Lesson from British India: Highlight victims when expanding government

Thanks to the deficient American public school system, which taught me all kinds of useless facts about now-moribund Europe, I’m learning a lot from Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani.

The profile of Ram Mohan Roy is relevant to our current political and cultural climate. With U.S. federal, state, and local governments now controlling or directing between one third and one half of the U.S. economy (depending on whether you consider the health care industry part of the private sector or part of the government-directed sector), how is that politicians are increasingly likely to tell us that the country is full of victims? See Andrew Cuomo, for example, on ABC:

we’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.” … America “…will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone. And every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.”

If the government is running half of the economy and the government’s actions are just (unlike the unjust market segment of the economy), how is it that so many Americans are victimized? Shouldn’t at least half of us be safe from victimization?

Let’s look at this 19th century Indian guy…

By the time of his death in Bristol in 1833, the Bengali scholar Rammohun Roy had become a worldwide intellectual celebrity. An English contemporary called him a “lion of the season,” and he was sufficiently dashing that a lock of his luxuriant hair has been preserved at the Bristol Museum. “He was a man of charisma and he was a man of determination,” Carla Contractor, a historian who has documented the three years Roy spent in Britain, says, He was six feet tall, a towering figure, and he made sure he dressed in flowing muslin robes, but with spats and European shoes. He wowed people, and they half-expected to be overwhelmed by this man. Whichever party he was invited to go to, he went. And he made sure that he spoke to the people that he wanted to. He was a networker of the first order.

“Roy was part of an international set of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radicals and reformers who attacked established religion and ruling despots, including the East India Company. He corresponded with Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, and with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted him to sit in the Westminster House of Commons. In Spain, liberals dedicated the country’s 1812 Constitution to him. In America, the young Ralph Waldo Emerson read him avidly. Roy celebrated Latin American revolutions and dined with the king of France.”

What gained Roy renown in the West, above all, was his advocacy to improve the status of women in India, and to abolish the practice of sati (or “suttee,” as it was then known), the Hindu rite in which widows immolated themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres.

Until the nineteenth century, British officials had largely tolerated sati, unwilling to intervene in their subjects’ religious customs. But Roy’s campaign converged with the birth of an international concern with human rights. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, movements to abolish slavery and capital punishment, to promote the rights of women, and to articulate and uphold humanitarian values became the first global moral crusades.

Sati fitted into this larger discourse, though it was probably not the most pernicious social ill inflicted on Indian women. In most parts of the country, it was exceptionally rare and, if anything, on the decline.

The campaign against sati was useful to Roy, enabling him to promote himself as a native moral conscience in tune with international norms. Yet he was not the only one for whom it was a boon, and reform ultimately came not from within India, but with a government ban, in 1829. The ruling marked a major shift in how the British saw their place in the country. Henceforth, part of their justification for ruling over Indians was the need to civilize them and educate them away from barbaric practices. Sati was a ready way of foregrounding the primitive bloodthirstiness of the Hindus, and of justifying the corrective despotism that the British now saw themselves as dispensing to India’s benefit.

In other words, India needed a big central government, which only the British could provide, so that victims (women, in the above case) could be protected.