Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century 9780823263639

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Imperial Babel

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Imperial Babel t r a nsl at ion, e xot icism, a n d t h e long nin et een t h cen t ury

Padma Rangarajan

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s   New York  2 0 1 4

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rangarajan, Padma. Imperial Babel : translation, exoticism, and the long nineteenth century / Padma Rangarajan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6361-5 (hardback) 1. Translating and interpreting—India—History. 2. Translating and interpreting—Great Britain— History. 3. Indic literature—History and criticism— Theory, etc. 4. English literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Semiotics and literature. 7. Intertextuality. I. Title. PN241.5.I53R36 2014 418’.020954—dc23 2014014675 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

con ten ts

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Translation’s Trace

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2. Pseudotranslations: Exoticism and the Oriental Tale

24

3. Romantic Metanoia: Conversion and Cultural Translation in India

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4. “Paths Too Long Obscure”: The Translations of Jones and Müller

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5. Translation’s Bastards: Mimicry and Linguistic Hybridity

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Conclusion

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Notes Works Cited Index

175 217 243

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p r e fac e

On a spring morning in 1816, a Malay unexpectedly wanders into the Lake District and Thomas de Quincey’s Grasmere cottage. It is a delicate moment for the author, who fears that the exotic stranger’s presence might alert the neighbors to his “Eastern” vice of opium eating. Baffled, and initially unable to communicate with his mysterious visitor, de Quincey finally hits on a solution: “my knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remarkably extensive . . . [a]nd, as I had n[o] Malay dictionary . . . I addressed him in some lines from the Iliad; considering that, of such languages as I possessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me in a most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay.”1 Choosing as his communicative medium a text that recounts the domination of a powerful Eastern empire by its Western counterpart, de Quincey records the Malay’s response as one of immediate, appropriate submission: in other words, as an excellent translation. Several years before de Quincey’s fateful encounter in the Lake District, Asiatic Researches, the publication of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, published An Account of the Jains, the first translated oral history of Jain practices. Its translator was one “Cavelly Boria,” now recognized as Kaveli Venkata Borriah, one of three brothers working for Colonel Colin Mackenzie, a British surveyor and orientalist in Madras. 2 Although Mackenzie referred to the brothers somewhat dismissively as his “assistants,” The Kavelis had a tremendous influence on Madras orientalists—Venkata’s brother Lakshmaiah became the first Indian to be admitted to the Madras Literary Society—and An Account of the Jains is considered to be one of the earliest extant examples of Indian writing in English.3 But Kaveli’s role as translator

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did not always survive his work’s reproduction. An 1811 reprint of An Account of the Jains credits Mackenzie with “furnishing” the account, neatly sidestepping the issue of translation altogether, and even the original publication does not permit Kaveli full narrative control. Instead, H. T. Colebrooke, eminent orientalist and frequent contributor, paratextually informs the Asiatic Researches reader that “[t]he language of this translation has been corrected,” presumably by himself.4 Although the relationship between the Kaveli brothers and their British counterparts reveals productive and often-unacknowledged collaborations between native and European scholars, it also attests to the ways in which indigenous knowledge was required to don the carapace of Western annotation. More recently, in 2006, Basim Mardan, an Iraqi writer and librarian, wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled “Lost after Translation,” documenting his flight from the Middle East after he was threatened while working as an interpreter for coalition forces. Mardan remembers the moment he realized his life was in jeopardy as a chilling moment of translative misinterpretation. During a routine interrogation an Iraqi prisoner tells him, “You are all going to be killed,” and Mardan recalls, “I thought he was referring to the Americans until he said, ‘No I mean you.’”5 With his translative work considered treasonous, and with little to no help from his employer, Mardan was forced to flee Baghdad after a series of escalating threats.6 As the United States rushes to disengage from its multiple global conflicts, the ongoing travails of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani translators reveal the very real consequences of a discursive act that Lawrence Venuti has termed “the translator’s invisibility,” the fluency with which the translator vanishes behind the translated text, rendering the crucial act of translation unseen and, consequently, easily forgotten.7 These three stories, ranging across space and time, reveal a truth so obvious that it is perilously overlooked: that at the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Translation has traditionally been assigned a secondary position in the literary marketplace as a derivative and, ideally, veiled process; contemporary copyright laws and publishing houses treat translation as adaptive and, unlike creative authorship, as merely “work made for hire.”8 Imperial conflicts (and the cultural encounters they necessarily engender) reveal its truer function as a locus of power. They do not create a new translative paradigm; rather, they illumine its persistent urgency. Translation in

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the empire steps out of the shadows, however fleetingly, to allow us to consider its real political and cultural consequences. Imperial Babel critiques the intellectual discourse of the British Empire by examining the role of translation in relation to colonial literature and policy in the nineteenth century. Recognizing translation as a fundamental colonial praxis, I argue that the intellectual exchange between East and West stimulated by eighteenth-century translations of Eastern texts into European languages compels a reconsideration of the history of orientalist studies and its relationship to nineteenth-century British culture, as translation’s persistent presence in colonial literature allows us new insight into its complex cultural aftereffects. In reinstating translation’s place at the heart of imperial exchange, this book suggests that the British colonial experience was haunted by the fate of what was considered, in nineteenth-century biblical historiography, the first world empire: that “city of confusion” symbolized by its unfinished tower. As the British sifted through an ever-expanding tangle of languages, customs, and people, their translative policies undergirded a central question: what kind of empire was this to be? The biblical Babel was corrupt and despotic, a tyrannical homogeneity undone by divine wrath into linguistic multiplicity. As the British self-consciously began trying to ensure that theirs would be an empire for the good, they debated what they considered the obvious benefits of English versus its possible corruption and corrupting effects, keenly aware that the language that might unite the empire could also be its undoing. In considering the production of translation in social rather than strictly formal terms, Imperial Babel is indebted to recent developments in translation studies that have opened the field to new cultural and historical considerations. This move has opened space for a critique of translation’s function in the empire, revealing exchanges of power and knowledge long neglected, demanding we take into account the terms under which translations are produced. It is, for example, surely helpful to know that Colin Mackenzie was not merely a surveyor but also an officer in the East India Company who took part in the storming of Seringapatam (Srirangapattinam) in 1799, the military victory that effectively secured South India for the British. The current interest in translation’s semantic fluidity, however, also compels us to consider the ways in which translations (and their reception) may prove resistant to the conditions of their production. It

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is this negotiation of context and meaning, history and language, that forms the basis of my study. While the new emphasis on historical condition has spurred invaluable studies of translation in the postcolony, this research too often adopts a reductive view of nineteenth-century colonial translation, an oversight that contradicts current scholarly interest in an emergent imperial Romanticism whose complexities are still in the process of being traced. By merging this revitalized interest in the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism with the theoretical shifts of translation studies, Imperial Babel argues that we have not yet taken colonial translation under serious consideration. Thus I consider translation theory, colonial projects that engaged questions of translation, and the integration (through narrative and paratext) of translation into colonial fiction. Searching for translation’s trace enables both a broader, more complex understanding of the work of translation in imperial culture as well as a more nuanced understanding of the dialectical relationship between colonial policy and nineteenthcentury fiction. Imperial Babel is a story told from multiple perspectives: political, linguistic, and literary.These are not treated as separate fields of study but as a dense network through which Britain’s territorial outposts—primarily India, in this instance—came to be defined and represented. Early colonial history requires this kind of thick reading, as the men and women who ventured out to administer these colonies often played multiple, seemingly incompatible roles as bureaucrats, linguists, ethnographers, missionaries, and poets (or as travel writers, reformists, and brides). This confluence of administrative, ideological, and aesthetic purposes resulted in a potent relationship between theory and practice: translation helped shape the administrative and imaginative course of empire, and the (translated) intellectual fruits of conquest helped direct European theories of language and culture. Reflecting the results of this symbiosis, literature plays a crucial role as both repository and crucible for the real and imagined translation of the colonial periphery to the metropole. Because of my focus on translation’s conceptual dissemination, I structure Imperial Babel around a series of argumentative nodes. The project begins in the late eighteenth century, when new linguistic theories established the role of place and time in the evolution of languages, recasting translation as a vital but possibly treacherous mode of cultural transformation. Translation thus conceived was

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initially aligned with colonial governance, but the two soon diverged. Tracing the history of orientalist translation through the nineteenth century, I track how shifting colonial policies and an increasing resistance toward certain modes of colonial translation reflected a growing unease with translation’s cultural implications. Romantic colonial translation was primarily one of Eastern texts into European languages, but the shift over the century to the translation of Western texts into Eastern languages raised crucial concerns over the possibility and desirability of colonial cosmopolitanism. Could the British make Englishmen out of the world? Or would the world end up corrupting Britishness? While my focus is on British orientalists and authors, the stories of the Kaveli brothers and Basim Mardan demonstrate the indivisibility of these kinds of narratives from any account of imperial knowledge production. Translation naturally lends itself to collaboration, but it also hews to dominant modes of power. If, as successive chapters demonstrate, the processes of colonial translation may have resisted the political conditions that produced them, then the reactions of British and (especially) native readers to these translations proved even more unpredictable. This book cannot hope to comprehensively address the role of native collaborators and assistants and their diverse responses (both translative and political) to colonial translative practice, but it does gesture to the inherently discursive—even when appropriative—nature of translation, which, even more than original writing, demands an audience. In order to demonstrate the evolving nature of imperial knowledge acquisition, the project is roughly divided into two parts: the second and third chapters focus largely on the early nineteenth century and the final two chapters explore the legacy of Romantic orientalism in the Victorian period. My first chapter situates the idea of translation theoretically and historically in the late eighteenth century, when the emergence of comparative linguistics changed the way people thought about language, translation, and culture. This new linguistics had a symbiotic relationship to colonial expansion, as evinced by the crucial role of translation in both. As translations in hitherto indecipherable languages became available to a European audience, fiction set in the East demonstrated a preoccupation with translation that was manifested in both narrative and paratext. Drawing on Gottfried von Herder’s theory of “radical difference,” or fundamental human diversity, I use

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this early linguistic history to critique contemporary postcolonial responses to nineteenth-century translation and to situate translation in relation to that paradigmatic site of colonial intellectual power: the imperial archive. The second chapter offers a transvalued theory of exoticism as an alternative discourse to Saidian orientalism. I argue that pseudotranslated oriental tales—works of fiction that, bolstered with scholarly paratext, assume the guise of real translations—constitute a genre whose multifaceted and complex response to the East has not been fully acknowledged. Looking at three such texts—William Beckford’s Vathek (1789), Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), and Lord Byron’s The Giaour (1815)—I consider the ways in which these tales are in dialogue not only with varying representations of the East but also with each other. Through their discourse we can trace the rise and inevitable decay of Romantic exoticism. The potential radicalism of the oriental tale may, as I argue in the third chapter, exist even more advantageously in its more elusive counterpart, the oriental novel. My analysis of two of these novels, Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811) and Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), examines how interracial romance is used as an allegorical framework through which to consider the efficacy of cultural translation. In these novels’ shared interest in both spiritual and subjective transformation—which I identify as a Romantic metanoia—they illumine the larger problems of cultural translation that gripped the subcontinent during the education debates of the early nineteenth century. The fourth chapter considers the changing dynamics of nineteenthcentury orientalist scholarship through an examination of two of its most famous translators: Sir William Jones and Max Müller. Because Jones was the most famous and influential of the early orientalist translators, his work is increasingly a site of ideological controversy as critics wrestle with his legacy as both imperial administrator and Anglo-Indian aesthete. Using his poetry, particularly the Hindoo Hymns, for insight into both his translative and administrative policies, I argue that this literature is the crucial bridge between the seeming opposition between his aesthetics and politics. In the wake of Jones, as British exoticism seemed to vanish in the face of Victorian imperial triumph, I uncover its aftereffects in the late nineteenth-century orientalism of Max Müller. Few literary scholars have ever written about Müller, even though his research into the roots of Aryanism

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had a profound impact on Victorian culture. My analysis focuses on Müller’s attempts to revive an earlier orientalist interest in Indian culture during an era of deep cultural and racial suspicion, and on the influence of his and Jones’s work in two of the blockbusters of Victorian poetry: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859) and Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879). As Chapter 4 traces how the anthropological borders excavated by both Jones and Müller narrowed over time, the fifth chapter focuses on the evolving discomfort over the implications of cultural translation. As the nineteenth century progressed, colonial translation moved away from an aesthetic cosmopolitanism to focus increasingly on the effects of cultural pollution and “bad” translation, or mimicry. Setting Elizabeth Hamilton’s The Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1798) against Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894) and F. Anstey’s Babu Hurree Bungsho Jaberjee, B.A. (1898), I argue that the hybrid figure of the “baboo”—an Indian who mimics British customs and mannerisms—appears as a representative of unease over the translation of Britishness and its possible pollution as it came into contact with colonial cultures. Westernized natives are often characterized as “funky”—cowards, in nineteenth-century parlance—but they are also unsettling, and their racial, linguistic funkiness presents an unnerving challenge to the fantasies of British cultural supremacy that I examine in these novels and, in an epilogue, in a brief sampling of colonial lexicons. With these chapters I hope to rewrite the history of colonial translation in light of its diffuse cultural aftereffects. In doing so, I also recalibrate our understanding of the dynamics of Romantic imperialism, as well as the relationship between early and late nineteenthcentury orientalist translation. Translation and adaptation are more complex than a simple act of appropriation, as the nineteenth-century British writer, translating other cultures into English, must wrestle with how England may itself be transformed. Throughout the book, I emphasize translation’s role as a form of mediation between two languages and cultures that is irreducible to either celebration or condemnation. We must bear witness to the violence on the ground that underwrites translation in colonial spaces, but we should also remain open to the irresolution of translation, its unfixed nature, and its ability to transform the colonizer as well as the colonized, the translated language and the translator’s language.

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ack now l edgm e n ts

I have many people to thank. First and foremost is Ian Duncan, who first suggested I write on translation, and whose unbounded intellectual generosity continued undiminished as this book emerged. I owe him more than I can possibly say. Abdul Jan-Mohamed and Eugene Irshick also deserve thanks for their invaluable input, especially during the project’s early stages. My colleagues Talissa Ford and Rae Greiner provided both inspiration and much-needed camaraderie. My work is indebted in many ways to theirs. At the University of Colorado I have been fortunate to work with some of the best colleagues one can have. Jeffrey Cox, Jill HeydtStevenson, and Paul Youngquist are my good fairies: inspired writers, selfless readers, tireless advocates, and wonderful friends. I have also benefited immensely from the junior-faculty writing workshop Laura Winkiel generously hosted. Laura, Lori Emerson, Janice Ho, Steve Lamos, Richelle Munkhoff, and Ben Robertson all pushed me to do better than I wanted to. I am also grateful to the many colleagues at Colorado who read and commented on parts of the manuscript, and who generally made the process of writing and thinking enjoyable and instructive: Sue Zemka, David Glimp, Katherine Eggert, Nan Goodman, and John Stevenson. Dana van Kooy was always ready to offer her eagle eye, her wisdom, and the splendors of her table. I owe a special thanks to William Kuskin, who bolstered me during particularly low moments with his unflagging zeal for the work that we do. I am grateful to all of my students, whose work always challenges me to reconsider my own. The students in my graduate courses on Romantic imperialism—particularly Joel Cuthbertson, Rogelio Garcia, Leslie Hale, Tom Hufendick, and Jason Schafer—informed many of the ideas in this book. The University of Colorado’s Center for

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Humanities and Arts provided invaluable venues for me to present my work, and its director, Helmut Müller-Severs, supported a translation initiative that gave me invaluable time. Daniel O’Quinn and Christi Merrill, my readers at Fordham, were both rigorous and generous and I benefited immensely from their insights. Helen Tartar’s enthusiasm for the project has been inspiring, and Tom Lay has been an invaluable source of advice and information. Daniel White deserves a special acknowledgment for his careful perusal of the entire manuscript; it is much better for his attention. Randall Fullington and the dedicated Jon Stillman did an excellent job helping me edit the manuscript. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in Angles on the English-Speaking World, and an earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in Nineteenth Century Studies. I would like to acknowledge the editors of those publications for their permission to reprint the material. This project was assisted by timely grants from the Center for Humanities and Art at the University of Colorado as well the Department of English. Throughout, I have relied on my dear friends Purnima Boominathan, Meg Dahlgren, Tali Ford, Tanya Kumaria, and Indira Sriram. Paul Saint-Amour has inspired and encouraged me from afar for many years now, not minding when I leaned heavily. My engagement with translation owes much to my mother, Radha, whose intellectual work has inspired all my endeavors. She, along with my father, A. Rangarajan, and my siblings, Vaijayanthy and Krishna, have all my love and thanks: they are my first and best support. Mani Varadarajan has been a fantastic resource and a keen critic. Malini and B. S. Sridharan have shown nothing but encouragement, and I am truly grateful. Rukmini has grown up with the project with her characteristic grace, and Mukunda’s appearance late in the process gave me the impetus to finish and turn to better things. This book is dedicated to Manu, whose commitment to my work, and to me, makes all things possible.

ch apter one

Translation’s Trace Say what one will of the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and valuable of concerns in the whole of world affairs j . w . v o n g o e t h e t o t h o m a s c a r l y l e

[T]thou didst inherit My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit; And I, inuisiblie, went prompting thee, To those fayre Greenes where thou didst english me

g e o r g e c h a p m a n , Euthymiae Raptus

Let us begin by returning briefly to that meeting in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater between de Quincey and the Malay. It is an episode commonly critiqued for the dubious gift of opium the author bestows on his exotic guest, but as I’ve already suggested, thinking critically about de Quincey’s wielding of The Iliad reveals a scene whose negotiation of power is as dependent on linguistic signification as it is on psychotropics. Opium eating brings the Englishman and Malay into uncomfortable proximity, but Greek acts as both a bridge between opposing cultures and a signifier of vast and impenetrable distance. De Quincey’s decision to use The Iliad seems like the arcane whim of an overenthusiastic classical scholar, but his argument for Greek’s geographical and thus linguistic mediality echoed the emergent linguistic theories of the period that form the subject of this chapter. Searching for translation’s trace in literary history, as in this moment from Confessions, is an elusive task. And it is a practice that seems particularly antithetical to our assumptions of Romanticism’s privileging of spontaneity and originality. The most famous pronouncement on translation in the Romantic era is Percy Shelley’s comparison of the inefficacy of poetic translation to the alchemic impossibility of deriving the properties of a violet from a crucible: a harsh axiomatic 1

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summation of translation’s perceived impotency.1 Yet British Romanticism was not only materially dependent on translation, it was also witness to a revolution in language that placed translation at the center of an ongoing debate over the changing definitions of authorship, language, imagination, and culture. Locating that history not only provides a crucial backdrop for the developing politics of translation during the period but also allows us to contextualize contemporary theorizations of the relationship between translation and colonization to which this chapter later returns. A full accounting of the Romantic language revolution is beyond the scope of this study, but a brief consideration of its origin and influences is vital to understanding the period’s engagement with questions of national culture and history.

