Mountstuart Elphinstone, Colonial Knowledge and ‘Frontier Governmentality’ in Northwest India, 1849–1878

With the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849 following the disasters of the First Anglo-Afghan War, Mountstuart Elphinstone's "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul", and those of his intellectual successors, became "useful knowledge", and found a fertile administrative environment in the management of India's northwest frontier. According to this logic of government, frontier spaces could be tamed through adequate knowledge and understanding of their indigenous populations, part of a wider assemblage of power that has been referred to in Foucauldian terms as "frontier governmentality". Taking this concept as its starting point, this chapter turns its attention to the procurement, evolution, and use of colonial knowledge as part of this wider project of frontier governance. If "frontier governmentality" differed from "colonial governmentality", then what made it distinct? By studying the trajectories of the body of colonial knowledge initiated by Mountstuart Elphinstone and his intellectual successors, new understandings of colonial power in frontier spaces start to emerge through the lens of "governmentality", offering key insights into the modalities of colonial government in so-called "peripheral" areas, and the role played by "colonial knowledge" as part of this assemblage of power.

The Discovery of Afghanistan in the Era of Imperialism

The establishment of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century, whose chief goal was to introduce the civilizations of Eastern societies to the West, encouraged a series of enquiries by British writers and travelers on the history, culture, art, antiquities, and literature of Eastern countries, including Afghanistan. This chapter analyzes the writings of three enterprising British explorers who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the travel accounts of George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson, men separated in time, interests and ambitions, but whose work, when examined collectively, delivers from personal observation an expansive picture of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such detail has not been found anywhere else, even within indigenous sources, which makes their writings essential and indispensable resources for studying the history, culture and society of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together, their enquiries concerning ethnographic, cultural, and social life in Afghanistan have formed a topographical and cultural template for future researchers.

The Soviet Elphinstone

This chapter offers a brief history of how the thought of Mountstuart Elphinstone was received among Soviet scholars of Afghanistan. The connection may not be obvious at first, but Russian language scholarship on Afghanistan outpaced that in any other language from the early twentieth century onward owing to the special nature of Soviet-Afghan relations following the October Revolution and Afghan independence. Likewise, close Soviet-Afghan relations during the Cold War – culminating in the decade-long occupation of the country by the Soviet Army – framed the context for later Soviet scholarship on the country. This chapter demonstrates that "Elphinstonian epistemes" very much had an afterlife in Soviet scholarship on the country, because many authors were misled about the identity of the Afghan state in Kabul with Pashtun populations on both sides of the Durand Line. Worse, these readings of Afghanistan had intermingled with crude readings about the "revolutionary" nature of Afghan Communists and their opponents. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, attentive scholars urged more nuanced concepts to make sense of Afghanistan, but as this chapter demonstrates, Elphinstonian tropes very much framed the Soviet romance with – and disaster in – twentieth century Afghanistan.

Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and 150 Years of Baloch History

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the UK dispatched a number of envoys, agents and spies into the vast area between northern India and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The information gathered by these adventurers provided the basis for British policy for the next hundred years, right down to the Great War of the twentieth century. Their publications have served as major sources of historical data, especially for Afghanistan, Iran and the area that later became Pakistan. But how their larger social context conditioned their work has not been examined sufficiently. In this chapter, I will focus on the adventures of Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, whose brief was one of the most challenging. However, he was well aware of being one of a number of Englishmen of different social classes who were doing similar things. What we learn about any one of them will shed additional light on the activities and significance of the work of the others, and in turn help us to understand the relationship between these countries and the West as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Muslim ‘Fanaticism’ as Ambiguous Trope

This chapter is concerned with the phenomenon of "Muslim fanaticism", an amorphous threat to governmental security that resisted colonial scrutiny throughout the nineteenth century. As tensions with borderland tribes, Wahhabi conspirators, and the forces of a global Muslim "revival" mounted, fanaticism evolved into a floating signifier, a malleable construct that could service divergent polemical agendas. Borderland ethnographers and India reformers conceptualized Muslim religiosity in various ways to support their own commentaries on native "political" vitality. Earlier observers like Mountstuart Elphinstone represented Indian communities in gendered terms and downplayed the influence of religious enthusiasm on societal progress. Later ethnographers, however, invoked fanaticism to justify a colonial "Forward Policy", or conversely, attributed Muslim discontent to the state's poorly conceived, westernizing legislation. Meanwhile, reformers who were calling for the retention of princely rule referenced fanaticism to defend the interests of Muslim notables in South India and Bengal. These loyalist leaders, they argued, could help provide native society with an organic trajectory of civic growth and douse the embers of fanaticism whenever they became enflamed. Extending this advocacy of native sovereignty to the Afghan frontier ultimately proved contentious on account of Russian expansionism and the resurgence of the Eastern Question.

