Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, Albumen print by Maull & Polyblank (April 1856). Image from National Portrait Gallery, London.

Cast of characters (in alphabetical order):

Mulk Raj Anand (1905 – 2004): Indian writer who wrote in English

Robert Clive aka Clive of India (1725-1774): British officer with the British East India Company credited with “establishing” British supremacy in Bengal (i.e. laying the foundations of the British empire in India)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948): Lawyer and Indian leader (Professor Chaturvedi will tell us more)

Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948): Lawyer, leader of the Pakistan movement who fought to establish Pakistan.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): British statesman

Act 1: How Shakespeare came to India

Shakespeare came, or rather was first brought to India by the British East India Company in the eighteenth century. The first performance at the Calcutta Theatre, sometime between 1775 and 1808 (Majumdar 261), was presumably for company-men and their wives. From 1817 onwards Shakespeare became a fixture in the “systematic study” of English literature in schools and colleges across the subcontinent (Trivedi 15). In fact, in 1822 Hindu College in Calcutta became the first place in the world where his plays were included as a part of the university curriculum.  This educational system was guided by the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He is often thought of as the architect of English education in India, and subsequently in other British colonies. In his famous Minute of February 2^nd, 1835, which is more popularly known as the Minute on Education in India, Macaulay makes an argument about “the intrinsic superiority of Western Literature” and goes on to make the bold claim, without knowing either Sanskrit or Arabic, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay 349).  Given that by this point Shakespeare was not just a popular dramatist, but was seen as a god, and the pinnacle of English literature (Holderness 126), Macaulay was most likely envisioning Shakespeare in that “single shelf”, perhaps even a whole shelf of Shakespeare.

Despite this belief, what is most important is that Macaulay’s goal was not to educate all Indians. Rather, it was, as he remarks in these oft-quoted lines:

To form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. (Macaulay 359)

The phrase “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste” highlights the fact that part of the literacy project was to create a hierarchy among Indians, a hierarchy whose basis was “taste”, “morals”, and “intellect.” One way to prove this, to prove one’s “Englishness” could therefore be a love of Shakespeare. Furthermore, scholars like Gauri Viswanathan have shown how the work of writers like Shakespeare and Milton were “standard fare” in government schools in India by the mid-nineteenth century and were used to spread religious values that could help the British consolidate power in India (Viswanathan 54, 169). Thus, not only do Shakespeare’s plays, especially The Tempest (discussed in Professor Lewis’ lectures), engage with the concept of empire, but they were also a key tool of empire.

Act 2: Caliban and Gandhi

In our readings of The Tempest this quarter we have often seen Prospero as a stand in for the colonizer and Caliban for the colonized. This configuration is also reproduced in a letter written by the famous Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand addressed to ‘Bapu’ – M. K Gandhi. This letter dated June 20 – presumably 1920, because that is the year on some of the other letters in the collection – is titled “Caliban and Gandhi.”

The premise of the comparison between the man who is called ‘Bapu’ – the father of the nation, Gandhi – and Caliban is an intriguing anecdote involving Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Jinnah was a leader of the All India Muslim League, who later became a staunch advocate for the creation of Pakistan. Among the various epithets he was known by in Pakistan was baba-e-qaum (father of the nation). Anand writes, “I was amused when Mister M.A Jinnah dismissed you by a contemptuous comparison: ‘Oh Gandhi! That Caliban!’ The scurrilous dismissal of both you and Caliban shows that he has perhaps never read Shakespeare’s fantasy play Tempest” (Anand 87). Anand, here, is reprimanding Jinnah not so much for the comparison between Gandhi and Caliban, but for Jinnah’s interpretation of the play, in which Jinnah saw both Caliban and Gandhi as “low creatures” (Anand 88).

Anand then goes on to analyze the role of Caliban in The Tempest, and gives a persuasive reading that paints Robert Clive, the first commander in chief of British India, and popularly known as Clive of India, as a Prospero-like figure, who

Robert Clive, portrait from the studio of Nathaniel Dance, oil on canvas (c. 1773). Image from National Portrait Gallery, London.

was a magician figure of the 18^thcentury by virtue of superior strategy which he brought to bear to defeat the Indian feudalists. He followed the pattern set by Prospero, of using the local Chiefs everywhere, by giving them gifts. Clive’s successors continued the dual policy of bribing the local princes and Bania agents while making them the servants of their will to prevail. Every clerk of the John Company regarded the Indians, who served them as inferior ‘Banias’ ‘Babus’ and ‘Baboons’! (Anand 91)

Much like Prospero dehumanizes Caliban, by using the word ‘Baboons’ Anand suggests that the British dehumanized Indians. This passage suggests that all company officials were Prosperos and all colonized Indians were Calibanesque figures. And yet, Anand remarks later in the letter,  “If he [Jinnah] had read Shakespeare’s Tempest he might have seen you as arch rebel of the 20^th century, as Caliban was of the 15^th century” (Anand 93).