Radical Difference George Steiner’s seminal study of translation, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, identifies four eras of translation. The first, which he associates with the codification of translation technique, begins in antiquity and ends with the publication of the most comprehensive study of translation principles in English: Alexander Fraser Tytler Woodhouselee’s Treatise on the Principles of English Translation (1791). The second period, which Steiner identifies with the philosophizing of translation, runs through the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. The third and fourth, from the 1940s–1960s and from the 1960s until the present, are concerned with machine translation and then a reversion to hermaneutic studies of translation, respectively. Complicating Steiner’s epochal scale, studies like Mary Helen McMurran’s The Spread of Novels . . . in the Eighteenth Century usefully reveal the scale and complexity of translative theory in the eighteenth century, a period of conflicting and overlapping theories of language that coalesced around attempts to discover a universal grammar and a pre-Babelian language of Men. 2 This refinement of Steiner’s broad generalizations does not, however, conflict with his assessment that the late eighteenth century witnessed a “decisive turn in language studies.”3 This “decisive turn” meant moving away from theories of linguistic universality toward ones emphasizing linguistic difference. In England, this approach was most famously championed in Horne Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley (1786). Tooke espoused a materialist philosophy that reduced language to essential verbs and nouns as the

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signifiers of sensory experience, and claimed that through etymological research the corruptions of language could be stripped away to reveal their original purity.4 The influence of Tooke’s language theories on radical politics is the subject of ongoing critical interest but by the mid-nineteenth century the mechanics (if not the philosophy) of Tookian empiricism had been debunked by comparative linguistics, a theory closely aligned with German intellectualism, particularly the work of Johann Herder, Wilhelm Humboldt, and Friedrich von Schlegel.5 Hans Aarsleff, author of the influential The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860, argues that the popularity of Tooke’s materialism essentially blocked the spread of comparative linguistics to Britain until the 1830s, after which Tooke’s influence waned and this new linguistic theory was finally accepted. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates how Aarsleff’s linear teleology simplifies important connections between Tookian empiricism and German comparatism and underestimates the (albeit indirect) influence that comparative philologists had on British Romantic culture. Of those many early comparative linguists, Herder deserves special notice because his theory of language was distilled into his other, broadly influential musings on politics, theology, and literature. Upending the popular Enlightenment theorization of “ideas” as the origin of meaning (in John Locke’s work, for example), Herder proffered a quasi-empirical theory of linguistics that, quite radically, posited language as a prerequisite for thought: meaning now resided in word usage, whose careful study was a prerequisite for both a faithful and emotive textual interpretation. Dismissing the universality of David Hume and Voltaire, Herder argued instead that language arose organically from particular geographical and historical conditions and, accordingly, varied widely across time and space: in a typical argument he insisted that because the economy of the “Hebrews” was heavily dependent on livestock, their vocabulary was intrinsically more bucolic and rich “in names of natural things” than the more mercantilist German.6 Because thoughts were now guided by a language formed from reactions to a particular time and space, Herder’s recognition of language difference expanded to posit a fundamental human diversity, or “radical difference,” which filtered down into his and his followers’ subsequent theories of history, ethnology, and nationalism. Radical difference was central to Herder’s understanding of essential (i.e., etymologically provable) linguistic and, in turn, cultural divergence. As language became, in effect, the key to cultural

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history, for comparative linguists “images of the linguistic past took on the kind of facticity which allowed them to be transposed between places and issues: kinship and texts, language and race, grammar and history.”7 Linguistics became an ethnological tool that demonstrated the radical difference between cultures and the basis for arguments in favor of distinct national identities grounded in unique linguistic, geographical, and historical experiences. In this broadening of linguistic significance, translation served as a theoretical lynchpin: both necessary as a bridge between radical difference and near impossible because of this difference. And because words were understood as signifiers for cultural experience, translation between different languages was not merely the replacement of a foreign word with a familiar one but an indicator of the potential transformation of thought itself, as one culture encountered another through language. In order to preserve radical difference even while translating, Herder advocated “foreignizing” translations, or translations that bend, or alter, the target language to allow room for the source language. This foreignizing approach ran counter to the eighteenth-century norm of domesticated or adaptive translation as popularly practiced by Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray and in the French belles infidèles, which advocated altering the source text for both form and content to suit domestic tastes. While Herder’s translative theory had little impact on greater translative practice, which remained resolutely adaptive, its immediate philosophical import was undeniable. For Herder and those philologists influenced by him— most notably Friedrich von Schlegel, A. W. von Schlegel, J. W. von Goethe, and Friedrich Schleiermacher—translation’s potential to transform thought meant that national character was equally susceptible to change, a prospect that was both necessary and terrifying: “A language before all translations is like a maiden who has not yet laid with a foreigner and born a child of mixed blood: for the time being she is still pure and innocent, a true image of the character of her people. She is also poor, obstinate, and unruly: and as she is, so is the original and national language.”8 Unspoken but tangible in Herder’s description of language’s deflowering is the role of the translator: no longer a mere copyist, but a dangerously virile arbiter of culture. While these new theories of foreignizing translation demonstrated the dynamic role language would play in determinations of nationalism, the essential connection established between language, culture, and place implicitly provided

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a linguistic basis for imperial conquest: if languages established radical (cultural) difference, then the “quality” of various languages indicated the relative value of their associated cultures. Herder, and then increasingly his successors, used morphology and syntax to distinguish between primitive and polished languages and between superior “organic” languages and inferior, mechanical ones.9 As Joseph Errington observes, “Applied locally, images of language history fitted and corroborated their shared sense of national destiny in Europe. . . . Applied globally, these same images helped to chart the long historical trajectory in which imperialism emerged as a natural continuation of the civilizational dynamic.”10 Errington correctly identifies the ideological continuity between the national and the imperial, but his seamless trajectory ignores the fear of translation’s unnaturalness that is implicit in an analogy like Herder’s. In it, the seduction of the virginal original language by the foreign language is necessary but also distinctly ominous because the incorporation of the foreign through translation results in cultural miscegenation. Thus, while Herder argued for the value of linguistic transfer, he also characterized spaces of true linguistic and cultural diversity, effectually “contact zones,” as culturally spectral and historically liminal.11 None of this potent Herdervian philology has any place in Arsleff’s history of early nineteenth-century British linguistics, which, he insists, valued Tookian thought to the exclusion of what he deems the “real” revolution in language: “for thirty years it [Tooke’s Diversions] kept England immune to the new philology, until the results and methods finally had to be imported from the Continent in the 1830’s.”12 Yet one of the most influential comparatists of the period was the British orientalist Sir William Jones, whose foundational Third Anniversary Discourse, which identified a common-source language tying Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin together (Proto-Indo-European), appeared in 1786, the same year as the Diversions of Purley. Even while stressing Jones’s central role in the formation of comparative linguistics, Aarsleff argues that the British neglected both his linguistic theories and the cultural discoveries precipitating them: “in England, the knowledge of Indian languages and literature failed to have any appreciable impact. Outside its practical utility to the conduct of business in the East, it remained largely the affair of a few scholars.”13 Aarsleff’s dismissal of British orientalism’s “appreciable impact” is at least partial proof of the problems with his linguistic teleology.

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While he cites the lack of a distinct discussion of comparative linguistics in Britain as proof of its near nonexistence, I suggest that these ideas were not ignored but rather sublimated into the larger ongoing discourse of empire.14 Comparative linguistics and imperialism were mediated wholes, seemingly independent phenomena whose coming into being depended on their relationship to each other. Comparative philologists were materially dependent on the textual fruits of colonial conquest—the translations of Jones and his fellow orientalists— for their grammatical and historical theories, and colonialism was, as the next several chapters demonstrate, ideologically influenced by the global history mapped out by comparatism. These influences include not only the linguistic teleology (later a racial one) that “scientifically” established Europe at a civilizational apex but also those early philological theories that established the Eastern origins of both civilization and language. In contrast to comparative linguistics’ inherently global perspective, Tookian empiricism’s immersion in Anglo-Saxon grammar and British radicalism suggests a wholly unrelated domestic language politics. Both philological theories, however, have afterlives in imperial praxis. Tooke’s approbation of simple languages uncorrupted by grammatical excess was refracted into James Mill’s denunciations of Sanskrit and its “artificial,” complex grammar, and subsequently, the liberal rejection of a more appreciative orientalism. Correspondingly, Dugald Stewart, Tooke’s formidable Scottish adversary, reacted to the culturally compromising implications of comparatism by launching the influential theory that Sanskrit itself was a forgery constructed by wily Brahmins on the foundations of Greek and then passed off as genuine, imbricating Sanskrit with contemporary debates over plagiarism, hoax poems, and general linguistic artifice.15 Widening the scope of British Romantic linguistics, we can see how Tookian empiricism and Jonesian comparatism were both part of a linguistic revolution that made the etiology of language a vital part of early nineteenth-century theorizations of culture. Of course, many scholars insist that Romanticism’s foundational aesthetic was first articulated in two of Jones’s other works—“An Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations” and “An Essay on Imitation”—which reject imitation and invite readers to explore a new aesthetic and cultural world in Eastern poetry.16 M. H. Abrams has made “An Essay on Imitation” the more recognizable of the two, but “An Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations,” which has been celebrated

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for its concluding argument that Eastern poetry will revitalize a moribund Western poesis, is more than a rallying cry for literary ecumenism. Beginning with Arabic poetry, Jones’s essay describes the evolution of a poetic culture that is both organic (or Herdervian)— Persia’s natural lushness is described as poetically phenotypical—and the result of conquest. From Arabs to Persians to Turks, the chain of poetic transfer in the East ends with “the descendents of Tamerlane [having] carried into India the language and poetry of Persians.” While Jones’s gaze remains fixedly on the Orient, the genealogy of its poetic inheritance leads naturally to Western expansion, as he concludes that “[t]he Indians are soft and voluptuous, but artful and insincere, at least to the Europeans . . . but they are fond of poetry, which they learned from the Persians, and may, perhaps, before the close of the century, be as fond of a more formidable art, which they will learn from the English.”17 This cryptic “formidable art,” with its aesthetic and martial implications, inserts the British into the aesthetic-linguistic evolution of Eastern poetry, making them inevitable cultural successors to the Mughal Empire by borrowing aesthetic ideas even as they conquer. Saree Makdisi has argued that Jones’s insistence on exploring a culture of difference required a firmer definition of the self that ultimately distanced, rather than incorporated, Easternness.18 While it is true that many Romantic texts with an Eastern veneer ultimately read like testaments to nervous navel gazing, Jones’s description of a constant poetic transfer, of a living in translation, suggests a nuanced negotiation of self and other, originality and imitation, that is an essential part of a more normative Romantic aesthetics. Take, for example, John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a poem that reveals the poet’s investment in the process of translation as both epiphanic and mediated. Keats’s sonnet, often interpreted as an expression of his poetic “election,” is one in which the poet’s inheritance of the sublime tradition also demonstrates the potency of the translator and translative fidelity.19 The poem’s identification of translation as the locus of sublimity evinces precisely the newness of recontextualization; as Charles Rzepka argues, “‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ shows itself to be a poem about belatedness, precedence, and mediation.”20 The poem’s approbation of George Chapman’s bold Iliad over Pope’s adaptive one demonstrates the Romantics’ growing interest in imaginative translations that also captured the spirit of the source text. It is also telling that

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Chapman’s translation, which was attacked during the time of its publication for its “originality,” was considered to be an original in its own right by Keats’s contemporaries. 21 Keats’s response to the Chapman Iliad is particularly emphatic in the poem’s original draft, in which Chapman’s translation is posited as directly responsible for the poet’s understanding of the sublime in the line “yet could I never judge what Men could mean,” which was replaced by “Yet never did I breathe its pure serene” in 1817. Keats’s inspiration via translation is conceptually similar to Goethian interlinear translation, the elusive “perfect translation” that represents the ultimate possibility of translation: that which “does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place.”22 The superimposition of Chapman over Homer inspires further replacement as Keats “appropriates the sublime”; the poem’s seamless interplay between original authorship and translation underscores the creative potential of translation in which the original coexists alongside the translation without either being overwritten. 23 Several readings of the poem have turned on the appropriative nature of the sublime and on Keats’s inheritance of the poetic mantle through sublime possession, but the experience of the sublime is also one of being possessed, as is again hinted at in the poem’s original version, in which Hernan Cortez is described with “wondering” rather than “eagle” eyes. This evolving negotiation of possessed and possessing is implicitly a negotiation of the work of translation, and it continues through to its most controversial point, the CortezBalboa palimpsest. Keats does not merely substitute one for the other erroneously: the palimpsestic layering of Cortez onto Balboa, conqueror onto discoverer (whether, as Rzepka argues, an example of preintention or not) echoes the poem’s ongoing tension between the translator as passive mediator and the translator as cultural appropriator. Indeed, Keats’s poem, revolving as it does around the sensation of translational affect (and bolstered by the poet’s intense interest in South America), is a poetic realization of Herder’s interpretive principle of Einfülung, or “feeling one’s way in,” the crux of which is the affective reproduction of sensory experience through careful study of linguistic and historical context. 24 Keats’s poem suggests the complexity of Romantic attitudes toward translation, as his imbrication of colonial themes with the experience of reading Homer is a crucial counterpoint to de Quincey’s manipulation of Homer in his dealing with the Malay. The poet’s evocation of a triplicate translative process moving across time and

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space demonstrates the dynamic role translation played in shaping Romantic aesthetics. 25 And as Keats’s poem suggests, this influence was as much practical as it was theoretical; it can be no coincidence that some of the most influential texts of the period were translations: Alexander Fraser Tytler’s 1792 translation of Schiller’s Die Raüber; the plays of August von Kotzebue, which were translated and then dramatized by Elizabeth Inchbald and Richard Sheridan; and the 1813 translation of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne are only a few examples. Even taking Marilyn Butler’s arguments about the contracting of inter-European communication during the decade following the French Revolution into consideration, translation remained essential to British culture, as its prominence in the innovative genre of the period—the periodical—suggests. 26 Blackwood’s decision to publish de Staël’s (Herdervian) “On Translation” in its second volume set the tone for that magazine’s sustained interest in foreign materials. As Peter France observes, “What is striking is the sheer amount (if not always the quality) of translation offered to readers in the Edinburgh periodical press. . . . Britain may not have been as welcoming to the foreign as Germany, but the public must have been willing to explore and sometimes to take to its heart new writing from abroad.”27 Although the majority of Romantic-era translations were naturally from German and French, Anglophilic publications like The Edinburgh Review published translations from Sanskrit and found ample opportunity to comment on colonial politics. In an 1811 review of Voyage aux Indes Orientales, the reviewer is more interested in lamenting the British public’s indifference to Indian affairs and in denouncing the East India Company’s trade monopoly than in reviewing C. F. Tombe’s narrative. 28 Even the most traditional form of translation, biblical scholarship, was susceptible to the frisson of exotic contextualization: George Campbell’s popular The Four Gospels (1789), which extensively discusses the problems of translation, concludes a section on the difficulties of translating anachronistic concepts using the following example: “Montesquieu observes of what is called honour in the monarchies of Europe, that it is unknown, and consequently unnamed in the despotisms of Asia; and that it would even be a matter of some difficulty to render the term, as understood by Europeans, intelligible to a Persian.”29 While scholars continued to debate the usefulness of the body as a register for racial taxonomy, language was proving a crucial marker of ethnic difference.

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Given the volatile symbiosis of colonialism and linguistic comparatism, postcolonial theorists have naturally seized on translation as the epitomic tool of imperial oppression in need of recuperation from its colonial legacy. However, as the next section demonstrates, this zeal to recoup translation in the postcolony has often meant a simplification of its diverse effects during its period of essential germination.

Translation and the Postcolonial Predicament For some time now, contemporary postcolonial theory has been engaged in an exegesis of translation, a process that acknowledges the centrality of translation to the literal and metaphorical work of empire while searching for ways to “liberate” translation from this paradigm. On the one hand, the dialectical nature of translation has been taken up by postcolonial authors as a way of confronting contemporary questions of cultural and national identity. On the other, extrapolating from a long-standing understanding of translation as “diminishment,” many postcolonial critics have read the colonial understanding of the colony itself as a translation, a diminishment of the metropole ideal: “The British . . . not only invaded and conquered a territory but, through their scholarship, they . . . invaded an epistemological space as well. The British believed they could explore and conquer this space through translation.”30 Along with insisting on an acknowledgment of the hegemonic function of translation, postcolonial theorists are also turning to the positive function of translation in the postcolony—translation as a potentially liminal and “thirdspace” offering an alternative site for expression beyond dominance or servility.31 The genealogy of the postcolonial interest in translation no doubt begins with Talal Asad’s groundbreaking assessment of the relationship between cultural translation and power in “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” a text that argues for recognition of the elision between translator and author in anthropological translations. Asad’s assertion that anthropological translation is implicitly an act of subject formation has been taken up to devastating effect in one of the most sustained and thoughtful accounts of the relationship between translation theory and the postcolonial condition, Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism, and the Colonial Context. Niranjana reads translation contextually as a method of containment and as a “philosopheme”

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that “brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation. These concepts . . . completely occlude the violence that accompanies the construction of the colonial subject.”32 Translation thus serves a double and paradoxical function as both representation and mask. Siting Translation presents a “before and after” reading of the politics of translation; Niranjana argues that traditional theories of translation evince a groping toward a transcendental signification that locks translation into a search for “fidelity,” creating, in turn, transparent and static versions of the colonized.33 Hermeneutic theories of translation (developed by scholars like Steiner), with their emphasis on the reciprocity and parity implicit in “authentic” translation, do not, in Niranjana’s analysis, sufficiently account for the political conditions under which a text is actually translated. In one section of her book, Niranjana analyzes a section from George Chapman’s 1609 poem Euthymiæ Raptus, where the spirit of Homer recalls his own translation as an active shift of subjectivity.34 The poem’s Homer begins classically as the inspiring muse to the poem’s narrator, but is himself transformed during the process of translation. He is “englished,” a move that Niranjana reads as indicative of the proprietary and transmutative principles of neoclassical translation.35 As Keats’s negotiation of Chapman’s Homer indicates, however, the line between possessed and possessing in translation is both rhetorically and ideologically slippery. What Niranjana fails to mention is that the power reversal in Chapman’s poem reveals the imminent frailty of all cultural identity within translation: as translation theory in the eighteenth century moved in the direction of foreignization and hermeneutics, it became increasingly clear that the “englishing” of Homer also opened the possibility for the “homerizing” of English. Niranjana’s analysis of colonial translation (or, more correctly, translation under the aegis of a colonial system), while invaluable, also reads it as essentially monophonic. Her construction of hegemonic translation presumes a silent complicity on the part of native texts and the native peoples who were both integral and often resistant to the translative process. Moreover, her insistence on colonial translation as occlusion does not take into account the effect that the translation of native texts had on their translators; she ignores the phenomenon Raymond Schwab has famously dubbed “the Oriental Renaissance,” the cultural revolution in Europe caused by the translation of oriental texts. While Schwab’s own analysis significantly neglects the inherent

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political and cultural inequality under which these acts of translation took place, more theoretical accounts of translation display at least a tacit recognition of the power struggle involved. Steiner’s description of the hermeneutic of translation unwittingly reads like a conceptual map of the colonial process: We ‘lean towards’ the confronting text . . . we circle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again off-balance, having caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from ‘the other’ and by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own. The system is now off-tilt. The hermeneutic act must compensate. If it is to be authentic, it must mediate into exchange and restored parity. 36

Steiner’s language of compensation describes a process of translation in which both the text and its translator wage a power struggle, invasion balancing alongside the uneasy consequence of bringing home the spoils of conquest. While Niranjana correctly identifies Steiner’s ahistoricity, his identification of the need for “restored parity” is unwittingly reminiscent of the various colonial “improvements” that were put in place to obfuscate the violence of conquest. Most crucial, however, is Steiner’s identification of translation as a site of contested power, one in which the victory of one side over the other is never quite assured, even when the translation has moved beyond the stage of conquest. The contingency of the above passage opens up the possibility that no translation is ever authentic. While Imperial Babel cannot hope to adequately address both sides of this massive issue—the centripetal and centrifugal force of translation in both the colony and the metropole—my study of translation accounts for both the violence of the translative process as a tool of colonial domination and the irresolution of translations that resist the very conditions under which they take place. Niranjana’s study was one of the first in what has become a surge of recent theorizations of the cultural implications of translation. As Sandra Bermann observes in the introduction to Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, globalization has brought translation out of the shadows, as the rapid “suturing” together of new global networks exposes the seams of its construction.37 In the new arguments for translation’s dynamism, however, imperial translation has been designated the static site against which postcolonial translation defines itself, resulting in an echo chamber in which colonial translation is dismissed almost before it is considered. This assumption of a

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monologic “imperialist legacy of translation” has become the starting point from which many postcolonial engagements with translation move forward. One such example is Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi’s otherwise invaluable introduction to Postcolonial Translation, which tackles the whole history of nineteenth-century colonial translation in brief discussions of Sir William Jones’s Sacontalá and Edward FitzGerald’s Rubàiyàt.38 This reduction of colonial translation to a strict center-periphery binary is at odds with the increasingly nuanced readings of colonialism that have emerged in recent years.39 With increasing frequency, scholars have pointed out the inadequacy of terms like Edward Said’s “Orientalism” to encapsulate the complex negotiation of Romantic encounters with the East, and in this project I use a vexing term familiar to both postcolonial and translation scholars—exoticism— to define a space of “lived perplexity” that includes a diverse range of reactions to the Orient, or “micropractices,” outside Said’s orientalist purview.40 In contemporary discourse exoticism’s implications of commodification and superficial costume imply that it is a site for the cultural dislocation of objects in order to render them fit for Western consumption. An examination of exoticism’s etymological history in English, however, reveals a more opaque negotiation of Eastern literature and aesthetics. The author of “The Life of Eutropius” apologizes for coining the term in a short biography preceding a reprint (with English annotation and notes) of Eutropius’s Eutropii historiæ Romanæ breviarium (1800). Attempting to pin down Eutropius’s background, the author relies on Eutropius’s own translations for clues to his ethnic origins: “Another circumstance too, which serves to confirm . . . these two last conjectures [that Eutropius is either Greek or from Constantinople], is his Latinity; which . . . seems to breathe an air of exoticism in it, and makes it . . . very improbable, that he was . . . Italian.” In a footnote, the author begs for “indulgence if he has here taken the liberty of coining a word . . . as he knows none in the English language sufficiently expressive of his meaning.”41 This use of exoticism to describe an essential, inescapable, but not necessarily negative foreignness evolves by the midcentury into a precursor of its contemporary pejorativeness. In 1848 Julius Charles Hare published, with many additions, the second series of Guesses at Truth, a book of theological and philosophical musings co-written with his brother, Augustus, in 1827. Like Eutropii, Guesses at Truth also situates the term “exoticism” within a comparative history of language.

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Discussing the relative translatability of the Bible, Hare argues that the Bible’s composition occurred at a time of intellectual primitivism, when “the chief objects of language were the elementary features of the heart and mind.” Hare goes on to insist that the Bible improves in translation, for “the Greek original belongs to a degenerate age of the language, and is tainted with many exoticisms and other defects, while our Version exhibits our language in its highest purity and majesty, in this respect it has a great advantage.”42 In Dacier, Eutropius’s exoticism is merely symptomatic of otherness, although his uneasiness toward his own neologism is worth noting. Hare’s exoticism is not only inherently negative but also explicitly degenerate; the history of linguistic advancement coincides with an adaptive mode of translation that purifies Christianity itself: the Bible is simply better in English. In the movement from Dacier to Hare, the brief period from the “creation” of exoticism to calls for its purgation, we see that nineteenth-century authors regarded exoticism not merely as a superficial veneer of the foreign, or a mode of safe appropriation but also as a troublesome form of cultural interpolation and an example of the foreign qua foreign that was by its very nature unsettling. This “double game” of exoticism, moving between costume and condition, is arguably the counterpart to the period’s evolving anxieties over language and cultural identity.43 Exoticism’s narrowing definition over the course of the nineteenth century is concomitant with the generally accepted understanding of British orientalism’s devolution from appreciative (if condescending) to almost hostile. The following section, however, considers ways in which this broad teleology may be, if not upended, at least usefully complicated.

