Empire calling : administering colonial Australasia and India

191 Pages·2013·1.78 MB·English

by  Crane

Empire Calling
Administering Colonial Australasia and India
edited by
Ralph Crane,
Anna Johnston
and
C. Vijayasree
Bengaluru • Chennai • Delhi • Hyderabad • Kolkata • Mumbai
• Pune • Thiruvananthapuram
Published by
Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. under the imprint of
Foundation Books
CAMBRIDGE HOUSE
4381/4, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi – 110002
C-22, C-Block, Brigade M.M., K.R. Road, Jayanagar, Bengaluru 560 070
Plot No. 80, Service Industries, Shirvane, Sector-1, Nerul, Navi Mumbai 400 706
10 Raja Subodh Mullick Square, 2nd Floor, Kolkata 700013
21/1 (New No. 49), 1st Floor, Model School Road, Thousand Lights, Chennai 600 006
House No. 3-5-874/6/4, (Near Apollo Hospital), Hyderguda, Hyderabad 500 029
Agarwal Pride, ‘A’ Wing, 1308 Kasba Peth, Near Surya Hospital, Pune 411 011
T.C. 25/ 2731 Lukes Lane, Ambujavilasam Road, Thiruvananthapuram 695 001
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material included in
this book. The publishers would be grateful for any omissions brought to their
notice for acknowledgement in future editions of the book.
© Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd.
First published 2013
All rights reserved. No reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., subject to statutory
exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements.
ISBN 978-93-8226-479-8
Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in
this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by Techastra Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad
Cover design by ISHTIHAAR, New Delhi
Published by Manas Saikia for Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd.
In memory of our co-editor and colleague
Chaganti Vijayasree (1953–2012)

