theological opposition to the theory of Pre-adamite man published by his friend
La Peyrère nine years earlier. Bernier’s conception was biological and based on
heredity. Bernier distinguishes four or five “species”; we need only note that he
considered Europeans and a good part of Asia (including the States of the Great
Mogol, the Kingdom of Golconda, and that of Bijapur) to be of the same race.
He made no other mention of India. Amongst the peoples with whom he is well
acquainted, Bernier makes no hierarchical distinction.
The worst and most dangerous aspect of the British empire was its racism. As
Veer notes, “Racial difference between the British and the colonized and among
the colonized themselves became the explanation and legitimation of colonial
rule” (Veer 2001: 49). The British thought that they proved their superiority to
Indians by conquering and holding India with a remarkably small number of
men. They achieved this by convincing themselves of their invincibility and per-
suading many Indians that they were inferior to the British in respect of ability
to rule and wage war; though bribery was often more useful than bravery. The
matchless self-confidence of the British produced the inverse effect on those who
beheld it. The British rulers kidded themselves and kidded the Indians, but it
might well be argued that the confidence trick took its inspiration from India,
from the caste system. It was Brahmans who did the trick first, claiming to be
the mouth of God, Gods among men, the twice born. The British civil servants
took over for themselves the very term “twice born.” Brahmans did not eat with
non-Brahmans; the British rulers would not eat, drink, or mix with Indians. The
Brahmans were essentially different from the other castes, for all castes were
essentially different from each other. Well and good, the British rulers would be
essentially different from the Indians, just as they were from their own lower
classes back in England.
The British caste maintained its mindset all the better by having nothing to
do with Hinduism. Their rejigging of the Hindu legal system and their censuses
sharpened up notions of caste, but they hid from themselves the caste nature of
the imagined essential inner power that enabled them to rule successfully, and
they hid this from themselves by having as little as possible to do with Hinduism.
In some sense it was their ignorance of Hinduism that enabled the British to rule
for so long. When Nietzsche’s friend, Paul Deussen, the German Vedanta scholar,
traveling by train in India in 1893 rejoiced in friendly relations with Hindus, the
cold and unfriendly Englishman in the same compartment remarked, “We have
to rule these people” (Deussen [1904] 1995).
Many of the statistics of British imperial presence in India are striking, as for
instance that “In one district of Lower Bengal, 20 Britons lived among 2.5
million natives. As late as 1939, about 28 million Punjabis – people not
renowned for their docility – were governed by 60 British civil servants.”
However, the size of the army – “65,000 white soldiers in an area populated by
300 million people that now includes not only India but Pakistan, Bangladesh,
and Burma” (Gilmour 1997: 35) – was not puny, given modern weapons and
transport. For the civil and military officer cadres English public schools pro-
duced “a courage caste with its ambitions turned from gain or learning towards
orientalism and hinduism 53