Создание представительского собрания в Майсоре стало первым шагом к доказательству способности индийцев к самоуправлению

Mysore was the first Indian state to have a representative assembly, a purely deliberative forum without powers of legislation whose members included landlords, merchants, and intellectuals nominated by the state. When the Mysore Representative Assembly (MRA) was founded in 1881, the editorial of a major newspaper published in British India noted: “A new experiment is being tried in the Mysore state whose progress would be extremely interesting to watch because it has been frequently asserted that Eastern nations are not fitted for such councils or such a Government as that of England or the United States. For many centuries before our time, Hindoos have been despotically governed; so very few of them have actually taken part in the government of their country that they know not what real political freedom and true representative government mean.” — Madras Times, October 18, 1881. Colonial rule had revived older European views of oriental societies as historically subject to arbitrary despotic rule and therefore incapable of self-governance. The founding of the MRA was therefore an endeavour that could potentially prove the Indians’ capacity for self-government, although colonial discourses asserted otherwise. This also becomes evident in Dewan Rangacharlu’s annual speech to the MRA in 1882: “The universal satisfaction with which it (the news of the MRA’s founding) has been received throughout Southern India, and I believe, in other parts of India also, is proof of the appreciation of the boon by the people and refutes the assumption often made that they are not yet prepared for self-government.” The MRA indeed served as an important symbol in the politics of civilisational recognition during the colonial era. A filial episode from another geopolitical context further clarifies this phenomenon. In countering the South African government’s argument that Indians did not deserve voting rights in South Africa because they had never exercised franchise in India, Mohandas Gandhi, who was then a lawyer, said in his address to the Natal Legislative Assembly in 1894: “The State of Mysore has at the present moment a representative parliament, called the Mysore Assembly, on the exact model of the British Parliament.” Two decades later, in an address to college students, Sir Kantaraj Urs, a member of the maharaja’s Council of Ministers and later dewan of Mysore, observed: “I may here perhaps mention that the name and fame of Mysore as one of the most enlightened States of India have reached even the far, distant Japan.” In a talk at the Indian Institute of Science delivered more than 15 years later, Dewan Mirza Ismail recalled learning from a Nobel laureate in physics from Mysore “that hardly anyone in Paris knew of the existence of Bangalore. Such a place did not exist for them on our planet … It is a calamity to be so little-known outside.” Indeed, he had arranged for reports about Mysore state’s achievements to appear periodically in newspapers in England. British colonial rule and its claims of the inherent backwardness of India constituted a powerful denial of recognition of the self-worth of the colonised Indians. The colonial encounter was also a source of cultural injury and shame. In Shame and Necessity, moral philosopher Bernard Williams notes: “The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people in the wrong condition.” The coloniser’s discovery of Indians in a state of backwardness on the plane of evolutionary history constituted an experience of shame for the colonised. The pursuit of development proved then a means of moving out of that shameful condition. For the colonial encounter to succeed as a denial of civilisational recognition and a source of shame for the colonised, the diagnosis of “the wrong condition” as well as the means of remedying it needed to be accepted by both the coloniser and the colonised. Colonial ideas of history and progress that enabled the imagination of linear social evolution from primitive to modern society played a crucial part in this respect. Such ideas succeeded in denying recognition to the colonised insofar as the latter accepted the European vision of universal progress as valid. Acknowledging that they were indeed backward and that the West was already developed in the scheme of social evolution, the Mysore state elite sought recognition for their capacity to achieve development squarely within the rules of the colonial intellectual game. Their pursuit of development, which allowed them to claim a commonality that bound Mysore with the Western world on the plane of temporal progress prior to exercising their political and moral agency, was misaligned with the integrity of the life arrangements of various local communities and marginalised the knowledges embedding them. Even as their planning schemes showed a steady anchor in Eurocentric knowledge and entailed an active non-recognition of the worth of local knowledges for building a modern economy, the elite’s theory and practice of development often realigned concepts in the colonial lexicon. Modern colonialism’s violent sociocultural consequences for the colonised have found wide discussion. The colonised societies’ internalisation of the colonial claims about their cultural inferiority has been passionately discussed by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, and Ashis Nandy. Faced with colonial humiliation, the colonised expressed their capacity for independent action in various ways. One such response found among the Mysore state elite was to assert their state’s capacity for becoming developed like the modern West. The West invoked in the state elite’s comparative imagination was an imagined entity where the historical and cultural differences among Western countries had collapsed. Equally significantly, the elite representations of Mysore’s backwardness did away with local cultural heterogeneity and saw their interests in development and those of all other locals as being aligned in a common pursuit. Excerpted with permission from Longing for an Elsewhere: Mysore and the Making of India’s Developmental State, Chandan Gowda, Oxford University Press.