The Persistence of Colonial Deference

Hindi has a word for the sycophant, and it is chamcha, the spoon. It is often said that this is because a spoon owns nothing. It carries food from the hand that has it to the mouth, and when the meal is over, it is washed and put back in the drawer. It has no appetite of its own and no opinion on the dish. It is judged entirely by how it does its work. Then, there is makkhan lagana, to apply butter. There is jee-huzoori, and there is khushamad, from Persia, which refer to more-or-less the same things. A language is the sediment of what its speakers had to say to power, and ours is deep enough to need a trowel. Any culture with this many words for one behaviour must be strange. It almost feels like an industry. 

Industries are founded. Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 states its purpose without  embarrassment: to produce a class of interpreters between the rulers and the ruled,  Indian in blood and colour, English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect. Strip the Victorian syntax and what remains is a job description. The interpreter’s entire value lies in his resemblance to the master. His incentive is therefore to resemble more, agree more and praise more, with promotions as the performance review. By a commonly cited estimate, roughly a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service administered a subcontinent of hundreds of millions. That is, the banian and dewan of the Company’s early decades, Rai Bahadurs and Khan Sahibs, and the babu, whom Calcutta’s own writers were satirising before the Company had finished counting its profits. Naba Babu Bilas (1825) and Kaliprasanna Singha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (1860s) are, among other things, field studies of a man who has discovered that the quickest route to money is agreeing with the person who has it. 

The habit did not survive 1947 because Indians remembered the Raj fondly. It survived because the reward structure survived. Pavlov’s dogs stop salivating once the bell stops producing food. Ours kept getting fed. Whatever else changed in 1947, the person with discretion over your career, your licence, your posting, or your file remained one person, and approval remained the cheapest way to reach him. Consider a clerk, whom we shall call Mr. Precious. He is an invented man who nevertheless exists in every district office. In his thirty-one years of service he has stood up for four Collectors, two Commissioners, one visiting Minister and a portrait of a seventh Collector who is not, strictly, there. One monsoon afternoon, the office door bangs open in the wind, and Mr. Precious rises, folds his hands and says “Good afternoon, Sir” to the weather. 

The joke is that he was wrong. The tragedy is that the incentives were correct: in Mr. Precious’ career, the one time he failed to stand, a man with a bigger bank account remembered it. The reflex is the target that keeps changing. The Viceroy became the Collector, the Collector became the Minister, and the Minister became whoever holds the pen on the transfer list. What began as a transaction between two parties settled into a posture, and the posture outlived both. The sycophant never wins. Homi Bhabha’s account of colonial mimicry says that the system wants a recognisable copy, designed never to be mistaken for the original. A copy that became indistinguishable would abolish the hierarchy that justifies the master, so the mimic must stay one step short by design. Naipaul gave the type its fullest portrait in The Mimic Men, and Orwell supplied one in Burmese Days. Dr. Veraswami reveres the British, admires their club and aches to be admitted to it, and is never admitted. His devotion buys him nothing, and when the intrigue comes, it does not protect him either. 

This has a consequence that is funny only until you think about it. If approval is withheld by design, the flatterer has to produce more of it, forever. A game that no one can win keeps its players, and a treadmill that goes up is only a staircase with a marketing department. Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s autobiography is dedicated, famously, to the memory of the Empire that gave Indians subjecthood and withheld citizenship. It is a loyalist’s dedication and a prosecutor’s brief. 

Colonialism is an administration, which ends by treaty, retreat, or a very expensive flag-lowering ceremony. Coloniality is a standard of measurement, i.e. the condition in which the coloniser’s categories remain the yardstick by which the colonised assess their own worth. Ashis Nandy reached the same diagnosis from the psychological side in The Intimate Enemy, arguing that the deepest colonisation was of the mind and outlasted the political occupation. Gandhi had named it in 1909 in Hind Swaraj: you want English rule without the Englishman, the tiger’s nature without the tiger. If worth is conferred from outside, deference is the rational response. If the habit pays for several generations, it hardens into temperament and is mistaken for nature. A society that mistakes the habit for nature stops looking for what produced it. The sycophant is where it becomes a person. 

This is also why the identity of our target here barely matters. The flattery that once travelled up to the Viceroy now travels up to the foreign journal, the visiting dignitary, the overseas degree and the domestic official who inherited the corner office along with the habits that came with it. A civilisation that gave the world the zero found, under empire, an equally original use for it: the value of its own opinion in front of the Collector. 

At the 1911 Delhi Durbar, Sayajirao III, the Gaekwad of Baroda, was expected to perform the full choreography of homage before George V. He did a perfunctory bow, wore plain clothes in place of the expected regalia, and walked away without the ritual backward retreat. The British press treated it as an outrage and the Indian nationalist press as a minor triumph. Nobody gets scandalised by the breach of a rule that does not exist. The outrage was a measurement, and what it measured was how much deference had been priced into the system as the default. The obvious rebuttal is that courts have always had courtiers. Of course they have. The Mughal darbar was no school of candour, and the Persian vocabulary of flattery in our own languages is evidence of centuries before any Company clerk learned to say “Your Honour’s most obedient servant.” Poets who wrote odes for one court wrote them for the next, and Ghalib is the standard example, praising the Mughal throne and later the British Crown when the authority changed. 

Schoolchildren across the country are still taught to close a formal letter with “Yours obediently.” Nobody asks whom, or why, or since when. We say “kindly do the needful” without noticing that it is a formula from a bureaucracy whose clerks were instructed to be careful of their tone. These fossils are harmless. The point is that we reproduce them without examining them. So when you next watch a man bend toward a superior who has done nothing to earn it, resist the laugh, or at least stop halfway through. You are watching the most efficient product an empire ever made: a man who needs no garrison, because he polices his own opinions, and no censor, because he has already edited himself.