So, who is Caliban? Are all Indians, by virtue of being colonized by Prospero like figures, Calibans? Are only those Indians, who have been educated through the English system of education, Calibans – Prospero did teach Caliban English? Or is only Gandhi, Caliban? For Anand, Gandhi is Caliban, Caliban is Gandhi. Gandhi, an upper caste Hindu leader, a beneficiary of the Macaulayan system of education, is being exceptionalized through the comparison with Caliban. After all, Gandhi went to England to study the law, and practiced as a lawyer in South Africa, before he returned to India. Configuring Gandhi as the “arch rebel” of the twentieth century also erases his racism/casteism/sexism.

Along with elevating Gandhi, Anand also uses this letter to dismiss Jinnah. Anand contemptuously calls Jinnah “an imitation Brown Sahab, who wore suits tailored in Bond Street, London, wore Sulka neckties on a butterfly collar, a monocle on his right eye” (Anand 91). Is the “imitation” calling into question his brownness – owing to his disloyalty to Gandhi and the Indian national congress, or his sahabness, his Macaulay-man persona owing to his lack of knowledge of Shakespeare, seeing as Mulk Raj Anand could be regarded as a Macaulay-man himself? The latter is emphasized when Anand says, rather glibly, “I doubt though if this clever lawyer ever had the time or inclination to read Shakespeare at all” (Anand 93). An important sentence follows: “The bard of Avon was a unique genius of all time” (Anand 93). Love for Shakespeare is being taken as a sign of authenticity. An authenticity that Jinnah does not live up to, but perhaps Gandhi does? The irony is that in doing so Anand elevates Shakespeare just as Macaulay and the British system did.

Act 3: An Uninhabitable Island

By comparing Caliban to Gandhi, Prospero to Clive, Anand also sets up a comparison between the Island and India. Adrian, one of the Italian noblemen, describes the island as a “desert,” “uninhabitable and almost inaccessible” (II.i.37, 40). Similarly, while telling Miranda their story, Prospero remarks,

Then was this island
(Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born) not honored with
A human shape (I.ii.334-337)

When Clive came to India, he did not encounter a desert, an uninhabitable land, an island without hierarchy as Gonzalo would like. Rather, caste-based hierarchies already existed. Within these hierarchies, Brahmins (traditionally taking on professions of teaching and learning) were at the top. While Macaulay, a nineteenth century Prospero figure did recognize the “body of the people,” the “great mass of people,” let us remember he wanted to educate only one class of people, and the caste system  was often exploited by the British so that it was upper caste people who had access to English education. Upper caste people now had yet another way to exert their power over lower castes.

A question that arises: were “the people,” the “natives,” these uneducated masses considered human? Throughout the play Caliban is considered to have human qualities (through the musicality and literariness of his verse for example), to show humanity, but not be human. In an Indian context, this begs the question: if Macaulay men, like Gandhi, are the “hag born” where does that leave those who are lower down in the hierarchy, particularly the caste hierarchy? Asking these questions while reading Mulk Raj Anand’s comparison forces us to imagine the perspectives and stories of those who are elided when colonialism and anti-colonial resistance is imagined as a dichotomy between Prospero and Caliban – a binary which has meant that Caliban is taken up as a hero in postcolonial adaptations.

Works Cited

Anand, Mulk Raj. Caliban and Gandhi: letters to “Bapu” from Bombay. New Delhi: Arnold Publishers, 1991. Print.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian. New Delhi: Aleph, 2018.

Holderness, Graham. Cultural Shakespeare: essays in the Shakespeare myth. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835.” Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Speeches by Lord Macaulay with his Minute on Indian Education. London: Oxford University Press, 1952 [1835]. 345-361. Print.

Majumdar, Sarottama. “That Sublime “Old Gentleman”: Shakespeare’s Plays in Calcutta, 1775-1930.” India’s Shakespeare. Ed. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 260-268.

Trivedi, Poonam. “Introduction.” India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, Performance. Ed. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 13-43.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

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Anandi Rao is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Irvine and a seminar leader in Humanities Core. Her research interests are in translation studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies and Indian translations of Shakespeare’s plays.