Transcript:
Sifra Lentin (SL) – Welcome to the 31st episode of Unfolding Geopolitics. Today I have with me special guests Roger Jeffrey, Professor Emeritus of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh and Friederike Voigt who is the Principal Curator for West, South and Southeast Asia at the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. Roger and Frederic have just published a new book, Perceptions of Empire, Edinburgh’s Engagement with India and are here for a few days to learn more about the history of the Scottish presence in Mumbai.
We’ve had a quick three-day visit to Mumbai and what are your impressions of the heritage city that we walked through yesterday and its Scottish heritage. Roger, you’d like to take that first?
Roger Jeffery (RJ) – Yes, thank you and thank you for inviting us here today. So yes, yesterday as you took us through areas of the Fort, what impressed me particularly was the extent to which there was some connection to Scotland around almost every corner, either as an architect or through the churches or through the schools that we went past. So, it’s very interesting to us to think about how Scottish connections in the past are still visible in Mumbai at present.
SL Friederike, you’d like to add something to that.
Friederike Voigt (FV); Yes, thank you. Walking through a city and experiencing the heritage is a very special event and experience. It’s very different from the world in which I normally live within museums and small objects, but what reminded me of experiencing the space and the person is really that we need an explanation, so a city doesn’t explain itself just by walking through. So having your voice as part of our talk and walk has very much opened up a new insight into Bombay’s heritage.
SL – It was also interesting actually before we went for the walk when I studied some of your work that – a lot of your work is on the connections and exchanges between Scotland and India and how these influence both countries, I mean Scotland and India as a nation. You were separating the Scottish exchange from the overall British colonial one. Is there a reason for this, Roger?
RJ – Yes, thank you. This is something which we grapple with – is to understand to what extent the Scottish connection was part of the British connection and to what extent it differed in important ways. So, we would say that the Scots have made particular contributions to the exchange between Britain and India. Not all good. There were many Scots in the army, many Scots probably in the police. I’m not sure about that but the kinds of people from Scotland who came here weren’t exactly the same as those who came from England. They’re particularly well represented in education, in missionary activities of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland.
Issues around the education that was available to Scots at a time when England had a much poorer developed education meant that, for example, doctors were more likely to have trained in Scotland than in England. And that kind of input into what’s happened in the course of 200 years, 300 years of colonial rule makes for a distinctive twist, perhaps, to how the impact was affecting both India and Scotland.
So, we had different kinds of people, and they came back with different kinds of objects perhaps, or they took different ideas, they brought back different ideas. And the people who came and went were often around issues of education so that the university and schooling here had very close connections with the university and schooling in Edinburgh. And I think that’s something which makes a particular kind of contribution to what happened during the Empire.
But as I say, I wouldn’t like anybody to go away with the idea that the Scots were the good ones and the English were the bad ones. They were good and bad on both sides but there’s a sense in which the Scots nonetheless have a particular kind of contribution. And, for example, the contribution of Burns and his egalitarianism, the Church of Scotland being a much more democratic institution. I think that kind of contribution, I think, is worth remembering.
FV – I would like to add a little perspective from the museum side. As you know, the institution at which I work is the National Museum of Scotland today. But when it was founded in 1854, it was a sister institution of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, so what was at the time the South Kensington Museum. But still, despite a similar idea, there was a very Scottish angle to it, how it was set up, how its mission was perceived, much more from an industrial perspective, so oriented towards traders, craftspeople, and that had an influence on how the museum collected, why it collected certain things, and what people wanted to contribute. So, quite a lot of our collections originated from Scottish people. So, there’s a different idea, a different intention often behind it was very much to address the needs of Scotland and that justifies in my book this very specific angle on Scotland.
SL – Friederike, when you talk about basically your museum, collecting artifacts, collecting commercial goods, industrial goods, showing the people who worked, isn’t that also reflected in Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum which was formerly the Victoria and Albert Museum, at Byculla?
