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton In conversation with Alan Macfarlane Edited by Radha Béteille First published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Social Science Press The right of Alan Macfarlane to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9781032228112 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003274285 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003274285 Typeset in Sabon LT Std by Manmohan Kumar Contents Preface vii Note on Transcription – Radha Béteille xi Introduction – Alan Macfarlane xiii Empires and the Role of Anthropology – Alan Macfarlane 1 PART I Christopher Bayly – In conversation with Alan Macfarlane 11 PART II Richard Rathbone – In conversation with Alan Macfarlane 41 The Troubled Past of Africa’s History – Richard Rathbone 81 PART III Richard Drayton – In conversation with Alan Macfarlane 95 Appendix 1: Biographical information – 129 Compiled by Radha Béteille Appendix 2: Historical information – 161 Compiled by Radha Béteille Preface I am old enough to have at least an infant foot in the imperial world of the British. Born in 1941 in Assam, the end of a long line of imperial ancestors in the West Indies, India, Burma and elsewhere, I was just aware of the world in 1947 when India gained its independence and the largest Empire the world has ever known suddenly crumbled. When I returned to England in 1947, I mainly lived with my grandparents, William and Violet Rhodes James. They epitomized the last decades of the Empire. William was born on a coffee plantation in the Nilgiri Hills at Coonor in 1886 and Violet was born in Mandalay, Burma in 1896, the daughter of the first solicitor in Upper Burma. They spent their lives in India, where my grandfather became a Lieutenant Colonel in the 89th Punjabis. From the age of six until I left for University, I was constantly surrounded by objects and photographs of India and Burma and my grandmother often told me about their lives there. So, I was steeped in that world, and also reminded of it by the letters from my mother in Assam, still filled with colonial clubs and sentiments even after Independence. Although there was surprisingly almost no teaching about the Empire and its history in the two boarding schools, I went to from the age of eight to eighteen, the education was still, to a considerable degree, that which had been designed to provide colonial civil servants. We learnt the arts of indirect rule through the prefect system and were toughened up to endure the hardships and loneliness that a posting in some remote Indian or African outpost would face us with. So, I was moulded for an imperial world which no longer existed. When I went to Oxford University in 1960 to study history the Empire was really receding. The Suez disaster and the final days often African Empire were almost past and again we hardly touched on the Empire and its history in the three years as an undergraduate. viii PREFACE All my teaching was in European and English history and I learnt nothing about other religions, philosophies or political systems outside the West. Yet my interest in imperial history was again kept alive by my mother Iris. As the wife of a tea-planter, she had unusually learnt Assamese and translated and published Assamese folk stories, studied the ancient Ahom tombs in Assam and done research on Burmese and Indian history. Some of this was later to be published in 1975 in one of the first books to reveal the fabrication for the justification for the taking over of parts of India in her The Black Hole; the Makings of a Legend. So, it was natural that, when I decided to do anthropological fieldwork for my second doctorate, in anthropology, I should try to return to these colonial roots — first attempting to go to Assam, and then, when that was not possible, to Nepal in 1968. I was supervised by one of the great ethnographers of late colonial India, the superb photographer and film-maker and writer of many classic studies, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Through him I met a number of the older generation of colonial anthropologists. Also, through Christoph, I became interested in the Naga peoples of the Assam-Burma border, who I had first encountered as a child on the tea estate we lived on which was on the border of Nagaland. So, with Sarah Harrison we set up a project to collect and publish all the available documents, films, photographs and photographs of objects from Nagaland in private collections and in museums in the UK. This was made available in a museum exhibition in Cambridge, a book by Julian Jacobs, and a videodisc and website containing all the original materials, many of which were returned, in this form, to Nagaland. So, although I cannot count myself as any kind of imperial historian, the subject has increasingly interested me and in recent years work in Japan and China has increased this interest. Both of these civilizations were deeply affected by western imperialism, though they managed, on the whole, to avoid occupation by imperial powers. Their recent history is a dialogue with western imperialism, and the story continues with the American imperialist mission to make the world in its image and he reactions to this. PREFACE ix Furthermore, as a historian and anthropologist moving up to a global level in the years since retirement, I have become increasingly aware of the ways in which the history of the Wet, and in particular Britain, has been shaped by their Empires. India is as much British, as Britain is Indian. As soon as we start to look, we find that much of modern Britain is actually a product of the West India, Burma, India and even of the shadow Empire in Japan and China. And with the huge influx of post-imperial peoples into Britain in the last forty years, the influence on British culture is even more dramatic. Other aspects of my engagement and the influence of imperialism is contained in a subsequent essay, which addresses such matters as the degree to which my academic discipline of anthropology is shaped by the entanglement with imperialism and colonialism. So, the wider theoretical implications of being from an imperial nation in its last period can be dealt with there. Here I will end by briefly noting how I came to know the three thinkers who represent a tradition of imperial and colonial history in Britain. The three individuals and how I knew them The only one of the three I have known for many years was the late Chris Bayly. I must have met Chris in the 1970s when I first came to Cambridge and he was teaching there and was a Fellow of St Catharine’s. I remember he invited me to write a volume (on demography) for the series of The New Cambridge History of India, of which he was the co-editor — an honour I sadly had to turn down, partly because of pressure of other work, partly because I was not really qualified to do it. I remember going to a series of prestigious lectures he gave in Cambridge and being amazed at his combined erudition, insight and fluency. As one does in Cambridge, we met on academic and social occasions over the years. In 1989 we discussed making a videodisc together for the Imperial Exhibition which Chris was curating, and a few years later we shared a table at a Summer Supper Party in King’s College and met again at a party with Lord Rees and Lady Caroline Humphrey in 2001. We also became closer when he married Professor