Translation’s Slant Shortly before the publication of Niranajana’s Siting Translation, Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism demonstrated the devastating effects of cultural translation in the conquest of the Americas. Critiquing the medieval concept of translatio studii et imperii, Cheyfitz effectively demonstrates how “from its beginnings the imperialist mission is, in short, one of translation.”44 His analysis of this theory of the westward transfer of cultural knowledge and political legitimacy establishes a priori the relationship between empire and linguistic transfer. In particular, Cheyfitz’s analysis of the relationship between the literal (or proper) and the metaphorical as the movement

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of the familiar into the foreign foregrounds the “territorial imperative” of Western rhetoric.45 He persuasively draws from a classical model of rhetorical translatio—emblematized in scenes where an orator uses eloquence to “tame” savage humanity—as a representation of the colonizer-native relationship.46 While Cheyfitz remarks on the difficulty and uncontrollability of translation, his focus is on its ideological paradox and on the free play between the literal and figurative. In representations of the East, however, the rhetoric of the oriental sublime (emblematized in the late eighteenth century by Edmund Burke’s speeches on India during the trial of Warren Hastings) and the initial admiration European scholars had for these “decaying” civilizations complicates any straightforward application of Cheyfitz’s civilized-barbaric dyad.47 The degenerative historiography implicit in Burke’s conceptualization of a sublime India clearly ratified growing British interference in Indian affairs, but this was a modernizing, not civilizing, impulse. In another discussion of translatio studii, Karlheinz Stierle tracks the shift from a vertical model of translatio—in which older cultures are usurped by the new—to a horizontal model of mutuality, or dialogue.48 For Stierle, this shift is marked by the transition from Dante’s model of cultural succession to Petrarch’s idea of a rebirth or renaissance after an age of barbaric disruption of culture into a “copresence” of cultures: Christian and classical, vernacular and Latin.49 If, as Stierle’s reading implies, cultural heteroglossia is the experience of modernity, I would argue that the British translative enterprise in the East is ideologically aslant: caught somewhere between the verticality of translatio’s cultural usurpations and the horizontal plurality of mutual appreciation. And although the angle of appreciation may become more and more obtuse as the century progresses, subsequent chapters demonstrate how imperial translation is never quite able to lose its slant. In the late eighteenth century, at least, Burke’s attitude toward India was not a singular one; his archenemy Warren Hastings prefaced the first direct translation of a Sanskrit text into English, Charles Wilkins’s Bhagvad-Geeta; or, Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (1785), with the observation that “[i]t is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered by many, as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life. . . . Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights. . . . But such instances can only be obtained in their writings.”50 Hastings’s description of

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misunderstood but textually graspable Indians was the dominant theme of orientalist scholarship for the next several years, one that simultaneously narrowed and widened the gap between Britons and their newly conquered subjects. But why would Hastings, an administrator for a mercantilist outfit, be interested in parsing philosophical texts in the first place? In The Stillbirth of Capital, Siraj Ahmed argues that translations of seemingly “irrelevant” texts like the Geeta were offered as evidence of the East India Company’s fitness for governance, tangible proof that a trading organization was capable of ruling India’s millions.51 Certainly the new orientalists were not coy about their political and intellectual ambitions. In a speech William Jones delivered at the opening of the Asiatic Society in February 1784, he encouraged its members to take as their model “the Royal Society, which, at first, was only a meeting of a few literary friends at Oxford, [and] rose gradually to that splendid zenith, at which a Halley was their secretary and a Newton their president.”52 Jones’s comparison was disingenuous, as the Asiatick Society’s charter members were not nonpartisan academics but Company men. Only a month before his “Discourse,” the society had published its first transactions with the editorial caveat that “a mere man of letters . . . allotting his whole time to philosophical or literary pursuits, is a character unknown among European residents in India, where every individual is a man of business, the civil or military state, and constantly occupied either in affairs of government, in the administration of justice, in some department of revenue or commerce, or in one of the liberal professions,” and thus already enjoying the patronage of the colonial ruling class. 53 Rather, Jones’s comparison of the Asiatick Society to the Royal Society in its glory days is an indication of the seriousness of the orientalists’ purpose and of their hopes to influence a diffuse audience beyond Company clerks and specialists. The first three Sanskrit texts to be translated into English were Nathanael Brassey Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), the aforementioned Geeta, and the Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma (1787) also translated by Wilkins. While Halhed’s Code had a significant impact on people’s understanding of precolonial subcontinenal governance (Edmund Burke quoted from the Code, which was prefaced by a grateful address to Warren Hastings, at Hastings’s impeachment trial), it was an indirect translation: Halhed’s source was a Persian translation of the Sanskrit original. Its translator’s preface is

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mostly concerned with persuading the Company’s Court of Directors of the wisdom of adapting British law to native custom. It is that first direct translation, Wilkins’s Geeta, and its famous prefatory materials that express the synergy of the Company’s literary, military, and financial excursions into India and which, in presenting the text to the “literary” (as opposed to administrative) world, take on Jones’s goal. Ahmed draws from Hastings’s introduction to argue that “the Orientalist critique of European history did not at all imply a genuine openness to Indian history. Orientalism’s textual baises . . . coincided only too nearly with the exigencies of colonial rule. These biases enabled Orientalism, when it arrived in the colony, to transform itself from Europe’s tireless critic to empire’s faultless servant,” but this analysis too neatly packages intent and production. 54 Rather than converging neatly with the exigencies of rule, the orientalist (and orientalist-inspired) texts often struggled to articulate a coherent ideological position. Take, for example, the introduction to the Geeta that Ahmed himself draws from. Hastings does attempt to posit orientalism as the best fusion of humanistic and worldly concerns—best seen in his argument that cultural “communication” soothes the injuries of the conquered and humanizes the conquerors—but his attempt to define the relationship between Eastern culture and Western rule is riddled with inconsistencies and complications, wandering between sameness and difference, aesthetics and praxis. After emphasizing the vast civilizational difference between his audience and the Geeta, and warning the reader to expect “obscurity, absurdity, barbarous habits, and a perverted morality” he goes on later to compare the Geeta favorably to “the best French versions of the most admirable passages of the Iliad or Odyssey, or of the 1st and 6th books of our Milton.” The reader is left with the sense that the governor is not quite sure of what he is introducing. Across these first three translations, the Code of Gentoo Laws, the Geeta, and the Heetopades, is written the template for late eighteenth-century orientalism’s evolution. Halhed’s translation—Sanskrit to Persian to English—embodies the traditional transfer of power as codes of law passed through the languages of the conquerors. In Wilkins’s Geeta, the acquisition of a sacral language uncovers cultural treasures, thereby demonstrating a fitness to rule. But the Heetopades is perhaps the most interesting signifier of the advent of modern empire and a demonstration of translation’s new globalization. In his

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introduction, Wilkins traces the Hitopadeśa’s original, geographically contingent journey from Sanskrit to Pahlavi then Arabic, Persian, and French, and then finally into English as the Instructive and entertaining Fables of Pilpay, an ancient Indian Philosopher (1699). After recreating the translative telephone game that turned Veeshnoo-Sarma “ridiculously” into Pilpay, Wilkins implicitly bypasses it with his new, “scrupulously” accurate one and offers, via language, that long-sought goal: a direct route from Europe to India. As we can see, the history of orientalist translation lies in the profusion of introductions, addresses, notes, emendations, and other paratextual accompaniments that envelop, bouy, and even overshadow the texts they accompany. Throughout this study I will turn to these seemingly extraneous materials, which are, in fact, indispensible to “ensure[ing] the text’s presence in the world.”55 In the case of translations, especially orientalist translations, this seemingly auxiliary material is particularly important as it marks the translator (and any editorial companions) as an intrepid guide into the jungles of the unknown. But as we have already seen, authorial control is not always absolute, and paratext may also function as a text’s unconscious, replete with anxiety over the extent to which control may be impossible. Hastings’s address in the Geeta endorses “social communication” as the best means of understanding another culture, although, in a fine example of paratextual wavering, he swings back to a specifically textual acquisition as the crucial facilitator when he notes that the best chances to observe the true character of the native peoples “can only be obtained in their writings.” This is a constitutive feature of orientalism that distinguishes it from Cheyfitz’s description of the oratorical colonization of the New World. Orientalist literature evinces an obsession with the written conquest of Eastern knowledge, celebrating the veracity of textual over lived experience. 56 Thomas Moore’s introduction to the wildly popular oriental tale Lalla Rookh (1817), the apogee of the Romantic craze for Eastern fictions, demonstrates the persistence of Hastings’s attitude: “I took the whole range of all such Oriental reading as was accessible to me; and became, for the time, indeed, far more conversant with all relating to that distant region, than I have ever been with . . . any of these countries lying most within my reach.”57 Even authors who derided orientalists’ approbation borrowed their methodology. James Mill’s preface to the virulently anti-Indian The History of British India, published

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the same year as Lalla Rookh, echoes Moore in its vigorous defense of the author’s lack of firsthand experience, claiming that the analysis of gathered evidence—a skill learned only in Europe—generates more knowledge and critical understanding than the evidence gathering itself. Thus, “[a]s soon as every thing of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may attain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.”58 The orientalist fascination with textuality, accompanied by the corresponding suspicion of lived Eastern experience, was symptomatic of a “denial of coevalness” that defined the Orient as a pristine historical specimen uncorrupted by outside influence.59 This covered history and religion, of course, but also language; Sanskrit, in particular, was considered a repository for and emblematic of an unchanging, impenetrable, Brahminical Hinduism. The comparatists’ search for linguistic roots in languages like Sanskrit essentially froze these “pure” languages into a spot on the evolutionary linguistic tree, providing a linguistic basis for the common trope of oriental stasis. As Alexander Dow remarks in frustration in History of Hindostan (1770), “the few [adventurers to India] who have a turn for researches of that kind [philosophical, intellectual inquiry] are discouraged by the very great difficulty in acquiring that language, in which the learning of the Hindoos is contained . . . or by that impenetrable veil of mystery with which the Brahmins industriously cover their religious tenets and philosophy.”60 Instead of fulfilling language’s basic purpose of communication, Dow’s Sanskrit is an impassable dam that checks knowledge, a prefiguring of Dugald Stewart’s later argument that it was a linguistic fraud. While this establishment of essential oriental stasis seemingly paved the way for the translator as conqueror, Dow’s description of reticent Indians withholding knowledge inadvertently indicates the extent to which colonial translative processes were initially wholly dependent on a cadre of native intellectuals and laborers to help with both the work of translation and the subsequent recording and printing of these translations.61 Miles Ogborn’s Indian Ink has demonstrated how Europeans did not introduce tools of literacy to colonies like India as much as they found themselves participating in extant “geographies of information.”62 The implications of this collaborative knowledge exchange, and of its later occlusion, are best exemplified

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in the two nineteenth-century English translations of Kalidasa’s circa fourth-century play Sakuntala. Sir William Jones’s 1789 translation of Sakuntala as Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring, the third direct Sanskrit-English translation after Wilkins’s, was a watershed moment in European aesthetics, exposing the West to, as Jones explained in his preface (and echoing the advertisement to the Geeta), “one of the greatest curiosities, that the literature of Asia has yet brought to light.”63 Despite its significance, Sakuntala was not translated in English again until 1855, when Sir Monier Monier-Williams, then professor of Sanskrit at the East India Company College, decided Jones’s translation was insufficiently scholarly. While the impact of Jones’s Sacontalá on continental Romanticism has been much discussed, the significance of Monier-Williams’s translation has not, but its importance (to the translator, at least) is perhaps best revealed in a second preface written by Monier-Williams himself in 1898 for the eighth edition.64 In the 110-year gap between Jones’s and Monier-Williams’s prefaces, we can see broadly the tremendous shift in colonial translative praxis that the subsequent chapters of this book consider on a more intimate scale. Jones begins his preface describing his eagerness to explore a newly discovered genre of Sanskrit literature called natak, which he believes to be the missing link of orientalist scholarship: pre-Mughal histories. But his pursuit leads to translative impasse; he learns that nataks are not histories but cannot discover what the word actually means, and so he consults both English and Indian scholars to close what he then suspects may be a lexical gap. A “sensible” Brahmin acquaintance finally informs Jones that he has seen entertainments similar to nataks put on by the British in the winter: they are, the scholar belatedly realizes, plays. Jones then describes how, working with his Sanskrit tutor, he translated Sakuntala first into Latin and then into English, providing his audience with what he calls “a pleasing and authentick portrait of old Hindu manners.”65 Although his translation was adapted to suit a Western aesthetic, Jones meant for his European audience to read the translation as a closet drama, insisting that only in India “could it [the play] be acted with perfect knowledge of Indian dresses, manners, and scenery.” Even after domesticating his translation, Jones acknowledged a radical difference between the cultural contexts of the play and his audience that translation could not bridge. While Jones’s preface lightly glosses over its adaptation as merely a disengagement from “the stiffness of a foreign idiom,” a reflection

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of relaxed eighteenth-century standards of translation, in MonierWilliams’s 1898 preface to the eighth edition of Sakoontalá; or, The Lost Ring, the translator acknowledges feeling “troubled” by his decision to translate adaptively but defends his decision on the grounds that it renders the play more suitable for performance on the modern stage. The stage he has in mind, however, is not an English one (or even, as Jones implies in his preface, an Anglo-Indian one): “It has gratified me exceedingly to find that youthful English-speaking Indians . . . have acted the [S’]akoontalá, in the very words of my translation with the greatest success before appreciative audiences in various parts of India.”66 As proof of the play’s success, he cites an approbative letter from one such actor who informs Monier-Williams that The public were kind enough to pronounce it [the play] a success. In many cases the applause given was not so much for the acting as for the beauty of your translation. . . . Our object in acting Hindú plays is to bring home to the Hindús the good lessons that our ancient authors are able to teach us. If there is one lesson in these days more than another which familiarity with the fountains of Western literature constantly forces upon the mind, it is that our age is turning its back on time-honoured creeds and dogmas. . . . ‘I desire no future that will break the ties of the past,’ is what George Eliot has said, and so it is highly necessary that the Hindús should know something of their former greatness. 67

Thanks to the many gifts of modernity bestowed on them by the British, Indians have been wrenched free from their historical stasis, losing, in the process, access to their “pure” languages and history, which must then be given back to them through the intervention of British translators and authors. The colonial subjects in this preface are no longer collaborators but merely grateful recipients. Rather than bowing before Western languages (as in the scene from de Quincey’s Confessions), they are now represented as genuflecting before the westernized translations of their own languages and, implicitly, the Western translator hovering in the background. While Jones’s preface abandons the pursuit of knowledge (the natak as history) for the delights of its poetry, Monier-Williams stresses edification over aesthetics. He moves quickly past the play’s beauty to harp on its utility. Jones’s “Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations” also ends with a plea for utility, albeit of a different sort: “if the principal writings of the Asiaticks, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed with the usual advantages of notes and

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illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our great seminaries of learning . . . a new and ample field of learning would be opened for speculation.”68 Jones’s delineation of the shared and distinct spaces of archival and translative work prefigures a more absolute split in later nineteenth-century orientalism, when the muscular scholar-adventurer who collected artifacts and specimens for the museum began to literally and literarily overshadow the textual orientalist. The intrepid colonial explorer is a popular subject, and I have not included in this book those formidable translator-adventurers (Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence) who fall into this mode. I am, however, interested in how the transition from Moore and Mill to Rudyard Kipling and Richard Burton underscores the metamorphosis of the colonial archive and its relation to power/knowledge. Thomas Richards’s Imperial Archive locates the utopic basis for the archive’s global scope in English Romanticism’s panoramic vision, but he defines archive itself as a product of triumphal Victorian positivism.69 Richards points out that by the late nineteenth century the British Museum was a black hole of artifactual excess hastily collected to prevent it from falling into other hands and to effect the control of knowledge governed and limited by the state. European indologists like Max Müller, the subject of my fourth chapter, often complained that while England housed the best archive of ancient Indian texts, the British themselves had only a minimal interest in the study of these found documents.70 Unsurprisingly, Victorian novels (Kim, King Solomon’s Mines) focus on the collection of materials for the archive rather than their incorporation into British literature or culture. Early orientalists exhibited similar archival impulses; however, the aesthetic and practical investments of their excavations yielded a markedly different relationship to the archive than the purely acquisitional drive described by Richards. The development of this earlier, emergent archive is examined to great effect in Betty Joseph’s Reading the East India Company, which effectively resituates archival study in the late eighteenth century. Joseph’s valuable work on the “unevenness” of the early colonial archive centers around the trace existence of women in these records of governance: “colonial understanding is limited and the activity of control through recording information is thwarted by the very object that has to be pinned down on paper—the woman.”71 My argument follows Joseph’s, but on the level of translation rather than gender. A

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necessary component of the archive, translation arguably also works to undermine the archive’s very purpose. As Richards argues, the imperial archive in its epitome achieves a total control over knowledge that is contained by the state. This emphasis on the control of information, however, is undermined by translation’s semantic fluidity. Imperial Babel demonstrates the ways in which, unlike mere accretion, translation (particularly as literary conceit) enables a textual nomadism that runs counter to the spirit of the state-controlled archive.72 One manifestation of this nomadism is the orientalist fiction that emerged as an early response to the accumulation of orientalist scholarship. The usurpation of classical authority via translatio studii entails the creation of new literature based on the transmission of earlier literary texts; not coincidentally, many major early orientalists published imitations of Eastern poetry along with (and alongside) their translations.73 The oriental tale was a popular genre in Europe from its beginnings in Antoine Galland’s 1704 translation of a collection of Arabic folk tales into Les Mille et une nuits, but the following chapter focuses specifically on a category of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century tales that attempted to imbibe the spirit of the archive of translated texts. Rather than write stories about collectors and the adventures of collecting, these oriental tales attempted to create a fantasy of a fantasy (the archive) by writing their own collections of “translationesque” tales, supplementing the authenticity of these pseudo translations by obsessively referencing their “factual” counterparts.74 The potential radicalism of the oriental tale has spurred critics like David Simpson to read translation as an integral facet of or alternative to cosmopolitanism that is not “easy” or “fixed” but swirls uneasily between cultures and nationalities through translation’s “profitable impossibility.”75 But I am also interested in how the oriental tale, especially in its Romantic incarnation, exposes literature’s unstable relation to the imperial archive: although literature does not absolutely fit into the project of state building that informs the archive, orientalist literature like the tale was central to the construction of an oriental mythopoesis.76 If, as Joseph observes, literature like the novel releases the archive from its box, the following chapter considers the ways in which oriental tales work from both within and without a narrative of archival control.77

ch a p t e r t wo

Pseudotranslations: Exoticism and the Oriental Tale Translation is the wandering existence of a text in a perpetual exile.

j. h ill is m ill e r

The Heterotopic Space of Translation On the seventy-fifth day of Warren Hastings’s impeachment trial, his lead counsel for defense, the aptly named Mr. Law, reached the close of his opening speech. To counter the “virulent, opprobrious, and abusive epithets” bestowed on his client, most notably the title “Captain General of Iniquity,” Law submitted “an immense body” of testimonials from India signed by a number of upper and middle-class Indians praising Hastings as an “excellent Gentleman . . . without an equal.” The production of this first tribute apparently motivated the creation of a second, this one signed by the “inhabitants of the Hills in Ingleterry,” who testified to their increased prosperity and happiness under the rule of Hastings and the East India Company.1 Hastings’s prosecutor, Edmund Burke, was unmoved by these endorsements, insisting that “they had been first written in English, in all the simplicity of a western style; that they were afterwards translated into Persian, and adorned with the lofty metaphors of the East; and then turned once more into English.”2 As a direct rebuttal to accusations of Hastings’s rapacious conduct while governor-general of Bengal, the testimonials were meant to provide an “authentic” Indian voice to combat Burke’s use of translated Hindu law codes (neatly obfuscating Muslims) in support of his argument that Hastings’s despotism was not a justifiable emulation of Asian governmentality. But as Kate Teltscher remarks, in the case of the testimonials “[t]he process of translation—the very means that should facilitate communication between

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governors and governed—here obscures the authentic expression of Indian opinion.”3 What is further striking about Burke’s disavowal of the native testimonials is the presumed double act of translation: rather than simply accusing Hastings’s supporters of emulating an “eastern” writing style in English, he insisted that the statements had been written originally in English, translated into Persian, and then retranslated into English, as if some lacquer of authenticity would be derived from the act of translation itself regardless of the document’s original language. The Burke-Hastings scuffle over factualness resonates with a debate already ongoing in the literary world over the oriental tale, an “apparatus[s] of mediation” that filtered European responses to the East as a particular sort of fantasy Srinivas Aravamudan has likened to “an artifact written to the specifications of the folktale but with the aims of modernity in mind.”4 As Aravamudan argues in Enlightenment Orientalism, the oriental tale, beginning with Antoine Galland’s Mille en une nuits (1704), was a fundamentally transcultural genre, and many tales relied on the guise of translation to varying effect. But the particular tales I am interested in are a late eighteenthcentury variant that I have designated as “pseudotranslations,” a subgenre whose emergence coincided with a surge of orientalist scholarship and translative activity in the subcontinent; in other words, a series of texts that Hastings himself was indirectly responsible for propagating.5 Aravamudan traces the emergence of the oriental tale in Europe to an upsurge in Arabic and Persian translations beginning in the 1680s, but my engagement with the oriental tale begins after decisive military and political victories established the British as principal players on the Indian subcontinent, and as a sudden and radical influx of direct translations from hitherto undiscovered or “secret” languages (e.g., Sanskrit) transformed Europe’s scholarly relationship to the East. Earlier oriental tales had often incorporated mock footnotes or pseudoanthropology, but the authors of oriental tales of this era were eager to demonstrate how the glittering expanses of their fiction were underpinned by historical and antiquarian research.6 Take, for a brief example, the paratextual presence in Sir William Jones’s poems on various Hindu divinities (the subject of my fourth chapter)—which were published in magazines like Asiatick Review and read, if not very widely, then very intently by British literati. Jones’s poems are noteworthy because of their deliberate invocation of non-Western voices, a mimicry the poet so excelled at that his