FV – Yes, there is a lot of connection, or it’s the collections as they were built originally have parallels, so particularly focusing on certain crafts like pottery, metalwork, lacquer work. So, when I last went a few years ago to see the collections there, I was very much surprised to see similar items to what I know from the collections that I care for.
SL – You’ve come to India, and you’ve just collected the first copies of your book in Delhi, Perceptions of Empire, Edinburgh’s Engagement with India. And in that book, I mean, I found the introduction extremely interesting, because what you’ve done is put together around 15 to 16 original writings from the Scots who had engagements with India and Indians who had engagements with Scotland. In particular, what I found of interest were the letters of Reverend John Wilson’s wife, Margaret Bayne Wilson, published under the chapter Missionary Letters from India. Can you tell us a little about the work that Reverend Wilson and his wife did in India?
RJ – Yes, I mean, they are a very interesting couple. They come out of a very Scottish background, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the surrounding areas. They’re trained in Edinburgh. And their mission is to do things for the people of India as they saw it, because they saw them as steeped in sin, inevitably going to hell after they died, and carrying out activities which they found obnoxious.
So that chapter is not easy to read. And we’re not suggesting that this is an accurate description of this part of the world 200 years ago. It’s a description fed through a very strong missionary zeal that was characteristic of the Scottish Church at the time. So they really wanted to change what was going on here, partly as a justification for the empire. Why is the empire, why was the East India Company at the time here? What could possibly justify this? So a series, it’s also true for the chapter on Alexander Duff. The significance of Christianity was as a justification for the empire, to give it a strong moral cast.
So I think one of the things that’s different between the two, the husband and the wife, is that the husband was out in the public sphere negotiating, getting on with people, and his wife was writing letters to her family and really giving voice to how she felt about what the challenge was. Margaret, unfortunately, died quite young. And so these letters were in memory of her. But both of them quite quickly saw that it was important to focus on education. And that’s something, again, which is, as I said, very characteristic of Scotland. So, Wilson High School, still there. Columbus School for Girls, again, something that Margaret Wilson was engaged in creating. So this was really a justification for their coming. And they committed themselves to it.
And over several years, John Wilson was here. And he would go back to Edinburgh, talk about it, come back here, and so on. We actually have a picture of one of the first converts that he made, a man called Dhanjibhai Naoroji who was in Edinburgh in 1843, at exactly the time when the city began its engagement with photography. And there he is. We have a picture of him sitting in a studio in central Edinburgh. So this, the beginnings of an exchange, and a very early student who came to Edinburgh as a result of this engagement.
And of course, after that, particularly from the 1880s onwards, you get more and more Indians coming to Edinburgh to study, and eventually going back, or not, as the case might be.
SL – So, Roger, it’s actually quite interesting, because we still have a lot of landmarks. I mean, Friederike mentioned it earlier, that we have schools here. Especially what is noteworthy are the two premier schools of Mumbai, the Bombay Scottish School and the John Connan School, which is part of the Cathedral. And of course, Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone was a pioneer of secular scientific education for Indians, and an endeavor which was supported by big merchants like Jagannath Shankar Seth. So is education really part of the Presbyterian ethos?
RJ– Presbyterians have a very strong ethos around education. So, again, much before England had a system of mass schooling, there was a system through the parishes, through the ministers in Scotland, to educate their parishioners. And this, again, I think feeds back into this democratic approach, egalitarian relative to England, in which you don’t have bishops, you don’t have somebody telling you what to do.
You have a group of people who call a minister and decide how much he would be paid and so on. So, yes, it’s very specifically about being able to read the Bible in Scotland, and I think here also they carried this along, and made a personal connection to a personal God. And that’s very much the Protestantism that is behind Presbyterian Christianity as it developed in Scotland over the period from the 17th century onwards.
SL – Friederike, could you tell us a little about how Edinburgh learnt about India through material objects as they’re kept today in the National Museum of Scotland?
