Indo European Collaborations and the Creative Society in Calcutta
Indo-European collaboration was a key ingredient of Calcutta’s creativity in the nineteenth century. Postcolonial historians fail to see its merit because when they look back at the past through their pet theoretical lens, any Indian who collaborated with Europeans was necessarily a foreign agent, part of the comprador class. Apologists for colonialism, although they are relatively rare these days, also ignore these ventures, as the imperial idea demands asymmetry in relation between the coloniser and the colonised. The theory of colonialism can accommodate benevolent patriarchy but as soon as there is equivalence between the coloniser and the colonised, the logic of imperialism is blown away. Indian nationalist historians have also ignored joint-ventures like the Bethune Society as these collaborative projects do not fit neatly into their simplistic narrative that all Europeans in British India were part of the evil colonial caste.
So, we are now in a situation where there is no objective historical analysis of the interesting collaborations that took place between Indians and Europeans in the pre-independence period.
An objective reading of Bethune Society’s ‘proceedings’ leads to the conclusion that the true nature of such collaborations cannot be captured through the narrow ideological lenses used in Indian historiography up until now. It is not that there are no theoretical lenses to analyse these collaborations, there are plenty. It is just that such frameworks have not been put to work in the context of Indian historiography. Social network concepts such as strength of strong and weak social ties, brokerage and structural holes, can explain much of the creativity that was engendered through nineteenth century Indo European collaborations, of which Bethune Society is just one example.
Selected Proceedings of the Bethune Society of Calcutta can be downloaded from this link