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original verse was often mistaken as translation.7 Moreover, he also supplemented his translations and his original works with detailed notes, revolving simultaneously between the roles of scholar, aesthete, and poet. Both his habit of footnoting and his zeal to portray Eastern cultures from within were crucial to the culture of Romantic literary exoticism. The footnote was already an established literary device, but as a way of inuring readers to challenging new information it became increasingly ubiquitous in a more rigorous style of scholarly translation ushered in around the middle of the eighteenth century. George Campbell, the influential biblical scholar, argued that as translation became more accurate and challenged traditional interpretations, notes would become indispensible proofs of fact: “When a change is made from what people have been long accustomed to, it is justly expected that the reason, unless it be obvious, should be assigned. Hence arises the propriety of scholia, or notes, both for vindicating the version, and for supplying further information, which . . . is, to most readers, highly useful.”8 While texts like Campbell’s The Four Gospels (1789) and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) demonstrate the importance of supposedly marginal text in eighteenth- century literature in general, paratext in the oriental tale has a particular resonance as it, like translation, serves as mediator between a supposedly foreign text and its domestic audience: intervening and interpreting; alternately threshold, buffer, and interlocutor.9 The “literary footnote” became the hallmark of the oriental tale in the later eighteenth century; and as this chapter demonstrates, reading paratext would prove as imperative to understanding a tale’s ideological psyche as the narrative itself. Nigel Leask’s recent comments on the literary footnote provide a perhaps too-pithy summation of the critical response to both the early oriental tale and its more learned successor: “arising in the brief lacuna between the generic triviality of the eighteenth-century Oriental tale and the rise of scientific anthropology, the age of the literary footnote draws to an unlamented close.”10 A more vexed contemporary response to the tale is expressed in Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785), which addresses the genre as part of its overarching narrative purpose to debate the value of romance. The book’s fictive debate takes place between three characters. Positing realism as the dominant form of literature, the intellectually dominant Euphrasia assigns the tale a place in “Novels and stories Original and uncommon,” and a sharp debate ensues over the value of “eastern

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tales.” Although Euphrasia initially distinguishes between “original” tales like The Arabian Nights, which she admires, and subsequent French imitations that she does not, this shaky binary collapses as the discourse proceeds. The dangers of these tales to the reader are described as a cross between infection and sexual stimulation, stimulating feverish desire but ending in disgust; as Sophronia notes, “They do more than catch the attention, for they retain it. . . . [W]hen once we begin a volume, we cannot lay it aside, but drive through to the end of it, and yet upon reflexion we despise and reject them.”11 Unlike the absolute conclusions about various literary genres that mark the rest of Progress, the debate over the value of Eastern tales splits over acknowledging their obvious enjoyability while worrying about their dubious lack of realism and morals, leaving Euphrasia uncertain of their value. She initially does not recommend them to literary youth, although she also inconsistently argues that “it be well if they read nothing worse.”12 In keeping with her overarching imperative, Euphrasia finally turns away from the oriental tale to conclude that only the careful selection and reading of “proper” fiction can ensure a responsible reading public, but the oriental tale continues to dog the text. In an example of romance’s universal appeal, Reeve appends Progress with an oriental tale of her own creation, The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt (the source for Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir). She also includes a friend’s response: “my friend was surprised [by the excellence of Charoba] . . . and answered me to this effect: ‘I return your Ægyptian story with thanks; whence you took it, or how far it is your own I know not.’”13 The friend’s comments demonstrate the extent to which “good” oriental tales were considered the result of a translative process that obscured author identity and involved substantial rewriting, implying that regardless of the intrinsic value of original oriental tales, an excellent one was always assumed to have been subjected to substantive translative tampering.14 The nondichotomous fiction-truth of the oriental tale that Progress negotiates lies at the crux of the genre’s significance. Pseudotranslations, with their emphasis on footnoting, historical accuracy, and translative guise, offered their readers a fiction posing as oriental reality. Even in the absence of overt attempts to fabricate factuality, the tales emphasized the existence of a place whose increasingly graspable material-textual presence made it eminently exploitable. The oriental tale in general, and pseudotranslations in particular, are uniquely extroverted displays of British exoticism in which the ideological

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seams of colonial rule are exposed through the pairing of translation and paratext. Although orientalist fiction did not always cling to the guise of legitimacy with the same vigor as William Jones’s, the pseudotranslation’s claim to historical truth and its assumption of an “Eastern” form (the tale) imply a conceit of genuine translation and, more importantly, presume to convey cultural truths by wedding fiction to botany, medicine, geography, religion, and anthropology: “the category of the exotic . . . traded on precisely the ambiguity created by the dialectical interplay of diachronic history (fact) and imagination (fiction).”15 The pseudotranslation was thus a form of palimpsest in which fantasy was superimposed on top of the factuality of the Orient as represented in the notes—a bizarre, near-mythic reality—and the exotic, “authentic” translated fictions of the East, with the original A Thousand and One Nights as their generative locus.16 In this way the success of the pseudotranslation is a telling corollary to its immediate literary predecessor, the “hoax poems” of the mid-eighteenth century. Marjorie Levinson has demonstrated how the controversy surrounding hoax poems compelled readers to chose one of two cognitive protocols: these fragments were either authentic archaic poems or facsimiles.17 Conversely, readers of pseudotranslations seemed to implicitly accept their interpretive dissonance, reading them as simultaneously fictive and true, leading to the use of orientalist fiction to corroborate or otherwise mediate eyewitness and historical accounts. In Reginald Heber’s travelogue An Account of a Journey to Madras, and the Southern Provinces, 1826, the bishop morally and aesthetically situates his descriptions with repeated references to Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1811). A section on his first impressions of India and the countryside around “Saugor” (Sagar) during a rainstorm is particularly illuminating: “When [the storm] coupled with the unhealthy and dangerous character of the place . . . it was impossible to watch the broad, red, ominous light . . . and not to think of Southey’s Padalon [padalalokam, or the underworld].”18 Of course, Heber was only able to visit Sagar in 1823 because the territory had been brutally wrested from the Marathas just five years previously, but the reference to Southey’s descriptions of the Hindu netherworld neglects colonial history and substitutes fiction in its place, stressing both the exotic timelessness of the landscape and the factuality of Southey’s Indian fantasy.19 In this way, oriental tales were central to the development of a colonial

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mythopoesis extending long after the genre’s heyday in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The oriental tale—bolstered by its accurate and copious references—thus offers an interesting counterpoint to the theories of late eighteenth-century fictionality. In her analysis of the dialectic between fiction and fact in eighteenth-century novels, Catherine Gallagher insists that fiction emerged as a category separate from both fact and deception (or fantasy), as “stories that were both plausible and received as narratives about purely imaginary individuals.”20 But what is striking about pseudotranslations is these tales’ supposed reproduction of narratives of cultures in which the fantastical—gods, myths, and histories—constituted reality.21 G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter observe that “the very charm of the Thousand and One Nights . . . lies in the trick whereby their prima facie implausibility becomes a token of their authenticity: the normal rules of time, character, and psychology are, of course, suspended in the geographical and mental heartlands of the exotic,” a characteristic that was even more pronounced in pseudotranslations’ scholarly displays of an implausible and authentic East.22 This interest in the verifiability of exotic fantasy dovetails with Gallagher’s assertion that novels were less about literal truth and more about “likelihood.” As Srinivas Aravamudan argues, the tale (and other marginalized genres) cannot be omitted from the geneology of fiction to the preferment of the novel; and if we are looking for origins into fiction’s “new ways of discovering truth,” pseudotranslations—tales of confirmable wonder—provide a potent example of the “cognitive provisionality” Gallagher associates with novelistic fiction. There is, however, a key difference between Gallagher’s identification of the suspension of disbelief in the novel and the pseudotranslation: the awareness that the willed suspension of disbelief was confined to the readers but not to the practitioners (i.e., Hindus, Muslims, other inhabitants of the beyond) of these fantasies. Earlier oriental tales may have allowed readers to plunge, or to float, as it were, “on a magic carpet of possibility above and beyond recognizable referents,” but the mere presence of footnotes, even if readers didn’t always read through all of them, tied oriental tales to uncomfortable political and ethical realities.23 Interestingly, oriental fiction’s expediency was, in turn, its mediation of the uncomfortable realness of the once-fantastical Orient. Such mediation allowed authors artistic liberties they could not otherwise take: Southey acknowledges this in the preface to The Curse of Kehama when he insists that his grotesque descriptions of Hindu practices are meritorious because they are

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tempered representations of an even more horrible and fantastic (but, for some people, real!) mythology. The import of the oriental tale, then, lay in the collaboration between diegetic and extradiegetic: the creation of oriental spectacle and the subsequent authentication of the accuracy of that spectacle as oriental reality through often-elaborate paratexts. Leask reads the literary footnote as an imperial, scientific containment of the panoramic excess of exotic literature, a distinction that is reinforced by the temporal vacuity between the pseudotranslation’s constructedly timeless exotic verse and modern, scientific notes.24 Although the original editions of the tales I discuss used endnotes, in later editions the temporal gap also reads visually as confinement, as in some later reprints of The Curse of Kehama where the endnotes are printed as footnotes, resulting in a presence on the page that overwhelms the actual narrative (Fig. 1). Late eighteenth-century pseudotranslations, with their often-prodigious paratextual armaments, partner an experimental and speculative engagement with the East with the more recognizable and homogenous orientalism that (incompletely) guided British attitudes in the nineteenth century. As the temporal juxtaposition of modern note with antiqued fiction suggests, the pseudotranslation depends on the creation of heterotopic time, when “men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.”25 For its theorist, Michel Foucault, the heterotopia is quasi-real: it is the space created as a difference that projects back some version of the familiar, and its material reality is complicated by a complex of symbolic attachments that blur temporal and spatial realities.26 Likewise, in the pseudotranslation conflicting temporal and spatial realities converge to construct a third, heterotopic space, creating an oriental whole via the illusion of translation while using the Western objectivity of the notes as both “vindication” (to use Campbell’s term) and rebuke. Rather than seeing this space— both imaginative and printed—as one in which the literary and creative is posited against the factual and hegemonic, heterotopia allows for a space (and time) where seemingly conflicting ideologies mesh and play on each other and demonstrates how the oriental tale can emerge, despite itself, as part of a critical discourse.

Rethinking Exoticism How do we define a discourse that addresses the space of the heterotopic and looks beyond the overarching dichotomies of Saidian

Figure 1. Image of The Curse of Kehama from the 1845 Longman edition of the Poetical Works of Robert Southey

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orientalism?27 My interest lies in those texts and historical figures described as “antithetical to—that disciplinary version of Orientalism, which [Edward] Said has designated as modern.”28 Short of manipulating orientalism’s given parameters, there seems to be no way to articulate this phenomenon, but Said himself provides a solution. In Orientalism’s introduction, he informs the reader that “Orientalism” is an antiquated phrase he resuscitated in order to stress the continuity of Western representations of the Orient. In a similar gesture, several critics have recently reappropriated the term “exoticism” to signify a mode of aesthetics that does not conform to Saidian orientalism. 29 Extrapolating from this ongoing critical work, I suggest that exoticism in the late eighteenth century can signify a kind of “colonization-in-reverse,” not an absolute counterbalance to European imperialism but a discourse of mediation and irresolvable tension, elided with but also distinct from orientalism’s manicheaism.30 Aravamudan has recently argued for the existence of a “transcultural, cosmopolitan, and Englightenment-inflected Orientalism” as an “alternative strain” predating Said’s.31 If, however, we take Aravamudan’s own acknowledgment of the Enlightenment (pace Clifford Siskin and William Warner) as a mode of mediation, and of the oriental tale as its virtuosic representative, the Romantic pseudotranslation is just one indication of an exoticism that persisted in various guises alongside—and not just before—a monologic Orientalism. This chapter, and indeed this book, explores the second life of that “Enlightenment Orientalism,” which, moving into the next century, never absolutely overrode or was completely overridden, but which alternately asserted and effaced itself in surprising and variegated ways. While exoticism, defined broadly as “styles of being and behaviour which defied normalcy,” exists prior to the nineteenth century, as episteme it is a distinctly modern (and often perceptively pejorative) adoption or adaptation of the ineluctably different, or the tension manifested when the conjectural meets the actual. 32 In this study exoticism is defined not as mere escapism or refutation but as a break or negotiation with Home: not merely as an aestheticization of the foreign but as the means through which the exoticist counters domestic culture in the process of returning to it.33 The resulting spectacle, it has been argued, occludes the political process it stems from, but spectacle is at best an uncertain means of control.34 Tellingly, critical redefinitions of a postcolonial exoticism can lean heavily on the recuperation of postcolonial translation. Graham Huggan, for example,

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for whom postcolonial exoticism can be repoliticized to function as a mode of critique, reads exoticism as a kind of cultural translation and translation as a mode of containment.35 But as I have already defined translation in the late eighteenth century as a potentially destabilizing practice, we may extrapolate from this to infer that late eighteenthcentury exoticism as an act of translation is potentially subject to the same ideological fluidity. It is perhaps not coincidental that contemporary translators refer to an “exoticizing” translation as one that resists adaptation and retains many of the words and features of the source text. Exoticizing translation is, unsurprisingly, a theoretical conundrum for translation scholars: after expressing concerns about the domestic expectations for exoticized translations of texts like The Arabian Nights (that may ultimately promote difference), Ovidi Cortés also admits “that there is always a need for the foreign exoticism in translation, and this is a dimension translators (and translation theorists) are unable to tackle in a normative, ethical sense.”36 Cortés’s ambiguity toward exoticism provides the model that I use in this chapter: exoticism not as a solution to Orientalism, but as recognition of the impossibility of cultural commensurability and the complexity inherent in many aesthetic productions and reproductions of the foreign. Exoticism’s association with otherness and loss stems from its ineffability: as soon as something is labeled exotic, its exoticism is consumable and in danger of being compromised. Although a culture of exoticism is materially dependent on the interaction of cultures that some critics immediately label “hybrid,” exoticism also seeks the exact opposite of hybridity. Thus, while exoticism is contingent on the products of the contact zone, nineteenth-century exoticists sought to escape hybridity in order to locate a world—however fictional—that was inherently other. This exoticism presumes both temporal and cultural plasticity: the longing for an inaccessible culture and a desire to both highlight alterity as well as neutralize it. Moreover—and this is a key component in the writing of modern theorists attempting to salvage exoticism—exoticism as a mode of representation implies individuation, not the collectivity of empire so central to Saidian Orientalism.37 Out of space and (modern) time, the exoticist seems like the ideal palliative for imperialism’s overwhelming modernity. However, this seeming panacea of exoticism—its timelessness—should not obfuscate its dangerous malleability in praxis.38 The individual exoticist’s embrace of the exotic as that which exists outside history blurs all too easily into

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a collective belief in the lack of non-Western histories and the resultant self-justificatory imperialism it spawns. In fact, it is precisely this pull between the national-domestic and the rebellious exoticist that underlies my understanding of exoticism, which, in this chapter, I read as a space of negotiation between orientalist power-knowledge and the imagined space of perfect representation and as a coterminal discourse distinct from and conjoined with orientalism. This theorization of exoticism as a liminal moment of radical potential recalls the “zones of anti-modernity” at the crux of Saree Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism. Makdisi’s zones, a reworking of Wordsworthian spots of time, are “self-enclosed and self-referential spaces of the anti-modern” that seem initially to counter modernity’s universalization of history. In Makdisi’s analysis, however, these seemingly alternative spaces ultimately serve to acknowledge the inevitability of modern imperial domination: “In being constituted dialectically against modernization, the resistance offered by a spot of time may in the long run turn out to be no resistance at all, but rather in effect an affirmation of modernization. Hence it is important to be able to see romantic spots of time as historical constructions, rather than as ahistorical essences that exist outside of time.”39 Makdisi’s dialectic confirms that what may be even more dangerous than the silent, overaestheticized native is the ventriloquism of the Western author: appropriative imitation can be the most insidious occulting of imperialist brute force.40As this chapter demonstrates, however, imitative exoticism as embodied in the oriental tale may not usefully counter imperial hegemony, but it may unsettle the domestic by putting into question the very nature of Britishness itself. Psychological dependence on exoticism as “the primary eroticized constituent of . . . fantasy life” results in “a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear, and desire in the construction of subjectivity.”41 British subjectivity has most often been portrayed as resistant to the lure of exotic: it is a nation of Captain Blighs, not Flauberts. Only recently have we begun to acknowledge suppressed or bowdlerized accounts of “White Mughals” and of Britons “turned Turk.”42 But as scholars continue to demonstrate colonialism’s constitutive role in the constellation of discourses collectively known as Romanticism, we must also consider the role of supposedly second-tier literature like the oriental tale and its exoticism in the aesthetics of the period.43 And yet finding a place for the oriental tale within the normative genealogy of British literature continues to vex scholars. Exoticism’s

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uncertainty is both ideological and generic: Conant defines the oriental tale broadly as “oriental or pseudo-oriental fiction—chiefly prose—that appeared in English, whether written originally in English or translated from the French,” which includes oriental tales, epics, prose poems, and early novellas; the tale is not a genre as much as a type of aesthetic response.44 Aravamudan argues that the oriental tale is in dialogue, not counterdiscourse, with the novel, as its exotic mimicry enables a “fluid circulation of endocultural and exocultural processes,” by which he means the consolidation of the national stereotype from within and the dissemination of desire beyond the boundaries of the nation.45 The pliancy of this process should be questioned, but Aravamudan’s resituating of the oriental tale is a necessary turn away from the tendency to read this genre as always marginal. Conversely, The Progress of Romance demonstrates how the oriental tale generated critical unease in part because it could not be neatly incorporated into domestic discourse. Dorothy Figuiera argues that exoticism’s hermeneutic is akin to Bildung, but exoticism’s temporal, subjective impossibility is at sharp odds with the self-awareness so crucial to the bildungsroman.46 Any argument for structural syncretism is also problematic given that the domestic bildungsroman became the dominant form of prose fiction in the nineteenth century while the oriental tale was always of uncertain value, fading in critical status even as it was interpolated into other genres.47 As a generically fluid, experimental, and seemingly derivative textual grouping, the oriental tale aesthetically embodies exoticism’s cultural compromise. The late eighteenth century’s well-documented drive to create a national and inherited literary culture would seem naturally to favor domestic realism over foreign fantasy, but the oriental tale and novel developed contiguously: in the same year that Wilkins published his translation of The Bhagavad-Gita, Novelist Magazine reserialized both Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights Entertainments.48 One year later, the radical evolution of the oriental tale beyond the Nights would manifest itself in the publication of Vathek, William Beckford’s transformative orientalist confection. Because of its obvious scholarly depth and skillful adaptation of “Eastern” rhetoric, Vathek is recognized as the first tale to leap from oriental caricature to “important” text while remaining one of the enfants terribles of British literature. Although Eastern tales would continue to be written throughout the nineteenth century, the last formally experimental

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and ambitious tale of the genre’s heyday was arguably The Giaour, written by Beckford’s champion and admirer, Byron. Along the way, Beckford’s legacy would prove inescapable, attracting ideological opponents like Robert Southey, who wrestled with the Beckfordian legacy of exoticism in The Curse of Kehama, one of the oriental tale’s best-known failures. These three tales are characterized not only by a shared investment in a certain type of knowledge—the collective riches of orientalist scholarship passed from one text to the other— but also by a negotiation of the exotic that resists strict dichotomies of Self and Other, East and West, in favor of a more fluid heterotopia. Each of these tales is also engaged, with varied intentions, in an exotic quest to translate the riches of the Orient, and the political and cultural significance of those riches, to an often-hostile domestic audience. The remainder of this chapter turns to these three tales, historically and tropically linked, and attempts to rethink the maligned genealogy of exoticism in the pseudotranslation—its brief success and longer decline—through their lines.