FV – One of the benefits, so to speak, of the book as I see it, is really that it sets a context for the many different ways in which India is still represented in the city. So often you have traces in the city, but they are not necessarily visible, or if they are visible, you don’t know how they are linked to each other, why this material is there, and how it was collected. So for me that is one of the strengths that the book can actually provide us with a bit of a context for these connections. So the museum, also it was founded in the middle of the 19th century, has also received overtime collections that date back 50, 70 years, as we took in collections from other much older learnt institutions in Edinburgh. And one of the really outstanding collections that represent India in the museum is a collection of models that was brought together by a Scottish woman, Margaret Tytler.
Tytler is really a case that exemplifies how, in this case, a woman was educated, took ideas from Edinburgh with her to India, and sent back what she had learnt there. So she was originally born in a small town on the east coast of Scotland. She died in Munger in 1822, but the longest period of her life she actually spent in India, in Patna and in Tirhut. And as part of her interest in the environment, in what people did around her, she studied the crafts and agricultural methods and turned this knowledge and her thinking into models. Not only for her own entertainment, some of them she used in order to produce her own silk thread, for example. But the main reason was that she wanted to educate Scottish people so in her bequest she wrote down or had it written down that her set of models should be sent back to Scotland after her death. When it arrived in Edinburgh it was put on display, it was very much valued. People, a certain group of people, so the educated class would have seen it on display and seen how Indian people did certain things. And the models were there, they are scale models, they are there in order to learn about methods in which you can do things in the best way. This is how she talks about it, so what are good ways of doing something so that Scottish methods could be improved.
SL – That’s really interesting because she talks about how Scottish methods can be improved, making scale models for off Indian metallurgy, cloth making, weaving. So that’s really interesting that there was this kind of exchange because one would have thought that they were there to trade and not to learn. In the introduction to the book, you make the point that the Indian subcontinent had very specific trades with each Scottish city except for Edinburgh which encompassed everything. So Roger, can you tell us a little more about that?
RJ Yes, so I mean there are four big cities, we think of them as big but not in Indian terms. And they have different positions in the country with different access to the wider world. Glasgow, which is the biggest city, has very strong commercial links and a number of companies that we talked about on the walking tour yesterday, Forbes and so on, were companies where the Glasgow merchants, it’s often called a merchant city in the centre, were involved. But they also had cotton mills, they had engineering works, you can find engineering products from Glasgow still across North India, keeping sugar factories going for example. So that’s the particular form that Glasgow has.
Dundee, very strong links with Calcutta and with jute mills. Most of the jute mills around the 1880s, 1900, were owned by people from Dundee and a lot of coming and going between Dundee and Calcutta as a result.
Aberdeen and Inverness were more around, these were farming areas, so a lot of men went into the army. But also as cultivation plantations went forward, you find them in tea plantations, in rubber plantations, in coffee plantations, so a lot of the plantation economy is linked to that part.
But across all of them you get, certainly, recruits into the army. What happens in Edinburgh is a greater proportion of area around certainly science, medicine, education in general, but also the kind of education that would equip a young man to get a job in the East India Company’s civil service and eventually the Indian civil service. So that’s the kind of difference that Edinburgh has, because it was the capital.
So you get more missionaries, you get more doctors, you get more skilled people who are able to run a bureaucracy proportionately, but of course you also get recruits from other parts of the country as well.
SL – So we also talked about Indians starting to come to Edinburgh in large numbers in the 1880s onward. Why did they come to Edinburgh? What was their experience like?
RJ – So they came to Edinburgh for the schooling, for the education in the earlier period. So, a man called Prafulla Chandra Ray, who was a very leading early Indian chemist, established his Bengal Chemicals around the turn of the century. He was in Edinburgh for four or five years doing chemistry and took that knowledge back with him to establish better training facilities in the University of Calcutta, but also this factory, which is a pioneer in pharmaceuticals. Medical students – they were the largest single category, certainly by the turn of the century, because Edinburgh was a real centre of medical education from about the 1800s onwards, the early 1800s onwards. So even until the 1920s or the 1930s, they came for medical education, but also engineering, education, etc. So those were the major reasons for coming.