Contents
Introduction
Administering Colonial Spaces in Australasia and India vii
Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston
Part 1: Australasia and Its Diaspora
1. Benevolent Empire? 3
Protecting Indigenous Peoples in British Australasia
Alan Lester
2. Population Control 24
A.O. Neville’s Anxious Administration
Rebecca Dorgelo
3. “At home” on a Mission Station and in a Female Factory 38
Imagining Mary Hutchinson
Lucy Frost
4. “Dead Empires Whisper Wisdom” 68
Alfred Domett and the Postcolonial Conscience
Mark Williams
5. “Operation Unique” 83
Administering Pitcairn Island in the Twenty-First Century
Lisa Fletcher
Part 2: India and Its Diaspora
6. Identifying Sher Mohamad 103
‘a good citizen’
Margaret Allen
7. Administering Domestic Space 120
Flora Annie Steel’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston
vi Empire Calling
8. The Native Element in the Steel Frame 133
Indian ICS Officers’ Relationship with British Colleagues
Meenakshi Sharma
9. The Production of Colonial Knowledge and the Role of 148
Native Intellectuals
The Case of Kavali Borraiah
C. Vijayasree
10. Administering the Literary Empire 161
Edmund Gosse, Toru Dutt, and Sarojini Naidu
Jane Stafford
Notes on Contributors 176
Introduction
Administering Colonial Spaces in
Australasia and India
Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston
i
Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this
book explore the roles of the men and women who administered
the British Empire in Australasia and India. The essays had
their genesis in an interdisciplinary conference held at Osmania
University, Hyderabad, in 2007, which was jointly convened by the
University of Tasmania’s Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath
and School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, and
the Department of English at Osmania University.
“Administering,” as the essays in this volume amply reveal,
involves many forms of activity – managing and organising;
financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering
and supplying; writing and implementing policy – across
diverse domains of practice (the Civil Service, schools and
universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems, and so on).
Administrative arrangements, as the various essays show, involve
complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often
through radically unequal and racially based power relations. In
the two parts of this book the authors, from India, Australia, New
Zealand, and Britain, look at the way colonial administrations in
Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn Island, and India — and with
inevitable reference back to Britain and other parts of the British
Empire — call into being the spaces under their control, and
how they do so through the accumulation and management of
information and knowledge.
vii
viii Empire Calling
This book is divided into two parts, the first containing five
essays on Australasia and its diaspora; the second comprising five
essays on India and its diaspora.
ii
In “Benevolent Empire? Protecting Indigenous Peoples in British
Australasia,” the opening essay of this collection and the first section
on Australasia and its diaspora, Alan Lester reminds us that in the
first decade of the twenty-first century conservative historians like
Niall Ferguson in Britain have called on Britons to celebrate the
achievements of Empire, while in Australia Keith Windschuttle has
led a conservative drive to scale down the estimates of the violent
Aboriginal death toll during the early nineteenth century. In New
Zealand, where such conservative voices are more muted, there
has been criticism of pro-Maori interpretations of colonial history.
In response to these conservative voices, Lester takes us back to
the early nineteenth century to consider the advantages British
humanitarians believed their colonial settlements were bringing
to the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand, and asks
how their attempts to protect the interests of indigenous peoples
within the imperial world fared. To examine these questions Lester
focuses on the Protectorate of Aborigines established in the colony
of New South Wales. He argues that the Protectorate mission failed,
not because their aims were unrealistic or because the Protectors
themselves were unsuited to their roles, but because of opposition
from British settlers, and because of the cultural assumptions of the
humanitarians, who ultimately promoted assimilation on white
terms, thereby denying rights to the supposed beneficiaries of
Empire.
Rebecca Dorgelo discusses an important historical figure in
the administration of the Australian colonies: A.O. Neville, Chief
Protector of Aborigines (later Commissioner for Native Affairs)
in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940. Dorgelo interrogates the
eugenicist theories which were central to Neville’s administration
and which led to his particular interest in the “half-caste” population,
and a belief that “half-caste” children should be removed from
their families for their education at government institutions such as
the Moore River Native Settlement, where they would be trained
as farm labourers and domestic servants, and where they could
be better assimilated into white settler society. Dorgelo draws on
Introduction ix
archival records and Neville’s own writing to examine his policies,
his obsession with domestic detail of the institutions under his
control, and how, ultimately, his efforts were doomed to failure.
Moving from the administration of Aborigines to the control
of convicts, Lucy Frost takes the reader to the world of Female
Factories, which in colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s
Land served simultaneously as prisons, nurseries, hospitals, and
labour depots. In this biographical paper Frost asks what life was
like for “free” women caught up in the administrative functions of
empire, and how they “negotiate the tensions between institutional
and domestic space.” To answer that question she imagines the life
of Mary Hutchinson (1809-80), daughter of the first Superintendent
of the Parramatta Female Factory in New South Wales, who began
her married life as the wife of a missionary in Tonga, served as
Matron at the Female Factory in Hobart while her husband was
Superintendent, and ended her career in the insistently male convict
administration as the first and only woman appointed to manage a
Female Factory in her own right.
Taking the reader across the Tasman to New Zealand, Mark
Williams considers the work of Alfred Domett whom he sees as an
extremely unattractive example of a colonial administrator. A poet
and politician, Domett was actively involved in the running of the
New Zealand colony while he was writing his vast epic, Ranolf and
Amohia. Williams explores the contradictions between Domett’s
administrative dealings with contemporary Maori people and his
literary representations of Maori in his cross-cultural romance. He
argues that the poem, regarded in its own time as the epic of the
nation, is an exercise in the public use of aesthetic activity to think
through issues of empire, both practical and theoretical, colonial
and postcolonial.
In “‘Operation Unique’: Administering Pitcairn Island in the
Twenty-First Century,” Lisa Fletcher traces the machinery of
colonial justice that followed two complaints of sexual assault
reported by a British police officer serving on Pitcairn Island in 1999.
She argues that the texts surrounding the subsequent investigation
and trials provide a useful case study for reconsidering the legacy
of colonialism in the Pacific. Approaching her topic from both
colonial and postcolonial perspectives, Fletcher examines the legal
judgments of the Pitcairn Courts and the Privy Council as complex