Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture : India, 1770-1880

Benares, 11 January 1853, on a spacious, verdant site located approximately half way between the old city's congested alleys, waterfront gha ̄t . s, and temples to the east, and the wide, planned streets of the European cantonment to the west. Here James Thomason, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces, officially inaugurated the newly constructed home of the East India Company's Benares College. The building was a large and elaborate study in gothic revival architecture, replete with numerous towers, arches, and pinnacles, and, moreover, represented the first permanent base for the college which had been established by the Company six decades earlier, in 1791. Although seemingly at odds with the city's overwhelmingly 'Hindu' character, Thomason expressed a confidence that the new college building's 'architectural beauty' would undoubtedly produce a positive 'natural effect, upon the mind' of the college's Indian students. 1 Indeed, the building's 'surpassing magnificence' had also been characterised the previous day, in a parallel inaugural address given in Hindi, as representing a substantive testimony to the Company's commitment to the education, and intellectual improvement, of India's people. 2 When, in the spring of 2000, I first spent some time on the site of Benares College (now part of Sampu ̄rn . a ̄nanda Sanskrit University) to begin the research for this book, and managed to gain entry to the largely vacant original neo-gothic structure, I was impressed by its imposing, if now somewhat faded, grandeur. In particular, the physical similarities of the building to many of the Victorian churches in India, and at home in London, were instantly recognisable. Having walked through the large wooden double doors, the first thing I noticed was the light streaming through a stained-glass window high in the wall opposite. Along each side of the main hall were a series of small enclaves, resembling chantries, which had probably been used for teaching small groups of students in years previous. All were covered in a thick layer of dust. In many ways, it would have been easy then, at that first visit, to understand the building as a Victorian folly, a monument to the self-confidence of European civilisation and the imperial project. Yet over the course of the next several years, as I conducted the research for this book, it became clear to me that the educational proviii I am indebted to numerous people across three continents for their help with this book. My first and foremost debt is to Chris Bayly, who acted as my Ph.D. supervisor at Cambridge. He has been incredibly generous with his time, knowledge, and good advice over the length of this project. Eivind Kahrs has read and commented on much of this work, and been most helpful in deciphering the intricacies and ambiguities of nineteenth-century Sanskrit, This book is about orientalism in the Indian empire, and examines the varied literary, historical, and linguistic scholarly practices which were used to construct understandings of Indian civilisation. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British orientalist research was a key strategy for gaining information with which to rule the subcontinent, but also, somewhat paradoxically, to naturalise the Company's state into the South Asian political context. By the middle of the nineteenth century, even while British imperial culture became more confident and intolerant, an in-depth knowledge of India's history and cultures continued to play largely unrecognised roles in furthering the 'civilising mission' of colonial education. Yet rather than understanding orientalism as exclusively linked to British imperial expansion and consolidation, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture also suggests that it was actually composed of a set of 'double practices', by virtue of the British reliance upon Indian scholarly intermediaries, the Sanskrit pandits. Thus, this study revises many commonly held understandings of orientalism by arguing that it was a much more ambiguous, and potentially subversive, enterprise, as Indian Sanskrit scholars also adapted the institutional and social underpinnings of colonial rule to produce newly-inflected, and often overtly anti-colonial, Hindu identities Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction Histories of Empire, Histories of Knowledge....Pages 1-17 Orientalism and the Writing of World History....Pages 18-40 Sanskrit Erudition and Forms of Legitimacy....Pages 41-60 An Empire of the Understanding....Pages 61-86 Enlisting Sanskrit on the Side of Progress....Pages 87-117 On Language and Translation....Pages 118-143 Paṇḍits, Sanskrit Learning, and Europe’s ‘New Knowledge’....Pages 144-183 Afterword Sanskrit, Authority, National Culture....Pages 184-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-268 Orientalist research has most often been characterised as an integral element of the European will-to-power over the Asian world. This study seeks to nuance this view, and asserts that British Orientalism in India was also an inherently complex and unstable enterprise, predicated upon the cultural authority of the Sanskrit pandits.