But by the 1930s, the 1940s, so this tails off, they don’t come so much. If they come to Britain, they go to London or to Oxford or Cambridge, and the numbers coming to Edinburgh decline. So that the post-Second World War migration is rather different. These are people who come to stay, they come to live and work. And those are the people whose testimonies we include in the final chapter on South Asians of various kinds in the city and their experiences. So, in general, I think it’s fair to say that Edinburgh was a relatively friendly place to come to. But you hear all of the qualifications.
There was certainly racism. Sometimes this comes out in public. So in the 1920s, there’s a colour bar put on by some restaurants and dance clubs in the city against not only Indian students, but anybody of colour. And the people who come in the 1950s and the 1960s also talk about Edinburgh as cold, not just cold climatically, but the people of Edinburgh are relatively cold compared to other people in Scotland. Not that they are unfriendly in general, but there’s a reserve. They aren’t as warm and welcoming as some others. And so there are definitely, almost all the accounts we have mention episodes of racist abuse or of discrimination. And yet these people stay and make a life and are now, I think, in large measure, well accepted.
An interesting fact for you to think about is that the tourist shops along the centre of Edinburgh, in the heart of the old town, the heart of tourist Edinburgh, many of them are owned by Sikhs. So, the Sardars are selling Scotland to foreigners from all over the world. But behind those shop fronts, there is a Punjabi.
SL – That’s interesting, Roger. So, I think my last question is for Friederike. As we talked about the historical connections, it might be useful to consider the significance of these historical links for Edinburgh, Scotland and India today. How would you sort of frame these links in the contemporary world?
FV – If we don’t know history, we can hardly understand what is important in the present, so looking back at these existing links from the late 18th century onwards, as we do in the book, has certainly helped me to understand better what I can do as a curator at the museum with the collections that I care for. One of our main areas of work is to make these collections accessible to communities, to the South Asian community, but to all other communities in Edinburgh and in Scotland too. So, seeing where we have come from and why South Asians, as Roger has just explained, live in the city, is clearly an easier way into imagining what we can do with these collections in the future.
So, if you think about the 18th, 19th and early 20th century as still collections built during the colonial and imperial periods, the character was shaped by thinking at these times. The 21st century is very different, so how can we engage with these collections today and make them useful for society and society in its plurality, so a multicultural society. And this is what I’m trying to do with my work at the museum, to engage with these different parts of society, to learn from whoever lives around me what is important to them, how they respond to the collections, how they want to be involved and represented in museums. So, these are all aspects that are of significance to my work and to how I can develop the collections, but also the relationships with India in this particular case and with South Asians living in Edinburgh.
So, it’s a two-way process. I want to invite other people to come and engage with these collections, but also for me to learn what I can do with these collections and make them a shared resource. They are a shared heritage, but how can we actually then also work with these sources together?
RJ – So, I think that’s a very important part of what we’re doing, is to build better relationships, help to build better relationships between local South Asians and cultural institutions in general, starting particularly with the museum. So, the city is now concerned about the legacy of colonialism in the city and the extent to which that legacy forms barriers to full inclusion of the whole diverse population that we have. So, this book, we hope, will contribute to that process of building a more inclusive, more egalitarian, more welcoming city for its current residents and for the future in ways in which their skills that we will benefit from will benefit from in ways that currently we don’t do as much as we should. So, this is a contribution to a process that we’re part of in various ways.
SL – Thank you both so much. And I’d just like to add a little factoid at the end. Where we are recording this, at our office, Gateway House, is actually under the Wankhede Stadium stands. And for the first time, we’re having the Scottish cricket team playing in the T20 World Cup. So, it’s a good way to really start a relationship because cricket is actually something Indians are absolutely crazy about. England is crazy about it. I mean, it came from England- cricket. So, with the Scottish team also in the mix, we’ve got a lot to look forward to. Thank you so much.
Dr Roger Jeffery is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh.
Friederike Voigt is Principal Curator for the West, South and Southeast Asia collections and Head of the Asia Section at the National Museum of Scotland.
Sifra Lentin is the Bombay History Fellow at Gateway House.
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