Translation’s Pleasures When William Beckford was thirteen, his guardian forced the boy to burn his youthful collection of oriental drawings and other knickknacks as a warning to not ignore “good taste”—classical European literature—in favor of more outlandish predilections.49 Undaunted, or more likely provoked by this early attempt at educational discipline, Beckford went on to delight in all things Eastern through the study and translation of Arabic texts and the amassing of a vast collection of orientalia, culminating with the penning of Vathek. Although he never traveled farther east than Spain, where he was enchanted by its Moorish influence, Beckford tried to live his exotic quest as few others could, hosting elaborate banquets with lavish gothic decorations and reveling in the exotic grottoes constructed by his father, all paid for by the family’s West Indian sugar plantations.50 These entertainments, combined with an extensive library, served as the basis for the oriental fiction he published later in life. Vathek’s Hall of Eblis, one of the most stunning descriptions in the tale and the epitome of exotic excess, is based on an early oriental fantasy world created at Fonthill, the family estate, for his twenty-first birthday.51 Similarly, despite the tale’s thorough grounding in history and mythology, Vathek’s bizarre plot was (and is still) read as a thinly disguised allegory of the author’s

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life: the Caliph Vathek is Beckford; his mistress Nouronihar is either Beckford’s cousin Louisa, with whom he had a tempestuous affair, or his remarkably forgiving wife, Lady Margaret; and Nouronihar’s cousin and childish lover Gulchenrouz is Beckford’s nephew Courtenay, whose relationship with Beckford caused the author’s flight to Europe. With commercial colonialism funding his more esoteric interests in oriental antiquity, Beckford’s exoticism was based as much on a desire for artifice as it was on his extensive scholarship and travels, revealing the very thin line between the exotic real and fantasy. After Beckford razed Fonthill Splendens and built the spectacular but ill-fated Fonthill Abbey as a replacement, tour guides reverted to the language of The Arabian Nights to describe its magnificence: “magic could scarcely have raised for him [Beckford] a habitation more exquisite,” likening Beckford to Aladdin.52 The performativity of Beckfordian orientalism, then, suggests not a rejection of realism but an actualization of fantasy that upends standard notions of mimesis.53 Beckford’s unconventional life provides some context for Vathek’s curious publication history. His friend Samuel Henley first published the story in 1786 without the author’s approval. Having been forced to leave England following the scandalous publicizing of his affair with Courtenay, Beckford was in France and preparing his own French manuscript of Vathek when the English edition appeared in print, without his name on it, as An Arabian Tale from an Unpublished Manuscript with Notes Critical and Explanatory.54 Aside from translating Beckford’s French into a rather lugubrious English, Henley was also responsible for the copious notes (which were praised by some critics as the best part of the whole tale) integral to the narrative’s now distinctive status in the history of the genre. This authorialtranslative fluidity was further complicated by letters from Beckford to Henley crediting his friend’s simultaneous translation of the evolving story for inspiring the author’s creative process: “you make me proud of Vathec. . . . I know [not] how it happens; but the original when first born scarce gave me so much rapture as yr translation.”55 Comparing Henley’s English edition to the Lausanne edition Beckford rushed to print soon after makes obvious that Henley also padded Beckford’s manuscript in order to provide himself with more annotative material.56 Adding to the confusion, the preface to the Henley edition claims that “the Original of the Following Story . . . collected in the East by a Man of letters, was communicated to the Editor. . . . The

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pleasure he received from the perusal of it, induced him at that time to transcribe, and since to translate it.”57 This prefatory focus on the pleasure of translation and translation as a means of spreading pleasure plays on the tale’s central theme. Vathek, like its eponymous protagonist, was impelled by the pleasure and vexation of translation. Vathek’s narrative draws from and yet dispenses with many of the familiar generic components of the oriental tale in the eighteenth century. Beckford emphasizes the tropic aspects of Vathek’s character and position to the point of camp, but the tale also complicates typical representations of the Eastern despot. Comically powerful at the beginning of the story (he enjoys kicking errant subjects to death), Vathek sees his power continually challenged and usurped by competing females—his mother and mistress—and the fiendish giaour. And while many of the caliph’s most cruel misdeeds spring from the pursuit of unbridled desire, his ultimate, damning sin—his abjuring of his faith—is not the result of his pursuit of sensual pleasures per se but of his frustration over the mysterious, untranslatable language on a saber presented to him by the giaour. The tale’s slyly Faustian argument is that knowledge is more corrosive than pleasure; Mohammed is incensed not by Vathek’s carnal pursuits but by his intellectual ones. That the caliph would try to uncover the sword’s meaning with such doggedness seems a departure from his usual lusts, but from the beginning of the story Beckford subtly differentiates between bestial and cultured hedonism. Although the caliph is a man of many appetites, the careful categorization of his pleasures into five palaces (whose names like “The Palace of Perfumes; The Incentive to Pleasure” describe both the satisfaction and philosophical abstraction each one offers and represents) suggests a scientific and connoisseurlike, rather than gross, aestheticism. 58 Only after Vathek is unable to read the ever-changing language on the giaour’s saber does his previously studied hedonism plunge into uncontrolled, insatiable appetite, as his inability to deal with linguistic flux leads to a loss of physical control. Subsequently, his excessive sensuality serves as a physical manifestation of his frustration over translation. The text’s exploration of the desire for immediate linguistic gratification is a darkly comic parallel to later theories of perfect translation and translation’s unique relation to the Orient, articulated most notably by Goethe in the notes to West-östlicher Divan (1817). Like that of his contemporaries, Goethe’s fascination with the East stemmed from theories of origination, particularly, in his case, in the

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East as a locus of pure, unmediated language—language sans translation—which he elaborates on in the “Übersetzungen” section of his notes.59 Goethe, like John Dryden, describes translation as tripartite, but Dryden’s three types of translation are simultaneous while Goethe’s are also evolutionary. The third and final stage, “perfect translation,” occurs when translation “achieve[s] perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place.”60 The pleasure of translation is the closing of the hermeneutic gap, creating an instantaneousness of meaning—the “impossibly transcendental signifier”—that is demanded by Vathek, for whom immediate gratification is a crucial aspect of the actual pleasure itself.61 Perfect translation is thus the linguistic parallel to Vathek’s desperate and ultimately depraved longing for translative resolution. As Goethe defines it, perfect translation is equated with an immersion into the foreign, as the translator essentially gives up his nation in order to capture this essence of otherness: translation as exotic quest.62 In Vathek’s case, the unusually symbiotic relationship between its author and coauthor-translator and the ultimate adoption of the English “translation” over the French original as the primary text metatextually realizes this Goethian translative nonlinearity. For Vathek himself, however, the giaour’s saber promises the opposite of perfect translation: the writing on it changes daily, making interpretation impossible and meaning useless. When the giaour’s saber proves undecipherable, Vathek invites learned scholars to translate it for him, but even when an able translator is finally found the sword proves resistant to fixed meaning; one day the sword praises the caliph but the next it does not. This frustration of desire plays out through Vathek’s subsequent abjuration of Mohammed and then through his own quest to find the ancient treasures of Istakhar. After his descent into Istakhar, which is revealed to be Eblis, the caliph’s moment of triumph is also his downfall: he is given access to the preadamite riches he had sought but is denied the pleasure to enjoy them. It is also surely significant that the entrance to Eblis is marked by the same indecipherable letters as the saber’s, which become perfectly comprehendible once Vathek irrefutably chooses to enter hell. Easy translatability is a false promise. Beckford’s interest in the impossibility of gratification extends to play on the sensibilities of Vathek’s readers. The caliph’s tidy, symbolically appropriate punishment satisfies the reader’s sense of moral outrage against the outrageous protagonist. But the story does not

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end there. The story’s concluding sentences turn incongruously from the hell-ridden Vathek to Nouronihar’s cousin Gulchenrouz, whom the narrator decides is the luckiest character because he lives in a quasi-divine erotic existence with other boys, all of them the caliph’s near victims. Henley objected to this ending by pointing out its structural awkwardness (he was no doubt also aware of its overt homoeroticism), but Beckford deliberately kept it in. This ending, which twists the story’s focus, is read primarily as emblematic of the story’s rejection of bildung; Vathek ends the story in Eblis with his mother and wife—the unwelcome catalysts of adolescence’s end—while Gulchenrouz remains in a joyous perpetual boyhood.63 It is also the culmination of the tale’s persistent thwarting of readerly expectations, as its ostensible moral (which reads in part that “[s]uch is, and such should be, the chastisement of blind ambition . . . which perceives not the condition appointed to man is to be ignorant and humble”) becomes willfully obfuscated under layers of oriental decoration and grotesque comedy that envelop the primary narrative.64 The distracting, impertinent ending destabilizes the “moral” for an arguably more fitting demonstration of the impossibility of commensurability. Both Vathek and the reader are promised outcomes that are fulfilled in letter while mocked in spirit. With its amalgam of biographical insinuation, extensive scholarly apparatus, and insistence on otherness, Vathek suggests that “cultural difference is a matter of costume,” even while asserting the importance of that costume.65 Beckford may have been enraged by Henley’s usurpation of his story, but he nevertheless realized how Henley’s notes added to the text’s exotic affect: the resolutely straightforward paratext normalizes the narrative, explicating without interpreting, and heightening the text’s surrealism.66 Although he would remove Henley’s notes for the Lausanne edition, in later editions they were mostly restored. Poised between Enlightenment universalism and a Romantic fascination with cultural specificity, Beckford celebrated cultural difference while arguing for its transportability. Never able to actually reach the East, he created a compendium of transportable Eastern fantasy—Vathek and his vast collection of literary and artistic curiosities—which he used to create his own Orient. Returning to England after his travels abroad, Beckford lived a solitary life at Fonthill Abbey, creating yet another scandal when he refused to allow visitors to view his house or collections. The abbey, which was begun in 1796 and languished in several stages of building until it was

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sold, unfinished, in 1822, was most famous for its soaring tower, which like Vathek’s, was never built to its planned height and toppled three times in between. Beckford spent several years in the unfinished abbey, but his life of oriental splendor came to an end when his father’s West Indies property depreciated; the abbey was opened to hordes of visitors, sold (appropriately enough, to a gunpowder contractor from Bengal), and eventually torn down. As William Haig Miller later recorded in “The Man of Wealth” (a sermon against profligacy), “Thus melted away, like frostwork before the sun, the extravagant productions of the man of wealth [Beckford]. His whole life had been a sad misapplication of the talents committed to his care, and in the end he discovered that he had been cheated by the Mirage.”67 The mirage, with its etymological roots in Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and its connotations of mirroring, captures the intangibility, impermanence, and ultimate self-reflexivity of Beckfordian exoticism.68 As Vathek’s desire to probe the secrets of heaven lead to his downfall, Beckford’s attempt to understand and transport the exotic resulted in ruin. His recreation of a Vathekian lifestyle in the pastoral English countryside displaced the exotic in time and space, creating a gothic-oriental mirage fifteen miles from Britain’s own original mythical site, Stonehenge. Like the author’s personal enactments of orientalist fantasy, Vathek demonstrates Beckford’s attempts to translate even the most bizarre and foreign back into a kind of domestic discourse. The instability that characterizes Vathek (and Vathek) are engendered by its exoticism, and the critical and lived parallels between Beckford and Vathek force an uneasy reading of the familiar. The tale’s bifurcated conclusion does not allow a strictly moral or satirical reading of its narrative—Vathek’s Arabia is not England in drag— instead, it emerges as a quasi-real heterotopic space that stands in such stark contrast to British society that the parallels between author and protagonist compel an awkward juxtaposition of seemingly opposing cultures. Beckford “does not manage to escape the occidental discourse,” as J. E. Svilpis observes, “but he adds something to it . . . the uncanny.”69 Just as the aging Beckford returned home to repose disquietingly in the bosom of the English countryside, Vathek’s proliferation of exotic description moves beyond mere “decoration” to an exploration of the parallels between the author’s scholarly, fanciful expeditions and those of his hapless protagonist, making the story an almost perfect representation of exoticism’s unsettling effect on domestic discourse.

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Given the tale’s and its author’s many scandals, it is surprising that Vathek’s publication was not more of an immediate sensation. Even at the height of popular interest in the genre it fared only moderately well, going through a few editions before 1814, when Byron invoked it in the final footnote to The Giaour. His warm approbation of Beckford deserves notice: “For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations; and bears such marks of originality, that those who have visited the East will find some difficulty in believing it to be more than a translation.”70 Throughout this passage Byron’s language resists Vathek’s fictionality. He refers to “all European imitations” rather than the expected “other European imitations,” implying that Vathek is neither European nor an imitation. The semantic strain becomes even more palpable in the last few words; “more than a translation” would normally imply something superior, but here Byron suggests that the fiction of translation is what gives Beckford’s work its (ironically) “original” and superior status. This upending of norms—translation superseding the original—speaks to both the oriental tale’s interest in maintaining the guise of accuracy and the increased appreciation for “free” and relativistic translation that Romantic theories of language engendered.71 All translation, even in its grossest form, is an act of doubling—a doubling that, as Vathek’s authorial history has shown, strips the translation of a locus—leaving it to wander between original and translation, England and the exotic faraway, until, as in Beckford’s case, the colonial structure supporting the exoticist fantasy crumbles, and the tower is pulled down. Any reading of Vathek’s subsequent influence is incomplete without considering Henley’s notes, which influenced the reading of the story to the point where the relationship between the diegetic and extradiegetic seemed to invert. The Gentleman’s Magazine stated bluntly that “Vathek . . . has been composed . . . for the purpose of giving to the public the information contained in the notes.”72 Robert Southey was also particularly impressed by Henley’s annotations, referring to them enthusiastically as “some of the most learned notes that ever appeared in any book whatever!”73 Not surprisingly, Southey’s own oriental tales incorporated a dizzying amount of paratextual material. In Thalaba the Destroyer and then The Curse of Kehama, Southey would abandon Henley’s tone of scholarly dissociation to engage the reader on both diegetic and extradiegetic levels to startling effect.

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Translative Failure These two epic “Eastern” poems of Southey’s career, Thalaba the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehama, exemplify the contradictions evident in Southey’s trajectory from radical Pantisocrat to composer of rococo paeans on George III. Originating from the poet’s youthful desire to “exhibi[t] the most remarkable forms of Mythology,” they are part of a series of epic poems including Joan of Arc, Madoc, Roderick, Last of the Goths, and A Tale of Paraguay. Although Kehama and Thalaba are often paired, it is evident from their differing “machinery” and structure that Southey did not regard the religions they represented—Hinduism and Islam—as equivalent.74 Islam’s patriarchal origins were something that could be portrayed positively, whereas Hinduism was always, in his correspondence and prefaces, “monstrous.” “Beyond all doubt, the religion of the Mexicans is the most diabolical that has ever existed,” Southey wrote, “[i]t is not, however, so mischievous as the brahminical system of caste.”75 Despite the critical tendency to see Kehama as Thalaba’s “swollen reprise,” Southey’s well-documented personal loathing of Hinduism undoubtedly contributes to Kehama’s significant differences, which were immediately picked up by his reviewers. While Thalaba’s oversublimity was blamed on its metric style and excessive symbolism (the faults of the author), Kehama’s faults were mostly attributed to its mythology, which hindered an otherwise great poet.76 More recently, the poem’s critical and financial woes has been attributed to its author’s fractured vision: the inevitable clash of poetic sensibility with political ideology, or the incompatibility of his radical imagination with his increasingly conservative politics.77 That Kehama was a consistent source of tension to Southey is undeniable—it surfaces in his letters to friends during the poem’s composition as well as in a revealing preface he composed for the poem some twenty years after its first publication. And perhaps the most remarkable response to the poem was its author’s own early prediction that it would be unsuccessful. Like the poem’s evil, eponymous antihero, Southey seemed content to eschew present popularity for evolving immortality: “Very few persons will like Kehama; everybody will wonder at it; it will increase my reputation without increasing my popularity . . . [but] every generation will afford me some half dozen admirers of it, and the everlasting column of Dante’s fame does not stand upon a wider base.”78

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Kehama’s narrative is often waylaid by or subsumed under fantastical geographical and mythological descriptions, and it often seems like nothing more than a collection of familiar oriental tropes: vicious despots, lascivious priests, and frenzied mobs. It begins with the funeral procession of the wicked prince Arvalan, who was killed by Ladurlad, a low-caste man, for attempting to seduce Ladurlad’s beautiful and virtuous daughter, Kailyal. Arvalan’s tyrannical and quasi-divine father, Kehama, curses Ladurlad, and the poem narrates Kehama’s bid for ultimate power and immortality, which is eventually thwarted because of the powers his curse has inadvertently bestowed on Ladurlad. Several chases, rape attempts, black magic performances, and ghostly apparitions into the poem, Kehama is tricked into hell and doomed to eternal torment by his own lust for power. Ladurlad and Kailyal, however, are rewarded for their nobility: the latter gains immortality and weds the celestial “Glendoveer” she had fallen in love with, and the former dies and is reunited with his wife. Combining verbose descriptions with notes of staggering length (on one occasion he retells the entire plot of Sakuntala), Kehama strains the boundaries between the diegetic and the extradiegetic as “decoration” constantly replaces narrative substance and the sheer weight of paratext threatens to overwhelm the actual story. Although Byron referred to both poems as “Southey’s unsaleables,” critics cannot agree on which poem, Thalaba or Kehama, was less successful.79 Kehama was read and appreciated by a small but influential coterie of intellectuals—Coleridge, Shelley, and Newman among them—going through four editions in ten years. But Thalaba, which he began writing in 1799 and published a year later, was an easier poem for Southey, whereas Kehama was started in 1801 and languished in various writing stages for nine years, during which Southey wrote and published Madoc, his poem on conversion in Mexico. Even after its publication Kehama remained vexatious: the poem’s first edition had included a brief prefatorial gloss on Hindu deities, but for the the 1837 edition of the Poetical Works, Southey added a substantial preface in which he broke from his usual reticence to engage at length the process of composition and his thoughts on the poem’s reception. The 1837 preface uses Thalaba as a point of comparison to explain the striking differences between that poem and Kehama: The same sense of fitness which made me choose for an Arabian tale the simplest and easiest form of verse, induced me to take a different course in an Indian poem. It appeared to me, that here neither the

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tone of morals nor the strain of poetry could be pitched too high; that nothing but moral sublimity could compensate for the extravagance of the fictions, and that all the skill I might possess in the art of poetry was required to counterbalance the disadvantage of a mythology with which few readers were likely to be well acquainted, and which would appear monstrous if its deformities were not kept out of sight.80

Although Southey claims his goal is to purge Indian mythology of its horrors and raise it to a superior moral level, he does not attempt to translate or even “Christianize” Hinduism, desiring to metrically bind its excess through formal strictures instead. His critics did not think it worked.81 While he alludes to the compensatory effects of “moral sublimity”—presumably his descriptions of Kailyal’s virtues—he also acknowledges the impossibility of his overarching task: to shield readers from Hinduism’s monstrosities in a poem whose purpose is to explore its contours. The general tone of prevarication in the passage is thus unsurprising given his ostensible attempt to infuse morality into a subject constitutionally so perverse. Southey describes the poem’s composition as an arduous task, a palimpsestic engagement with the foreign in which virtue and rectitude are layered frantically over vice and corruption in order to render it acceptable for viewing, but he is far less explicit about its success. This prefatorial confession of authorial effort was no doubt a belated response to numerous reviews criticizing Kehama’s alienating effect on its readers. A critic for the Monthly Mirror, for example, ended his review with the admonition that “Mr. Southey will never acquire the fame, which his poem is capable of conferring, until he obtains readers who reverence and adore his deities; and that time can never come until The Curse of Kehama be translated into Hindoostanee.”82 Indeed, despite his claims that he had tamed Hinduism, Southey’s private correspondence indicates the difficulty he had in “checking” the poem’s content through its form. In a letter to Walter Savage Landor, Southey asserts exasperatedly that the vagaries of Hindu mythology do not permit higher metrical forms: “Blank verse has long appeared to me the noblest measure of which our language is capable, but it would not suit Kehama.”83 Southey’s second preface suggests a William Jonesian melding of orientalist aesthetics to European prosody, but Kehama’s poetry reads like experimental transcription rather than adaptive translation.84 Herbert Tucker has waded through the poem and points out that Southey used thematic repetition to add some structure to the unbounded, internally rhyming

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stanzas, but the repeated themes Tucker observes occur independent of the other themes (Ladurlad’s three plunges into the sea are not symmetric with Kehama’s double horse sacrifice, for example) and the narrative frenzy of the poem as a whole washes over these structures.85 When one reads Kehama, it becomes clear that the notes, and not the poem itself, are the effective site for moral tempering. Although Kehama’s original preface demonstrates little of the disquiet of the second, it too indicates concern over the fitness of presenting wholly immoral material to a genteel reading public. As we have seen, Southey later claimed to interject metric control and an independent strain of morality into the poem, but his first preface rather audaciously attempts to alleviate readerly anxiety by claiming that “however startling the fictions might appear, they might almost be called credible when compared with the genuine tales of Hindoo mythology.”86 Rather than creating a fictive copy that, as is often argued of most translations, is reductive of and inferior to the original, Southey suggests that his fictive universe is actually more real than its original inspiration. His fiction becomes acceptable because even its monstrosity is no match for the mythical grossness of the Hindu religion. This prefacing enacts a disavowal of reality, exposing the gap between real knowledge and symbolic belief; the British disbelief in the beliefs of Hindus is mediated safely by the literary introduction to the fantasy of “true” Hindu barbarism.87 Southey did not limit his paratextual interpretation of the poem to his evolving introductions. Unlike the factually presented notes in Vathek, Southey often peppers his notes with observations that run from outrage to wry humor. A note about sati presents an opportunity for the author to rail against those colonial officers who tolerate the practice, while a reference to the extravagance of Hindu mythological descriptions provokes the observation that “[t]hroughout the Hindoo fables there is the constant mistake of bulk for sublimity.”88 He further personalizes the citations by including a number of travelogues and first-person accounts as sources, like François Bernier’s disgusted descriptions of sati in Travels in the Mughal Empire (1684). Southey clearly wanted the epic’s panoramic effect undisturbed, but he tried to use the poem’s paratext as a barrier against charges of Eastern infection. In a letter to Sharon Turner written the same year as Kehama’s publication, Southey described his enthusiasm for imperialism as a “firm belief that there are but two methods of extending civilization—conquest and conversion—the latter the only certain one.”89

