person:charles grant

  • Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture, Of mimicry and man
    http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/mimicry.html

    The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.

    A classic text of such partiality is Charles Grant’s ’Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain’ (1792) which was only superseded by James Mills’s History of India as the most influential early nineteenth-century account of Indian manners and morals. Grant’s dream of an evangelical system of mission education conducted uncompromisingly in the English language, was partly a belief in political reform along Christian lines and partly an awareness that the expansion of company rule in India required a system of subject formation - a reform of manners, as Grant put it - that would provide the colonial with ’a sense of personal identity as we know it’. Caught between the desire for religious reform and the fear that the Indians might become turbulent for liberty, Grant paradoxically implies that it is the ’partial’ diffusion of Christianity, and the ’partial’ influence of moral improvements which will construct a particularly appropriate form of colonial subjectivity. What is suggested is a process of reform through which Christian doctrines might collude with divisive caste practices to prevent dangerous political alliances. Inadvertently, Grant produces a knowledge of Christianity as a form of social control which conflicts with the enunciatory assumptions that authorize his discourse. In suggesting, finally, that ’partial reform’ will produce an empty form of ’the imitation [my emphasis] of English manners which will induce them [the colonial subjects] to remain under our protection’. Grant mocks his moral project and violates the Evidence of Christianity - a central missionary tenet - which forbade any tolerance of heathen faiths.

    #colonialisme #Inde #Empire_britannique #religion