“The Learned Brāhmen, Who Assists Me”: Changing Colonial Relationships in the 18 th and 19 th Century India

  This article examines the process through which the varied and fluid relationships between English East India Company servants and Indians in the eighteenth‐century transformed into rigidly racist ones in the nineteenth. At the outset, the Company's position in India was precarious and impossible to sustain without intensive help from various Indian elites and experts. Relationships created through these collaborative ties were often (but not always) accompanied by prejudice. Prejudice was frequently expressed as mistrust on the part of the Company servants who complained about Indians' untrustworthiness. Yet for decades prejudice was only one possible modality for relationships between Company servants and Indians; relational fluidity was the default. However, the steps that the Company took on to solve their “mistrust dilemma”– namely, codification of Indian knowledge and modification of Indian institutions in terms of their staffing and methods – set in motion processes that eventually eliminated relational fluidity and replaced it with prejudice as a binding social norm, thus creating a rigidly racist regime.