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While the letter expresses a clear preference for conversion, he was by no means indifferent to the idea of conquest or to the necessary interdependence of the two. In one of the moments in Thalaba where the narrative voice breaks from character, the narrator, contemplating the prospect of Baghdad, wishes fervently that “the Crescent [may] from thy Mosques / Be plucked by wisdom, when the enlighten’d arm / Of Europe conquers to redeem the East!”90 Not unsurprisingly, during the years Southey was composing Kehama he also contributed articles on evangelism to the Quarterly and Annual Reviews.91 Southey’s evangelical goals were twofold: not only did he support the controversial India Mission, he also believed that true conversion could only happen in English because “nothing but missionaries can secure in that country what we have won. The converts would immediately become English in their feelings, for, like Mahomet, we ought to make our language go with our religion.”92 The author’s latent populism made it possible that Indians could actually “become English,” but this does not seem to have compelled him to ask whether the Anglicized Indians would then still be considered “what we won.” Given Southey’s own comments about the poem’s containment of excess and his own belief in the power of conversion, it is unsurprising that Kehama is often read as an allegory of conversion. In this reading of the poem, the redeemable (i.e., lower-caste) characters move toward the worship of an unspecified deity who intervenes on the behalf of his devotees.93 Certainly the moralistic, somber gods of the poem’s conclusion have a more monotheistic flavor than the frightened, uncaring, or even beneficent devas or goddesses in its earliest cantos. The poem’s turn to monotheism, however, is not a satisfactory indication of an explicitly Christian subtext. Many of the early orientalists Southey cites in his notes were aware of Hinduism’s philosophical monotheism, so the invocation of a supreme deity does not necessitate it be a Christian one. Kehama’s final description of a benign, ultimately triumphant Siva is rather reminiscent of Jones’s invocation of a benevolent “Oversoul” in “Hymn to Narayena,” where the deity is queried, “Spirit of Spirits . . . What first impell’d thee to exert thy might? / Goodness unlimited.”94 More usefully, Daniel White has recently argued that Southey’s instrumental, rather than doctrinal, mode of evangelism colored his representation of idolatry in Kehama as potentially salutary, as in his description of the goddess Marriataly’s rescue of the hapless Kailyal from Kehama’s clutches.95 White’s reading of Kailyal’s idolatry as a “vaccine” against

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Brahminical Hinduism is an interesting inversion of the orientalist argument implicit in a poem like “Narayena”: that Brahminical Hinduism was in fact a theistic practice comparable to Christianity. But this targeted assessment of Hindu mythology was lost on many of Southey’s readers. John Foster’s denouncement of Kehama in the dissenting Eclectic Review stresses the dangers of Southey’s exoticism: “the present fiction . . . vacates the eternal throne . . . to elevate Seeva. . . . He is as much, and as gravely attempted to be represented as a reality, as he could be by the poems of those heathen themselves.”96 A more powerful argument for Kehama as a conversion poem lies not in the poem’s portrayal of gods and God but in its summation of a Hindu weltanschauung, which Southey locates in the concept of punya, or merit. Of the many Hindu “traditions” Southey objected to—sati, the festival of Jagannatha, and idol worship, to start with— punya arguably caused him the most philosophical dismay. Southey defines Hinduism in the 1810 preface around this “remarkable peculiarity,” explaining that “[i]n the religion of the Hindoos . . . [p] rayers, penances, and sacrifices, are supposed to possess an inherent and actual value, in no degree depending upon the disposition or motive of the person who performs them. They are drafts upon Heaven, for which the Gods cannot refuse payment. . . . This belief is the foundation of the following Poem.”97 In his definition, punya inverts standard hierarchies of power, putting the gods at the mercy of humans and creating a religion and culture devoid of ethical truths.98 Kehama’s punya and, in turn, his power is not earned through inherent goodness, but through pure exertion. Given Southey’s personal ambivalence about the moral pitfalls of life in the East India Company (potential nabobery) versus its financial merits, it is telling that his definition of punya turns Hinduism into a system of pure capitalism in which power is wholly disassociated from moral value.99 As unmediated power, punya becomes synonymous with the ability to curse, and this collusion of sheer exertion with power parallels the implied failure of Hinduism as a moral system to Kehama’s failed rule, as both fall victim to their merits. Reading the gap between text and paratext, one can also argue that Kehama’s failure to translate, or make accessible, Hindu epic reflects the author’s newly perceptive, if grim, awareness of the cultural constraints on fluid translation. This would be a marked departure from his stance on translation and the East prior to beginning Kehama, when he imagined translation seamlessly linked to colonial

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dominance. In a letter to Charles Wynn in 1800, Southey contemplates the benefits of a possible Indian adventure and remarks that “the language . . . is a baboon jargon not worth learning; but were I there I would get the Vedams and get them translated,” phrasing translation purely as easy acquisition.100 Kehama, on the other hand, demonstrates the dark side of Herdervian radical difference. Reflecting on his use of the word “folly” to describe Arvalan’s failed rape attempt, Southey cites a passage from Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws in which he notes that “the folly there specified is not to be understood in the usual sense of the word in a European idiom. . . . It seems to be a weakness particular to Asia, for we cannot find a term by which to express the precise idea in the European languages. . . . [W] e must suppose the impulses [of the passions that lead to folly] to act with infinitely more violence upon an Asiatic mind than we can ever have seen exemplified in Europe.”101 Ironically this specifically “Asiatic” folly, which Southey, channeling Halhed, attempts to describe as a disassociation between emotion and reason, is textually reflected in the contrast between the panoramic enargia of the poem and the rational, Western scientism of the notes.102 Southey’s second preface to Kehama manipulates the guise of translation, chronicling the hardship of his endeavor and claiming to translate that which he believes is untranslatable. Yet the poem and its earlier paratext present a truer picture of the author’s translative quandaries. Southey’s attempt to rescue Hinduism from itself is in keeping with Pike’s category of a “moral school” of oriental tales, which tended to use oriental motif as a backdrop for moral allegory.103 The difference with Southey, however, is precisely that he drops the allegory, opting for a condemnation of Indian society with only oblique parallels to Britain.104 Rather, Kehama bears a strong resemblance to the self-parodying grotesque of William Beckford’s Vathek, which mocks the “moral” school of orientalist literature. The poem is not, as others have suggested, an ideological struggle between footnote, introduction(s), and narrative; rather, the three work in tandem to create a text so censorious of Hinduism that the reader’s only recourse is to call for the demise of the culture that spawned it. Thus, Southey’s seeming failure to translate Kehama into a viable (read profitable) oriental tale was a perversely ideological triumph, a demonstration of the impossibility of recreating the monstrous foreign in British prosody. The poem’s very epigraph (a Greek translation of “curses are like chickens—they always come home to roost”) brings

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us back to the (possibly) false translations of the Hastings testimonials—it is Coleridge’s translation of a favorite saying of Southey’s dotard half-uncle—and demonstrates Southey’s ironic awareness of the falseness of translative veneer and, in turn, of the untranslatability of the East.105 Kehama demonstrates the destabilizing potential of exoticism in the face of authorial intention; although Southey intended the poem to serve as a call to conversion, it was generally received as part of that cult of orientalism he so feared. Southey’s winking failure to translate can be read as a denunciation of Hinduism—that religion most monstrous—but also as an example of what happens when the exotic quest goes too far: Foster’s review of Kehama suggests that Southey turned temporarily into a sort of prefigured Kurtz, slipping into the darkness.106 Even the notes—implicitly Southey’s critique of his own text—fall prey to what Diego Saglia describes as a danger of Southey scholarship: “Caught up in an endless proliferation of examples, annotations, and intertextual references, exegesis is held to ransom by accumulation.”107 Kehama may have been a relative failure on the literary market, but the pseudotranslation tale continued to be a valuable commodity, notable not only for the continued public interest in orientalia but also for the ease with which exotic machinery and textual apparatus moved from one tale to the next. This was facilitated both by the foreignness of the subject matter and the extinction of any original references through the crucible of orientalist translation. The oriental worlds thus conjured were remarkable for both their specificity and their interchangeability, reinforced by hermetically sealing the literary Orient off from modernity and global history. When this seal was cracked, however, as Byron did in The Giaour, and the oriental tale was inserted back into time, it underwent a remarkable transformation of both form and content.

Translation’s Fragments Before I turn to Byron, though, any reflection on the tension between semifictional histories of the past and the national-historical present in the early nineteenth century must address Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), long recognized as a seminal text in the development of historical understanding in literature. As Scott’s story comes to a close with the creation of a Great Britain formed from the ashes of the old,

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spectralized Highlands, the famous “Postscript Which Should Have Been a Preface” chapter is a fitting conclusion because of the deliberate tricks of time the chapter plays in imagining historical continuity. As the chapter title throws narrative out of its usual chronological order, the chapter itself describes a historiocultural evolutionary process that is equally warped. After decades of evolutionary stasis, the British conquest of the Highlands speeds up the development of Scottish society to the point where “the present people of Scotland [are rendered] a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time.”108 Scott’s literalization—narrative and structural—of the fastforwarding rewards of colonialism presents a striking comparison to The Giaour, in which Byron uses the fragment as the structural representation of a European country (Greece) enslaved by an oppressive Eastern empire. If the historical novel is defined as the genre of modernity and the chronicle of colonial progress, then the fragment is arguably the inverse: the formal representation of stasis and ruin in those regions that have stalled in the cultural evolutionary process. In the particular case of The Giaour, it is a fitting tribute to the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire: European colonialism produces the historical novel, oriental despotism necessitates the fragment. Since its publication, The Giaour’s fragmented style has garnered considerable critical attention, and more recently, so have its Eastern elements. It is now almost impossible to examine the text’s remarkable stylistic form without seriously interpolating into that study questions of orientalism and the colonial condition.109 This is best effected when we consider one of the archetypal moments in Byron’s tale—a curse—in light of the history of the oriental tale traced thus far. In Other Inquisitions, Jorge Luis Borges asserts that Beckford’s Eblis was the first truly atrocious hell in literature, surpassing even Dante: “the most famous literary Avernus, the dolente regno of the Divine Comedy, is not an atrocious place; it is a place where atrocious things happen.”110 One can take this to mean that whereas Dante’s hell is expectedly uncomfortable, Vathek and Nouronihar descend into what at first seems to be a somberly extravagant dinner party. Only later do they discover that hell is not their lavish subterranean surroundings, but rather exists in its denizens’ hearts: “they [Vathek and Nouronihar] went wandering on . . . all without bounds or limit . . . all [the galleries] adorned with the same awful grandeur; all traversed by persons in search of repose and consolation; but, who

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sought them in vain; for everyone carried within him a heart tormented in flames.”111 As Marilyn Butler has observed, this trope of the heart in flames (borrowed from Milton’s description of Satan’s agony) repeats itself in The Curse of Kehama and Byron’s The Giaour. Southey exploits its folkloric element and uses the heart of fire as the crux of the curse Kehama lays on Ladurlad, but Byron’s invocation of the heart in flames draws on Vathek’s psychological resonances.112 Initially part of a curse cast by the Turkish observer on the Giaour, the Giaour’s self-inflicted torment becomes an internal manifestation of guilt that reveals the superficiality of the plot’s chivalric model and complicates the loci of guilt over the death of his lover, Leila, at Hassan’s hands. Byron’s appropriation of this image is in keeping with his utilization of a number of familiar oriental tropes: the jealous Islamic despot, the beautiful, tragic harem girl, and an array of curses. What distinguishes The Giaour is the introduction of a Western infidel, an intrusion that Byron interpolates stylistically with his fragmented narrative. The encyclopediac nature of the pseudotranslation oriental tale suggests that translative work was not the recovery of fragments but the recreation of whole cultures and histories: for many of these tales, the purpose is to construct an oriental world that is graspable in its exotic entirety. Byron’s decision to use fragments suggests the cracking open of the Eastern world by the West, an invocation of modernity that he both mourns and celebrates. But Byron’s poem is equally reminiscent of the Ossianic narratives of James Macpherson: the fragments of a fissured, only partly tangible European past and of epic sagas that mournfully anticipate their own demise. Fragmentation—suggestive of both modernity and antiquarianism—is an appropriate form for the oriental tale, a distinctly modern genre cloaked in antiquity. The Janus-faced fragment is thus the emblematic form for Romanticism’s anticipatory, eternally incomplete creativity and a formal parallel to translation’s impossible search for completion. While the Germans’ love of the fragment corresponded to their embrace of translation as praxis, and in turn the necessary role of Eastern literature in the creation of a new Europe, Ann Janowitz argues that in Britain the fragment was the popular literary inheritor of an ongoing interest in the “poetic antiquities” of the landscape.113 Like exoticism, then, the radical potential of the fragment was perpetually threatened by its incorporation into mainstream genres. Francis Jeffrey’s 1813 review

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of The Giaour for the Edinburgh Review, for example, deemed the fragment an appropriate reflection of modern reading practices (people only ever read fragments of long poems anyway) because “we [cannot] think that we have any reason to envy the Turkish auditors of the entire tale, while we have its fragments thus served . . . [by] Lord Byron.”114 In the way that Southey’s appropriation of Hinduism supposedly mitigates its inherent monstrosity, Byron’s formal “translation” of the story from overlong narrative to suggestive fragments is an improvement on the laborious Turkish original. It is also worth noting that with its inverse emphasis on a presumed whole, the structure of the fragment parallels the historiographic myth of oriental decay: that contemporary oriental cultures were the remnants of superior, but lost, civilizations. As the fruits of this coalescence of colonial historiography, fragmentation, and translation, the lacunae in Byron’s poem force readers to supplement the disjointed narrative by relying on their familiarity with orientalist tropes; climactic scenes of action are afforded opacity because many of the conclusions are inevitable. The reader does not need to be explicitly told that the bundle Hassan throws into the water is Leila’s body, for example, because the figure of the drowned odalisque was, as Byron remarks in his notes, “not very uncommon in Turkey.”115 More unusual was the incorporation (or allusive retention) of a number of Arabic words into the poem, a move that Jeffrey found exasperating: The Oriental costume is preserved, as might be expected, with admirable fidelity through the whole of this poem; and the Turkish original of the tale is attested . . . by the great variety of untranslated words which perplex the unlearned reader. . . . Chiaus, palampore, and ataghan, are . . . puzzling: They are well sounding words, however; and as they probably express things for which we have no appropriate words of our own, we shall not now object to their introduction. But we cannot extend the same indulgence to Phingari, which signifies merely the moon, which, though a humble monosyllable, we maintain to be a very good word either for verse or prose, and can, on no account, allow to be supplanted, at this time of day, by any such new and unchristian appellation.116

While acknowledging the difficulty of the poem for the “unlearned” reader, Jeffrey approves of Byron’s inclusion of the untranslatable as evidence of the poem’s authenticity. What disturbs him is the decision to use Arabic for commonplace words like “moon.” Byron’s decision, which can be read as either a failure to translate (from the illusory

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Arabic original) or a deliberate translation from his English original into Arabic—yet another reminder of the Hastings testimonials— tips the linguistic-cultural balance, rendering superfluous foreignness “unchristian” and therefore ominous. During his disparagement of the poem’s deliberate exoticism, Jeffrey does not find fault with Byron’s decision to label his protagonist a “giaour,” which, he notes, “is the Turkish word for infidel.” Perhaps he also intimated what David Seed has pointed out: that “giaour” is not only a statement of fact, it is also a curse.117 Byron’s decision to call his European hero a “giaour” also recalls his specific debts, inspirational and practical (many of his notes overlap with Henley’s), to William Beckford. The hideous, bewildering Indian “giaour” in Vathek—the epitome of the East as undecipherable monstrosity— becomes, in Byron’s poetry, a symbolic echo of the self-proclaimed cursedness of the Christian Giaour. But the giaour’s shift in signification from devilish Indian dive to brooding European also reifies the central distinction between Beckfordian and Byronic orientalisms. Beckford’s giaour represents the far reaches of the Orient itself, “a part of India wholly unknown,” as the giaour informs Vathek. Beckford’s conceit is of an oriental tale in which the sense of translation is so complete—as Byron himself noted—that no indication of the Western world is possible. Conversely, Byron’s Giaour unsettles the reader with his refusal to belong anywhere; as the poem progresses, it becomes clear that his exilic status is not merely a cultural label but an identity. The Giaour’s subjective nomadism is reflected on a larger scale in the poem’s fractured global perspective: its multiple narrators—a Muslim boatman, the Giaour, a monk, and the overarching voice of the narrator—negate any illusion of a self-contained Orient. The narrator’s opening lamentations over the decline of modern heroism remind the reader that The Giaour is about neither the recent past nor the fictive temporality of Eastern myths but a troublingly prescient present. The poem’s fantastic appeal is further complicated by extending the pseudotranslation’s presumption of native voice to invert the anthropological gaze. Countering the invisible textual presence of the classifying, footnoting European is the Muslim observer who instantaneously traces in the Giaour’s “lineaments” (with its obvious allusions to “lineage”) his Europeanness and affixes a label, which is also a curse: “I know thee not, I loathe thy race. . . . Right well I view, and deem thee one / Whom Othman’s sons should slay or shun.”118

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This narrative polyvocalism, unique in the history of the genre, might be hailed as an example of exoticism’s dialogic potential. It may also simply be a particularly audacious moment of colonial ventriloquism, for “[a]s imitation is appropriation, so identification is a form of the cultural imperialism that it seems to occult in the duplicitous gestures of Orientalist discourse.”119 The ambiguous potency of multilingual discourse was something Byron himself noted in one of the stories that footnote The Giaour. Referencing the superstition of “second-hearing,” Byron recounts a tale from his wanderings in Greece when a Muslim companion with the gift of second hearing prophesies immanent danger. After Byron’s party safely reached their destination, he recalls how he and his companions “returned leisurely, saying a variety of brilliant things, in more languages than spoiled the building of Babel, upon the mistaken seer. Romaic, Arnaout, Turkish, Italian, and English were all exercised, in various conceits, upon the unfortunate Mussulman.”120 Recording the simultaneity of both unity and divide—the party all agree, but the degree of mutual comprehension is unclear—Byron notes that they are all mistaken when the Muslim’s second hearing comes true and Byron and his companions narrowly escape attack. Similarly, The Giaour coalesces around a point of agreement—that the Giaour is cursed—only to splinter into an aural panorama that resists mutual translation. While we cannot say that the poem’s multiple narrators somehow transform The Giaour into a poem that rejects the hegemony of the Western voice, the poem does resist aestheticizing the native speaker to death. And although the poem’s glorification of Hellenism makes any sort of true cultural parity impossible—the East is inherently despotic and immutably wrapped in its orientalism—it also constantly problematizes this geographical binary. There are, for example, several descriptive instances where the Giaour takes on Black Hassan’s physical characteristics, notably his darkness. The poem’s moment of true empathy, however, comes during the confession the Giaour makes to a monk at the close of the poem that reveals the tenuousness of his heroism in his avenging of Leila’s murder: Still, ere thou dost condemn me—pause; Not mine the act, though I the cause; Yet did he but what I had done Had she been false to more than one; Faithless to him—he gave the blow, But true to me—I laid him low;

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56 Howe’er deserv’d her doom might be, Her treachery was truth to me.121

The short, rhymed couplets construct a series of pairs, at once contrasting and merging Hassan and the Giaour’s behavior. Although the Giaour is here poised between his own guilt and that of his Eastern counterpart, it is the state of Leila’s chastity—or lack of it—that bridges the gulf between the European and the oriental. The Giaour asks for a pause before moral sentencing, ostensibly in order to redeem himself, but he is all too aware of the wholly individualistic morality of his actions: Leila’s death is tragic only because she was in love with him. This somber revelation on the Giaour’s part mitigates much of the supposed cultural distance between him and his barbaric foe. In the same way that Eastern and Western moralities come to an uncomfortable agreement in the poem’s conclusion, the Muslim’s curse at the start of the poem—a verbal manifestation of exotic, occult power—echoes in the Giaour’s final recollection of a lone friend who had much earlier predicted the Giaour’s doom. In this context the Muslim’s curse is not an instigation of doom but a form of second hearing, prophesying the inevitable. The Giaour’s use of second hearing is also metanarrative, as the poem the reader is presented with is essentially a second hearing of a poem Byron claims to have heard in the East: “I heard it [this story of the giaour and Leila] by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers. . . . The additions and interpolations by the translator will be easily distinguished from the rest by the want of Eastern imagery.”122 The supposed difference between a terse, European voice and a lavish, oriental one suggests a dual authorship reminiscent of the Beckford-Henley collaboration. Rather than that simultaneous exchange of idea and language, however, Byron deliberately distinguishes the translator from the author-storyteller. In The Giaour translation is fragmentation, a splitting of meaning, origin, and author. The Byronic fragment’s resistance to narrative continuity presages Jacques Derrida’s argument in Tours de Babel that translation signifies the impossibility of universal congruence: “Translation becomes law, duty, and debt, but the debt one can no longer discharge.”123 But are we to read Byron’s fragments as uncertain and apocalyptic or inviting and open ended? Or, to return to an earlier question, is the Byronic fragment a representation of modernity or archaism? On one hand the poem reads like a polyphonic consummation of several equivalent perspectives. On the other, its overarching