Introduction

The Introduction describes the larger Elphinstone Project that contextualizes this book. It provides a brief biography of Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) and outlines his scholarly work and its enduring impact for both Afghanistan Studies and Indian Studies. Elphinstone's tenure as Governor of Bombay (1819-27) and his 1841 "The History of India" highlight the discussion of his prominent location in the field of British Indian and colonial studies. Elphinstone's 1815 "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" is discussed through contemporaneous book reviews and references to the book's current status as a canonical text in the field of Afghanistan Studies. Short summaries of each chapter conclude the Introduction.

Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision

Mountstuart Elphinstone's writings on Afghanistan have had lingering effects throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century. Even with the end of British colonial rule in 1947, western interest in Afghanistan, and particularly the Pathan borderlands spread across southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, has remained. Both British and American observers have continued to value this region for its strategic locale, even as both have wrestled with the "tribal" nature of the local Pathan population and its longstanding autonomy from neighboring states. While Cold War competition replaced the rivalry of the Great Game, colonial-era understandings of Afghanistan and local and regional politics continued to color western policies towards this region. This chapter reflects on the legacies of Elphinstone's work for western policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of partition and in the emergent Cold War. Using the works of Olaf Caroe and James W. Spain, it considers how Elphinstone's ideas and rhetoric concerning Afghan politics and tribal society and organization have resounded in western conceptualizations of Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan. It compares British and American understandings of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relative reliance on Elphinstone's ideas. Ultimately it considers the similarities and differences in the ways that British and American officials have perceived and valued Afghanistan's place in a broader world political order.

Elphinstone, Geography, and the Spectre of Afghanistan in the Himalaya

This chapter analyzes the "Elphinstonian episteme" in the context of the northwestern Himalayas, a region centered on the historical "entrepot" of Ladakh. The combination of cartographic, ethnographic and scientific practices exhibited in the Elphinstone mission of 1808-09 were repeated a decade later in the north-western Himalayas by William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, and were extended by two British boundary commissions in the 1840s. The results of these commissions were compiled in Alexander Cunningham's composite account, "Ladak: Physical, Statistical, and Historical" (1854), a text which has done for Ladakh Studies what Elphinstone's "Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" has done for Afghanistan Studies. This chapter surveys the place of geography within Elphinstone's, Moorcroft's and Cunningham's texts, before exploring how the assertion of borderlines within these geographical conceptions conflicted with indigenous understandings of territory. By comparing these texts, this chapter traces the development of colonial geographical knowledge. Not only are these texts fundamentally concerned with the construction of political space, they also reflect a specific hierarchy of information that reflects broader colonial understandings of territoriality.

Mountstuart Elphinstone and Indian Education

Mountstuart Elphinstone was widely lauded by his contemporaries for his progressive views and advanced policies regarding education whilst he held senior colonial positions in western India from 1817 until 1827. The creation of Elphinstone College in his honor exemplifies this. This essay is an exploration of Elphinstone's educational views and policies, paying attention to various influences that explain his distinctive approach to education. These influences included the East India Company's ethos of pragmatic respect for Indian culture, religion and mores; educational policy and debates in contemporary British Bengal; Scotland's parish schools and Adam Smith's use of these to defend state-sponsored education; and German Romantic ideas regarding language, literature and national culture. The chapter concludes with Elphinstone's larger vision of a political education that would lead the Indian people to eventual independence but leave Britain with a "moral empire" that might rival the one that outlasted the Roman Empire.

Can Imperialists Produce Knowledge?

Mountstuart Elphinstone's administration as Governor of Bombay consolidated East India Company rule over large tracts of Central, Western, and Northwestern India. It represented a new and unmistakable projection of both British armed force and knowledge production. In this chapter, the work of a prominent soldier-administrator scholar whose work was strongly encouraged by Elphinstone, the father of Maratha history, James Grant Duff, is taken up. The line of argument is that, despite the imperial and military conditions that made Grant Duff's research possible, it is a mistake to see it simply as a project of colonial hegemony and not a major, even foundational intellectual production and act of public reason submitted to the cosmopolitan world of letters from which Indians were not, in principle, excluded. The chapter thus suggests grounds for breaking with the Saidian paradigm not simply on positivist grounds, but in favor of finer grained historical and more discerning ideological analysis. This means paying close attention to Grant Duff's (and his History's) struggle against the East India Company itself, whose chief interest was not knowledge so much as secrecy.