Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India

Abstract

Kingsley Martin's critique of imperialism was born out of socialist rationalism and long overseas lecture tours. But in Leonard Woolf, his friend and periodic replacement at the offices of the New Statesman, we have a confidant who had, for several years before 1914, abandoned the rarefied circles of Bloomsbury, to become a civil administrator in Ceylon. Woolf's experience of colonial government had soured him from the beginning. He came to feel that the British were eternally shut out from knowledge of the lives of the Ceylonese subjects by an almost palpable curtain of ignorance and racial prejudice. Those temples of accumulated colonial knowledge, the district offices where he worked, were ‘great monuments of official incompetence, bottlenecks of delay’. When he tried to galvanize into action these places of sacred lore, the squeals of rage, from Briton and Ceylonese alike, were louder than if he had trespassed into the holiest Buddhist shrine. Yet, for all that, Woolf remained a devout believer in the individualist myth that sustained colonial rule: the ideal of the lone colonial officer and sage, standing at the centre of a web of untainted knowledge, the man who ‘knows the country’.British rule might be saved from damnation if liberal judgement were based on pure information. The problem was that, at some level, information hadto come from a ‘native informant’, an agent, a spy, an ‘approver’ who turned King's Evidence, and, by their very nature, such agencies could not be trusted.