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narrative voice and annotation enact strategies of containment from an informed and panoptic European perspective.124 Although Byron’s life and work generally evince his deep suspicion of colonial power and rapaciousness, there are only a few moments in The Giaour when the poem advances a critique of Western imperialism. The most compelling of these are the Muslim boatman’s lines from 288 to 345 contrasting Hassan’s palace in its glory and then its degradation after his death. These lines, a later accretion Byron made to the third edition, are the only ones to offer an alternative perspective on the usurpation of Eastern sovereignty, as they refer to the civic toll caused by Hassan’s death: “Courtesy and Pity died with Hassan on the mountain side.”125 However, these moments of critical perspective are soon drowned out by the poem’s concluding focus on the Giaour’s personal torment. The transition of the “heart of flames” from a talismanic to psychological trope reflects the poem’s pointed lack of interest in the material discourse of orientalism. Even while utilizing common orientalist tropes, The Giaour has surprisingly few references to the luxury, pleasure, and beauty that characterized most orientalist fiction. At first glance, Byron’s elusive fragments, accretions, and revisions appear to be a radical alternative to Southey’s epic totality; it may seem that fragmentation invites doubt, conjecture, and misreading, in contrast to Southey’s almost hysterical attempts to control and “archive” his text.126 However, both epic and fragment indicate a shared obsession with an ephemeral, original source, as the Byronic fragment always gestures to the oriental whole—and orientalist whole—that fills its gaps and lurks in the guise of footnote on the edges of the text.127 The inexpressibility of thought represented by the fragment seems a complement to Southey’s insistence that certain aspects of Hinduism should not be expressed. Byron’s annotated reflections on the unreliability of translation and memory also display an oblique tension also present (if more stridently) in Southey’s obsessive explanation of his authorial motives. This famously jointed “rattlesnake” poem does not achieve the supposed seamlessness of false translations, yet its multiple perspectives actually offer a translative reality not achieved by his contemporaries, if only because fragmentation as a form mimics translation. If, as many translation theorists have suggested, translation is an exemplary metamorphosis, then The Giaour depicts the messiness of that motion. It is a text whose structural and narrative explication of the paradoxes of attempted

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fusion reveals a greater propensity to accommodate otherness than those narratives (Kehama, for example) in which Western presence is largely paratextual, confining, and distanced.128 The shifts taking place between the impudence of Beckford’s Vathek and the agony of Byron’s Giaour suggest that exotic escapism proved less and less feasible in the face of vast geopolitical change and shifting balances of power. Byron’s suspicion of European imperialism and outright loathing of Ottoman tyranny was coupled with a strong sense that “Asiatics” were constitutionally unfit for democracy.129 Unlike his predecessor, Beckford, Byron seems unable to find easy solace in the exotic, and his bitterness reflects the power vacuum in the tragic wake of the poem. Killing Hassan is not a victory for the Giaour, but rather an invitation to a kind of death in life that mimics Byron’s own impatience with global politics and his weariness toward the policies of imperialist powers. The weakening of the Ottoman Empire through internal and external conflict fueled Greek nationalism but, as Byron would discover to his disgust, did not incite any sort of Hellenistic political revival. This frustration over the many impotencies of radical action feeds into the poem’s representations of Leila’s guilt in innocence, her palpable silence, and the mourned absence of a hero.130 More than either Beckford or Southey, Byron grasped exoticism’s elegiac quality; it was one that intersected well with his own aristocratic melancholia and glorification of the classical past. In his global perspective, the exotic is neither an escape nor the locus of the monstrous; rather, it becomes yet another space of inevitable disappointment. And so, in the Giaour Byron neither embraces exoticism (Beckford) nor attempts to overcome it (Southey); rather, he allegorizes its impossibility in the face of the colonial present. The oriental tale as an experimental genre fell into decline after the publication of The Giaour. Byron’s subsequent “oriental romances” (The Corsair, The Bride of Abydos, Lara, Parisina, The Siege of Corinth) enjoyed only short-lived success, and many critics read those stories as mere reproductions of The Giaour.131 The next distinctive successor to The Giaour was Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), arguably among the last of the well-known, commercially successful Romantic oriental tales. But Moore’s prose poem is a harkening back to an early era of oriental storytelling that relies on familiar tropes and a safely distanced, untouchable Eastern fantasy. With Lalla Rookh the oriental tale no longer provides the shocking cultural revelations of Beckford or even Southey’s grotesque, offering instead the

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nostalgic, tuneful invocation of a well-worn genre that Moore uses in part to veil his far more radical agenda of Irish nationalism. It is worth noting that Lalla Rookh was published the same year as James Mill’s The History of British India, the signature text of the emerging Anglicization of colonial rule and the death knell of British orientalism. The lineage of Beckford to Southey to Byron seems at first circular, with Byron returning to the Beckfordian radicalism Southey tries (only partly successfully) to escape. However, The Giaour, which ultimately reads like a grim acknowledgment that such easy exoticism is already impossible, represents the oriental tale at a moment of historical fissure, when the genre seems unwilling to carry on the conceit of pristine wholeness it once strove for. Although European colonialism as such does not factor into the poem, the lone giaour who manages to upset Eastern social fabric is both a foreshadowing of the European domination that is fast approaching (within the poem’s temporal framework) and the colonial reality of Byron’s present. As a noteworthy, even notorious, form of fiction, the oriental tale may have slowly submerged into the British literary landscape, but its cultural incorporations were diffuse and subtle.132 After gently chiding Byron for his insertion of Arabic terms into the poem, Jeffrey’s review proves itself equally susceptible to this linguistic orientalism when it refers to the kind of cheerful “moral avatar” Jeffrey hopes Byron will turn to next. Jeffrey’s offhand, perhaps unconscious reference to the Sanskrit term for incarnation demonstrates the extent to which, in the short span of time between the publication of Jones’s Sacontalá and Jeffrey’s review, a language once deemed impossible to learn or translate had already embedded itself into the English lexicon. Many critics refer to the modernity of Byron’s project, its gesture toward hermeneutic irresolution and “intentional correlative” that is a hallmark of twentieth-century literature.133 More specifically, much like Walter Scott’s manipulation of Scottish history, Byron’s use of the fragment illustrates the desire to capture a quasi-fictional historical instance in a way that ultimately neutralizes its revolutionary potential, reinforcing Jerome Christensen’s argument that Byron’s oriental tales, supposedly written to counter hegemony, write against themselves.134 Thus The Giaour is a postscript as much as it is also a preface: a narrative whose struggles signal both culmination and fulmination. Reflecting on the Beckfordian legacy in the nineteenth century, Svilpis defines the oriental tale as a potentially subversive genre:

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“By constituting itself as a genre through its departure . . . from this anglocentrism, the oriental tale necessarily also makes a gesture of revolt. . . . [It] may thus been seen as a direct counter-discourse to the novel.”135 However, as we have seen, while negotiating the space of exoticism, the radial aspects of the oriental tale are too often compromised by the realities of colonial politics and the limits of form. In the next chapter we will see the novel’s potential to inform and expand on rather than extinguish the pseudotranslation’s unsettling potency.

chapter three

Romantic Metanoia: Conversion and Cultural Translation in India Our duty is not to teach, but to un-teach them

c h a r l e s t r e v elya n

The scholarly inclinations of the pseudotranslation may have directed the genre toward the varying exoticisms examined in the previous chapter, but it also had the effect of tying orientalist fiction to the male-dominated field of orientalist studies. While women mined the Orient for commercial and intellectual profit with the same enthusiasm as men, they had a far more tenuous relationship to its scholarly apparatus. Elizabeth Hamilton, author of Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), sarcastically noted that the heavily annotated dissertation of Indian history prefacing her novel “may be censured by others as a presumptuous effort to wander out of that narrow and contracted path, which they have allotted to the female mind.”1 At the same time that the oriental tale began to engage directly with orientalist studies, several women also began to publish Eastern fictions that, laden with factual information and annotation as they are, form a striking contrast to their male-authored counterparts. Balachandra Rajan identifies three such “oriental novels”: Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), Hamilton’s Translation, and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811). In contrast to a more ubiquitous and hegemonic feminization of India, Rajan argues, the oriental novel’s importance lies in its disruption of gendered colonial hierarchies and its deviation from the inexorable march of orientalism-colonialism to the occlusion of discourse. 2 In this chapter, my analysis of two of these novels—Hartly House and The Missionary—demonstrates how the usurpation of masculine orientalist authority by female authors resulted in a dramatically different Orient than the one constructed 61

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by the male authors of oriental tales.3 While these novels share many of the same “colonizing aesthetics” as the oriental tale, in choosing to represent the East without attempting to replicate its supposedly governing form (the tale), they take up the challenge that even tales like The Giaour only allude to; declining to represent the East as a static or quasi-mythical space, these narratives engage specific colonial situations, inserting the Orient into historical time.4 Although the appellative “oriental novel” is semantically vague, Rajan’s identification of a specific oeuvre of female-authored Eastern novels underscores the fraught relationship of its signifiers. While orientalist study may have been considered a male prerogative, translation—the bedrock of orientalist study—had long been one of the only respectable pathways for women into the literary marketplace. (The male usurpation of orientalist studies may be taken as partial proof of translation’s transformation, in this new Eastern context, from derivative to knowledge producing.) And the novel was, of course, a suspect genre, both unsuitable for and suited only to women. Thus the “oriental novel” is something of a conundrum: an intellectual space carved out at least partly by female authors, but also unwelcoming to them. In their portrayal of the experience of women—both British and native—abroad, the two oriental novels in this chapter fill in blanks in the imperial archive and, along the way, exhibit a decidedly improper willingness to cross racial, linguistic, religious, and geographical lines. This chapter also considers the relationship between governance and Evangelicalism in India in the years between the publication of Hartly House and The Missionary. From this relationship emerged two distinct but elided questions: the future of native education and the role of missionaries in India. In the course of making practical decisions about what languages these projects should utilize, what emerged was a more vexing set of questions concerning the cultural translations they implied. Although the East India Company was most concerned with profitably accommodating and adapting native custom in its earliest years, the increasingly imperial thrust of governance meant that translation became a fraught debate, one in which Anglicists, orientalists, missionaries, and native intelligentsia formed networks of shifting allegiances. If we consider questions of cultural translation invoked by these debates through the lens of the oriental novel, it is surely significant that both Hartly House and The Missionary use intercultural sympathetic romance as a signifier for the

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transformations of subjectivity brought about when cultures meet and translate across linguistic, religious, and racial borders. Both these novels are written in the shadow of the Hastings trial and its one coherent conclusion: that modes of governance in the subcontinent needed alteration. The Hastings regime had adopted a policy of adaptation to native customs—using Persian as the official language of government, sponsoring madrassas and Hindu colleges—that also led to charges of nabobism and corruption, and by the early nineteenth century that model was increasingly contested by advocates for a reformist government advocating westernization. As early as 1792, Charles Grant’s Observations of the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals set the tone for later arguments, positing that although it would be easier for English “cultivated minds” to learn native languages than it would for the natives to learn English, the greater benefits of English religion and culture could only be made available to those Indians whose knowledge of English allowed them unfettered access to the language’s riches, the most important benefit being religion.5 Conversion is itself the promise of transformation, which is referred to in the New Testament as metanoia.6 Metanoia is a translatively elusive word, often rendered interpretively as “repentance”—the condition needed to effect mental transformation—rather than the more literal but flaccid-sounding “change of mind.” In his influential essay “The Great Meaning of Metanoia” (1882), the American religious scholar Treadwell Walden discusses the tremendous spiritual significance of metanoia’s translation, insisting that “repentance” is not sufficient to convey “an intimation that the whole inward nature of man was appealed to, all its springs of action, all its possibilities of affection.”7 Walden indirectly acknowledges the importance of late eighteencentury translation theory when he credits George Campbell, the biblical scholar, for his groundbreaking reassessment of the term in The Four Gospels.8 Somewhat surprisingly, he also looks to Romantic authors for corroborations of metanoia’s cognitive import. He references Coleridge’s concept of “transmentation” in Aids to Reflection (1825) to underscore metanoia’s significance as “a mental transfiguration, under which the Mind, when placed in a new situation, thinks new thoughts, receives new impressions, forms new tastes . . . [and] develops new aptitudes.”9 He also uses a passage from de Quincey’s Autobiographical Sketches (1853) that, aside from its religious

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context, stresses metanoia’s potentially secular dynamism. In it, de Quincey explains metanoia to a female questioner and immediately rejects “repentance” as a definition, arguing instead that “[t]he Metá carried with it an emphatic expression of its original idea—the idea of transfer, or translation . . . [or] the idea of a metamorphosis. . . . The human race was summoned to bring a transfiguring sense and spirit of interpretation (Metanoia) to a transfigured ethics [referring to the significance of baptism].”10 While not abandoning its sacred import, de Quincey uses the literal meaning of metanoia to describe a revolution of subjectivity and interpretation: not only does the individual alter, the very basis of perception transforms as well. In redefining metanoia de Quincey also implicitly defines translation, which, in this example, is valued not for its ability to faithfully convey the same message across different mediums, but for its potential to effect and embody change. In his expansive definition of metanoia’s significance, Walden fuses emotion and cognition, insisting that the mind “embraces . . . a large portion of the moral and affectional nature. It occupies the realm of the heart.”11 This language is strikingly similar to a Humean idea of sympathy, which in A Treatise on Human Nature is also described as a concordance between mind and heart: “When any affection is infus’d by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection.”12 Clearly, Humean sympathy and metanoia share a common noetic grounding. Significantly, however, whereas Hume stresses the importance of “countenance” in the spontaneous production of sympathy, metanoia, and conversion more generally, is described as a selfconscious transformation effected primarily through language and text.13 Using de Quincey’s partly spiritual, partly secular definition of metanoia as a model, I suggest the existence of a Romantic metanoia whose radiating significance (ethical, personal, secular, sacred) makes it an invaluable nexus through which to understand the interaction between religion, politics, language, sympathy, and subjectivity in the oriental novels this chapter addresses.14 Expanding on metanoia’s potent signification also allows us to see the common emotive structure of sentimental literature and Evangelicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fictional

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sentimental plots often hinged on dramatic plot reversals that enabled personal transformations—the discovery of kinship, the appearance of characters presumed dead—which resembled the spiritual reversal of metanoia and the sudden shift of reality it entails.15 The goal for authors of sentimental fiction was to enable sympathy (considered a moral state of mind) such that the living experience of the reader was affected by the fictional emotion. Moreover, the moral efficacy of sympathy touted by Hume was one based on distance rather than close, personal contact, a sympathy of strangeness, that enabled an opening of the self in order to fully understand another.16 Sentimental literature is thus inherently pedagogical and even conversionary as it attempts to alter the lived experience of both the reader and the fictional character. Not coincidentally, evangelical literature often appealed to this same sympathy of strangeness. In William Carey’s pamphlet An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792), the soon-to-be founder of the Baptist Missionary Society responded to skepticism about global missionary activities by invoking the distance between the civilized and the barbarous: “It has been objected that there are multitudes in our own nation . . . who are as ignorant as the SouthSea savages, and that therefore we have enough work at home, without going into other countries. . . . [But] [o]ur own countrymen have the means of grace. . . . [W]ith them the case is widely different, who have no Bible, no written language . . . no good civil government. Pity, therefore, humanity, and much more Christianity.”17 Pamphlets like Carey’s connected educational and civic problems to religious concerns and persuaded the British public to donate money to people and places they had never seen, becoming at once abstracted Christian comrades and quasi-divine conferrers of grace on the converting natives. As the next section demonstrates, in the growing evangelical movement of the late eighteenth century we see clearly how sentiment served to create communal bonds even while insisting on essential differences between Self and Other.18

Translating Evangelicalism There is no denying the political signification of conversion: Gauri Viswanathan has defined conversion, whether coerced or liberatory, as profoundly socially unsettling: “By undoing the concept of fixed, unalterable identities, conversion unsettles the boundaries by which

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selfhood, citizenship . . . and community are defined, exposing these as permeable borders.” And Robert Frykenburg, after insisting on the profoundly personal, spiritually ordained nature of conversion, reluctantly acknowledges that “what is often labeled as ‘conversion’ may sometimes have less to do with an inner change . . . and may, alternatively, be based upon more mundane decisions rising out of rational choices and self-interest. Conversion, in this sense, does indeed become an event that has social, economic, and political ramifications.”19 Occupying a floating, uncertain status between traveling strangers (who necessitate hospitality) and settling strangers (who invite hostility), missionaries, and their history in India, are fraught subjects.20 Historical hindsight on conversion in the subcontinent tends to split along recognizable lines: Indian nationalists have vigorously denounced prostelyzation as one of the gravest colonial crimes, while many historians opposingly point out that until the nineteenth century, mission work in India was continually hindered by a government that for many years adopted a policy of placation and noninterference.21 As Christianity existed in India long before the arrival of European missionaries, any categorization of it as “European” is obviously false. Yet the causal connection between the influx of Anglican and Baptist evangelicals to India in the late eighteenth century and the rise of European colonialism is obvious: even though missionaries often regarded their work as distinctive from imperial enterprise, overseas expansion provided both the practical impetus for and providential proof of the timeliness of their Evangelicalism.22 The first Protestant missions had been established by German Pietists earlier in the century in the Dutch colony of Tranquebar (Tharangambadi), but the newly arriving British missionaries (or foreign missionaries under the auspices of British missionary societies) brought with them very distinct ideas of how to disseminate Christianity.23 These more “Calvinist” evangelicals were generally less inclined to work within native systems of caste and tradition, and many churches began banning the incorporation of native religious practices (like the offering of flowers as puja) and vernacular, Indian-authored hymns and rituals into European liturgical services. 24 And when, in 1825, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge transferred its sponsorship of missions from German Lutherans to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, thousands of Tamil Lutherans became Anglicans without their consent. 25 Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century many of the forms of Christianity practiced in India tended to assume European

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trappings, eschewing native custom and intersecting all too conveniently with the British colonial presence to be considered separately. The obvious conjunction of missionary and colonial efforts made administrators at home and in India nervous and inconsistent about encouraging evangelical work. While the East India Company was principally a commercial institution, the ideological strength of colonial rule necessarily had recourse to evangelical rhetoric. Missionaries were technically barred from Company-controlled territories but resolutions regarding their activity were often vague: the Company’s 1698 charter pledged support for missions and Company administrators had no consistent policy for the illegal entry of missionaries into their territory. 26 This political confusion was responsible for the numerous battles over the 1792 clause to the Charter Act allowing missionary activity in Company territory. The clause, which initially passed the House of Commons, was later rejected when it came up again in the same house. Finally, bolstered by support from the evangelical Clapham Sect, Parliament passed the 1813 Charter Act formally permitting the establishment of an Indian bishopric and the admittance of missionaries into Company territory. 27 The Clapham Sect was also responsible for encouraging Carey, a cobbler turned missionary, to travel to India as the first British representative of a wholly British evangelical organization. 28 Though he was initially scorned by his better-pedigreed counterparts, Carey’s unflagging zeal quickly led to important administrative positions; he ended his career as, among other things, professor of Sanskrit and Bengali at the College at Fort William and a member of the Asiatic Society. Carey’s work, particularly in translation, epitomizes the transformation of the British evangelical community’s relationship with colonial governance from oppositional to increasingly integrated. Carey, who was inspired to turn to missionary work while reading about the “spiritual degradation of the heathen” in Cook’s Voyages, had as one of his foremost goals the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. 29 Other missionaries had already been working on vernacular lexicons, and the Pietists had translated the Bible into Tamil, but Carey, joined by William Ward and Joshua Marshman, beat them all by establishing a translation factory in Serampore where missionaries and native scholars (some converts, others not) worked together to produce Bibles and grammars, first in Bengali and Sanskrit, and then in an increasing number of languages.30 Carey’s establishment of the Serampore Mission Press in 1800 was followed

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four years later in England by the establishment of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which, while it was conceived primarily in order to provide Bibles to impoverished outlying regions within Britain (like Wales), also cited in its first advertisements “the prevalence of Ignorance, Superstition, and Idolatry, over so large a portion of the world.”31 Although the Company remained wary of evangelical activity, print’s trajectoral indeterminacy meant that even approved colonial publications, like Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778), the first book printed using Bengali types, could become embroiled in discourses seemingly antithetical to the official policy of native placation.32 Carey was only able to print the first Bible in Bengali by employing a native blacksmith who had been taught to make the Bengali types by the Gita translator Charles Wilkins, who made the first set of Bengali types for Halhed’s Grammar.33 This practical union of orientalist and evangelical practices hints at a more fundamental alignment: aside from the obvious utility of biblical translations, evangelical work also necessitated translations of subcontinental religious practices and texts in order to create a comprehendible foe. Here, despite some obvious differences, evangelicalism and eighteenth-century orientalism shared the same epistemological goals. It is worth remembering that although early orientalists were often relatively indifferent or outright hostile to conversion, many missionaries (William Taylor, William Yates, and John Wilson, to name but a few) became orientalists as a means of effecting better methods of conversion. While “Hindoo” or “Gentoo” had been used as a geographical marker for some time, the first people to use “Hindoo” to signify a single religious identity were the British missionaries of the late 1780s.34 This shift in the meaning of Hindu colluded with orientalist insistence on the rigidity and broad applicability of “Brahminical” texts like the Maanavadharmashastra. Assuming Brahminism as the dominant mode of subcontinental religiosity, orientalists and evangelicals together created a “Hindoo” foil to work either alongside or against. Translation is an obvious and practical first step in the process of conversion, as the radical reimagining of reality conversion requires is inaugurated through translation’s conceptual transference. The inherent translatability of Christianity’s spiritual message is best represented in the story of Pentecost, the spiritual resolution to the Tower of Babel.35 On the day of Pentecost, Christian disciples filled with

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the Holy Spirit began to speak in different tongues, which a polyglot assembly of devout Jews registered as the gospel message spoken in their individual languages: “Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”36 As a universal language, Christianity fulfilled the promise of hermeneutic translation, but neither translation nor conversion was easily accomplished in the linguistically diverse subcontinent. Orientalists like Sir William Jones had initially encouraged publishing the Christian Gospels in Sanskrit in order to confer on the Mosaic texts the language’s inherent sacrality.37 Some missionaries, Carey among them, sponsored translations in vernacular languages they had come to appreciate, while others believed that the imagistic power of the Bible was best captured through English and despised Sanskrit in particular because of its emphasis on sabdam, or sound, and metrics.38 In The History of British India, James Mill correlated Sanskrit’s lexical excess to Hinduism’s mythological superfluity: “Whenever indeed we seek to ascertain the definite and precise ideas of the Hindus in religion, the subject vanishes before us like a dissolving cloud. All is loose, vague, wavering, obscure, and inconsistent. Their expressions point at one time to one meaning, and another time to another meaning.”39 Mill was no evangelical, but The History of British India’s rejection of native culture via language was an extreme parallel to the Anglicization of conversion. Ironically, these new methods of conversion often placed British missionaries in conflict not with Hindu and Muslim populations but with groups of already-converted natives. One such example of translative impasse is the story of Vedanayaka Sastri and the Tanjore Evangelical Congregation. Prior to the coming of the British, German Lutheran missionaries in India had followed a relatively cautious model of conversion. The few converts from more priviledged jatis (subcastes or contextual castes) largely clung to their traditional rules and customs, including eating and sitting with same-caste members, a practice that lessened the convert’s chances of being socially “excommunicated” and thus deprived of status and property. Converted Christian Indians like the celebrated Tamil poet Vedanayaka Sastri managed to practice their

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religion openly and still obtain important positions in Hindu society. Sastri, the author of numerous Tamil Christian works of poetry, most notably Bethlahem Kuravañci (1800), a poem that wedded evangelical themes to the Tamil dance-drama kuravañci tradition, became the official court poet in the royal court of the Hindu Serfoji II. Sastri’s church, the Tanjore Evangelical Congregation, which was founded in the Pietist tradition, was among those passed from Lutheran to Anglican control. As the Anglicans attempted to remove long-standing caste barriers during worship and mealtimes, Sastri, a member of the Velalan jati, was so incensed that he wrote several pamphlets interpreting caste laws as habit, and thus permissible for Indian Christians, rather than as Hindu religious doctrine. Although Sastri’s English was imperfect, he deliberately translated his Tamil works on caste for this new cadre of missionaries attempting to subvert long-established traditions practiced by flourishing Christian communities in Tanjore (Thanjavore), Vepery, and Tranquebar.40 Sastri and many second-generation Velalan Christians were also dismayed by new translations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer undertaken by a Ceylonese Christian under the auspices of the Bible Society in London, which they believed undermined the congregation’s extant worship based on an earlier translation by the German missionary Johann Phillip Fabricus. These high tensions eventually resulted in Sastri’s expulsion from the congregation in 1829. Recounting the story of Sastri’s expulsion, Dennis Hudson notes how “[i]nterestingly, the question of how to translate the Bible into Tamil had brought the issues of caste custom, seating in church, celebration of festivals, sensuality in worship, and music all together into one document [referring to Ja¯titirtuttalin Payittiyam, or “The Foolishness of Amending Caste,” a document penned by several members of the congregation including Sastri]. . . . Protestants, unlike Muslims, must struggle wherever they find themselves to translate the Scriptures in relevant ways.”41 In contrast to Sastri and other native Christians’ anxieties over new translations (and the particular forms of Evangelicalism they represented), missionary publications described a paucity of printed translations as the only hindrance to otherwise inevitable conversions. “Only let the population have the power to read our scriptures,” wrote one Reverend Mr. Fisher in Meerut, “[and] the Bible may do its own work: that it can do so has been repeatedly proved, in spite of the melancholy forebodings, and sensitive jealousies to the adversaries of its distribution.”42 But as Sastri and his fellow worshippers at

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the Tanjore Evangelical Congregation were learning, the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages no longer implied the transculturation of Indian practices of worship with Christian ones. Reverend Fisher’s letter goes on to recount the story of a native convert wandering into an ad-hoc native Bible study group. When one of the group members informs the “official” convert that they are studying an unnamed “book of God” given to them by “a learned Pundit,” the convert informs his countryman that “these books . . . teach the religion of the European sahibs. It is their book; and they printed it in our language for our use.”43 Even while the Bible was touted as the instrument for personal revelation, it was simultaneously cast as a gift of the colonial establishment and, as “their book,” fundamentally foreign. Stressing the simplicity of the untutored Bible readers, who are advised to abandon vegetarianism and visit a “Christian padree” for instruction, missionary publications such as this one depicted natives as ignorant objects of sympathy, and this rhetoric, while sentimental, was also affectively distancing.44 Sue Zemka has argued that missionary publications encouraged the British public to become active participants in a religious empire, and it seems that as missionary publications increasingly inculcated a sense of comradeship between the missionaries and their domestic readership, native congregations were increasingly depicted as gratefully dependent on both.45 One need only recall the concluding pages of Jane Eyre, in which Rochester’s transformation (from orientalized cosmopolitan to pious Briton) is succeeded by St. John Rivers’s narrative of missionary toil in India, to recognize the extent to which colonized natives—converted or not—could be erased from their own conversion story to the preferment of a re-Christianized British populace. Although the education-language debate in India has been reduced to T. B. Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835) as both its inaugural and decisive statement, Macaulay’s is merely the dramatic apex of an argument that started in the late eighteenth century with the advent of the new missionary movement. The “Minute” was, moreover, the more vitriolic echo of a sentiment that had been expressed earlier by Rammohun Roy, the influential leader of the Bengali reformist movement. In a letter written to Governor-General William Amherst in 1823, Roy protested the establishment of “a new Sanskrit School in Calcutta” by orientalists as antithetical to a progressive idea of education. Promoting traditional native education at the expense of a modern English one, Roy cannily argued,

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implied that the government was afraid of its own policies of improvement: “[i]f it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge, the Baconian philosophy would not have been allowed to displace the system of the schoolmen, which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same manner the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness, if such had been the policy of the British legislature.”46 Roy had already opened an Anglo-Indian School the previous year to provide free English-language instruction to Hindu boys. Visiting the school some years later, William Adam noted how Christian doctrine was not “inculcated,” but that “facts belonging to the history of Christianity are taught to those pupils who are capable of understanding general history.”47 As the issue of how, and in what languages, natives should be educated roiled, conversion—both religious and cultural—ultimately defined the terms of debate. Utilitarians like Macaulay, while fairly indifferent to missionary work, were invested in the creation of an English-speaking class to serve as both proxy native rulers and quiescent imperial subjects.48 This vision of secular humanism was vociferously challenged by missionaries who argued that, contrary to Macaulay’s vision of a docile, culturally Anglicized native bourgeoisie, Indians educated only in the principles of humanism would be more prone to sedition than before.49 Only Christian Indians, they argued, would possess both the education and the humility it necessitated. This mélange of British opinions was punctuated significantly by the various demands of Indian elites like Roy, many of whom desired English-language educations without the side effects of religion and culture (and some of whom desired both) and whose diverse voices were appropriated by the other two sides of the debate, each of which claimed to represent the true wishes of the native peoples.50 While intellectuals from all sides were busily founding educational institutions to put their theories into practice, the government responded in 1813 with the Charter Act, which attempted something of an evangelical-orientalist-Anglicist compromise by permitting missionaries into India and allotting monies for both Western education and the “revival” of native literatures. Unsurprisingly, the Charter Act’s irresolution did not quell the continuing argument over the merits of commerce versus Christianity: anger over conversion was cited as the cause for both the 1806 Vellore Massacre and the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, indicating the extent to which the British failed

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to come to terms with—or even come up with—a foundational imperial narrative. Aside from their structural similarities, conversion and translation share similar ideological conflicts. Missionaries are at once cultural mediators and minglers, sifting through difference to arrive at a spiritual unity they believe transcends tangible borders. However, missionaries are also bearers of a religiocultural ideology—their attempts to learn another culture are often made in order to dislodge and subvert it. These are dialectical rather than opposing modes of conversion, and missionaries (and colonial administrators) rationalized both definitions. The clash of religious-economic-literary issues in the subcontinent created unlikely political bedfellows; playing off the evangelical belief that spiritual truth was best discovered through exposing the opponent’s errors, orientalists insisted somewhat perversely that the most effective means of converting Indians was not to deny them their traditional texts but to allow them access to Sanskrit literature while exposing them to Christian doctrine, arguing that the natives could work through the problems of their indigenous religions toward Christian truth. However, assumptions about the inherently sacral but pagan nature of Sanskrit and the presumed crudeness of vernaculars meant that while large-scale evangelical work and native translations of the Bible continued, English was annointed the language of a sacralized secular humanism, moving cultural translation steadily in the direction of translation as improvement.

Linguistic Intermarriage The Charter Act’s nebulous gestures to native education may have reflected attempts to forge a compromise between increasingly divided factions, but its overall rhetoric evinced a decidedly imperial thrust to subcontinental governance and the concomitant need to justify British rule with the recompense of reform. Missionary schools were integral to the English-based educational system established after 1835, and as we have seen, many colonial officials insisted that learning English would naturally create a greater propensity for conversion. But this seeming unity of liberal and evangelical reform was challenged by the question of the purpose of education in the subcontinent and the inevitable questions that the creation of this new class (whose fuzzy interplay with caste was never out of mind) of English-educated natives would engender. The 1813 act is tellingly opaque, leaving issues of

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language and religion to the governing administrators themselves. In the years between the act and its denouement—the March 1835 resolution legally echoing Macaulay’s rhetoric in the “Minute”—these issues were bitterly disputed between the orientalists and the Anglicists, with missionaries generally falling on either side of the debate. Charles Trevelyan, Macaulay’s brother-in-law and ardent admirer, captures the spirit of these debates in his treatise On the Education of the People of India (1838). Trevelyan, who was appointed to the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1833 (replacing the orientalist H. H. Wilson), is often credited with winning the battle against the orientalists before Macaulay arrived in India.51 On the Education deserves particular attention not only because it is an overview of the debate written by one of its chief architects but also because Trevelyan posits a theory of national language in which translation is central to both cultural and linguistic evolution. Trevelyan’s primary argument for the establishment of Englishbased education in India relied on claims of native dissatisfaction with traditional systems of knowledge as evidence of a flawed orientalist educational policy.52 English language and science had in fact been taught in institutions like the Benares Sanskrit College since 1816, but Trevelyan argued that this integrative approach was futile because it merely appended an English curriculum to a native one. He also repeatedly insisted that translations of scientific texts into Arabic and Sanskrit were wasted because the languages were not linguistically able to cope with the demands of European science.53 Sanskrit and Arabic were difficult to learn and the information each language could impart was useless except to the antiquarian; extending a feeble olive branch to the orientalists, On the Education implied that oriental knowledge was useful only to European scholars, not to the “orientals” themselves. Trevelyan also emphasized the classor caste-selective ramifications of continuing to promote education in languages reserved only for an elite native population, an interesting counter to Macaulay’s hopes for an English-educated native upper-class. Describing the administrative committee’s split between advocating classical native languages or English, Trevelyan observes that a third option was ignored by both sides: native vernaculars. Trevelyan’s promotion of vernacular languages comes as something of a surprise given his scathing initial assessment: “in the long discussions which preceded the change in the plan of the committee [the 1835

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Resolution], there was one point on which all parties [Anglicists and orientalists] were agreed: this was, that the vernacular languages contained neither the literary nor scientific information necessary for a liberal education.”54 But yet another faction of administrators argued for the improvement of vernacular languages through an infusion of English, which would result in a downward dissemination of science and morality (which neither Sanskrit nor Arabic texts possessed). Through the study of English, vernacular languages would evolve to the point that they could function on their own, and entire populations would benefit from this overall linguistic enrichment. This evolution would take place, Trevelyan argued, through the cultivation of translation in school, as local educational committees were advised that “pupils should be constantly exercised in translating into their own language, as well into English from the time they enter the seminaries till their departure.”55 Trevelyan’s schema ultimately posited translation as a dynamic yet nonintrusive mode through which to enhance vernacular languages and “un-teach” the natives’ original dissolute practices.56 This hedging concept, “un-teaching,” captures the central concerns facing an increasingly liberal colonial administration during a period of evangelical expansion. The Company was facing a difficult balancing act; even while the Charter Act indirectly espoused Christianity, the Company was simultaneously centralizing its custodianship of Hindu temples (replacing the traditional role of Indian rajas), thus effectively enabling “dissolute paganism.”57 Although the new administration’s policies were vastly different from those of Hastings and Jones, the educational policy On the Education outlines relies on the same logic of linguistic and political succession as Jones’s On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations. In Trevelyan’s reasoning, English became integrated into an evolutionary history of linguistic imperialism: “Sanskrit, Arabic, and English are equally new to the people. . . . Sanskrit itself was engrafted by a race of conquerors on the national languages. . . . [T]he Mahommedan invaders afterwards introduced a profusion of Arabic and Persian.”58 Trevelyan hoped first to render Sanskrit and Persian as being equally as foreign to India as English—a radical departure from the orientalist glorification of Sanskrit as the epitome of Indian culture—and then to subsequently naturalize English by equating it with subcontinental literary languages. But if Jones’s Poetry of the Eastern Nations grafts English onto a flourishing literary tradition, Trevelyan’s theory posits a cultural vacuity. Vernacular languages

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produce nothing, and the languages celebrated by both European and native scholars are nonindigenous. India becomes a land devoid of any organic culture, where English has just as much legitimacy as any other language to establish itself—perhaps even more because of its natural superiority. Eventually, Trevelyan’s teleology reaches an audacious sleight of hand where English, having woven itself into vernacular languages, vanishes and is replaced by Anglicized vernaculars, creating a new, “national” language with English as its unifying glue: “the introduction of English into the vernacular dialects will gradually diminish the distance between the scientific and popular language. . . . The languages of India will be assimilated to the languages of Europe.”59 On the Education’s epistemology reveals that the eventual victories of both Anglicists and evangelicals were the result of a slow but steady change in the interpretation of Hindu and Muslim linguistic cultures. While the monolith “Hinduism” was erected on the superstructure of Brahminical culture, “India” was stripped of a national identity (Hindu or Muslim) and found badly in need of one. After constructing such a fantastically blank slate, however, even the most ardent supporters of globalized English, like Trevelyan, balked from the idea of English as the national language of somewhere else. English needed to be conceived of as colonially applicable and culturally specific. Trevelyan’s linguistic teleology, which he repeatedly compared to Roman cultural assimilation, is an inverted echo of the conclusion to Virgil’s Aeneid—arguably the mythological guidebook of empire— when Jupiter and Juno thrash out the cultural fates of the Latins and the invading Trojans: When the nuptial bed shall bind the peace, . . . let the Latins still retain their name, Speak the same language which they spoke before, Wear the same habits which their grandsires wore. . . .  From ancient blood th’ Ausonian people sprung, Shall keep their name, their habit, and their tongue. The Trojans to their customs shall be tied: I will, myself, their common rites provide; The natives shall command, the foreigners subside. . . .  From blood so mix’d a pious race shall flow; Equal to the gods, excelling all below. 60

Trevelyan’s hopes for English-infused vernaculars reverse the hybridization of Trojan and Latin culture, as English in his schema is at

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once integrated and distinct, but in the Aeneid mediation is crucially predicated on the marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia, the tropic union of the native woman to the foreign male and his culture’s subsequent naturalization. Trevelyan never would have espoused this classical resolution; that model of cultural integration had been officially denounced in the post-Hastings era.61 Nineteenth-century imperial history, moreover, commonly suggests British women in the colonies tended to calcify cultural boundaries and fomented the cultural antagonism and excessive snobbery popularly associated with the British Raj. In the oriental novels this chapter discusses, however, women, both British and native, are important cultural mediators who provide readers with ways of understanding the colonial condition in terms other than the strictly hegemonic or “other.” In the next two sections I examine how these novels, both written before 1813, play with the possibility of romance as a model of cultural compromise and, indirectly, react to the burgeoning controversy over conversion by examining what lurks in the shadows of the Charter Act: not just the condition and moral improvement of Indians but also the cultural and spiritual ramifications of Eastern living for those British in India.62

Translation and Flirtation Following the conventional epistolary plot of an Englishwoman writing letters to a friend back home, the anonymously published Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) chronicles Sophia Goldborne’s (alternately spelled Goldsborne) sojourn in India with her widowed father in a generally insouciant manner that emphasizes the pleasures of being a single female in early Anglo-Indian Calcutta. But the novel’s first line, which defines India metonymically as “[t]he grave of thousands!” also establishes a persistent obsession with death that unsettles what might otherwise be read as merely a chronicle of days that mostly involve dressing, eating, drinking, socializing, and otherwise luxuriously taking in the Indian atmosphere. The real promise (and premise) of the novel is embedded in its 1908 subtitle—A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings—in which the domestic space of Hartly House becomes representative of a specific mode of colonial governance.63 Hartly House’s satiric, playful letters similarly employ femininity as a flimsy but effective screen behind which serious political and racial matters are pondered: most crucially the possibility of an

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Englishwoman succumbing to the lure of the exotic. In letters to her friend Arabella, Sophia explores topics like interracial love affairs, conversion to Hinduism, and abduction fantasies all while maintaining a sensibility that veers between frivolity and melancholia. Before Gibbes was identified as the novel’s author, its obvious political potency prompted a critical debate over the location and gender of its writer.64 In his introduction to the 1984 reissue of the novel, G. F. Barwick insisted that the novel was either a woman’s firsthand account or a man’s secondhand, revising his theory two years later to insist on a male author on the dubious grounds that “in the eighteenth century few women took an interest in politics.”65 Barwick’s analysis echoes an earlier reading by William Foster, who insists that while a woman might be sufficiently compelled by first-hand experience, the novel’s classical quotations and political acumen indicate a male, metropolitan author.66 The recent discovery of the obscure but prolific Gibbes as author reverses Barwick’s gendered chain of authorship, especially as scholars have (inconclusively) posited that Gibbes had a son in India whose letters furnished her with much of the novel’s descriptive information.67 Although it quickly fell into obscurity, the novel’s importance as a source of apparently authentic Indian material in its time was acknowledged by reviews that described it as a factual source “in the guise” of a novel and, more unfortunately, in articles that freely plagiarized its descriptions.68 Aside from her possible personal connection to the novel’s source material, Hartly House’s depiction of the Englishwomen abroad corresponds with Gibbes’s established interest in gender politics, as the India in the narrative emerges as a potent, if compromised, space of female freedom.69 Not only do colonial women engage in public life with a vigor that astonishes the newly arrived Sophia, the scarcity of women allows certain sexual freedoms unavailable to women in Britain; flirtation and romantic juggling in the colonial parlor are acceptable and commonplace. The considerable value of rare British female bodies allows Sophia to flex unusual social power, but it is a position of power that the novel problematizes: Sophia continually tries to distance herself from the aggressive marriage market, although it is obvious from her first minute in India that her true value lies therein.70 Gibbes’s protagonist generally expresses a rather hesitant attitude toward female education; although she takes pains to describe the political and cultural environment around her she also dismisses her own more scholarly epistles, commenting that

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women gain knowledge best through conversation and observation rather than formal study. And on several occasions she remarks that her peers disapprove of her copious letter writing because it pulls her away from various leisure activities. Felicity Nussbaum resolves these oppositions by reading Hartly House as an imperial bildungsroman in which “India teaches the Englishwoman that by becoming convinced of her seductive power, she will learn to submit to domestic silencing at home.”71 The colony as the locus of temporary escape is a familiar literary trope, and the novel’s diegetic frame supports Nussbaum’s analysis: after a period of relative social freedom in India, Sophia marries a man of her father’s choosing and returns to England. However, her engagement with India is of an intensity that belies Nussbaum’s reading of the exotic as merely the space of fleeting excess that reinforces domestic strictures. As I describe below, Sophia’s near love affair with an Indian and her supposed conversion to Hinduism allow for a contagious exoticism that moves beyond the merely temporary or decorative. Although Hartly House does not follow the conventions of most sentimental fiction, it immediately and consistently reinforces Sophia’s position as a sympathetic barometer using the temporal polyvalence afforded by letter writing to effect the intimacy of cultural encounter.72 Because time is wrinkled as the act of writing becomes simultaneous with the recorded event, this is an encounter that the novel makes particularly intimate: for example, Sophia fears her repeated descriptions of the scores who die during monsoon season will infect Arabella.73 Contagion’s recurring presence in the novel is also symptomatic of its broader interest in multiple forms of transference: metempsychosis, sympathy, and conversion. Throughout, Hartly House presents bodies and cultures as astonishingly permeable. Sophia’s arrival in India is symbolically and practically accomplished by crossing the Ganges in a luxurious boat, after which she casually declares herself “orientalised.”74 She (seemingly) displays an equally cavalier attitude toward race, repeatedly suggesting that Arabella might wed a native prince and become the foremost of his many wives. “Orientalising” is thus another contagion easily transferred, although Sophia acknowledges that some aspects of Indian sublimity are not easily conveyed on paper: “the work of creation was performed in the East, and in the East Christianity received its birth; in consequence of which great circumstances, the sublime ideas and discoveries perpetually opening themselves upon my mind,

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can alone be even faintly conceived by you, if you . . . travel over so highly-distinguished a region, traced out as it is on your globes, with the sacred and prophane writers of antiquity in your hand.”75 The novel thus vacillates between treating exoticism as merely superficial or as the catalyst for a true metanoia, a tension most fully explored in Sophia’s dalliance with a Brahmin tutor. Although Sophia’s willingness to flirt with the edges of racial and cultural propriety would seem to display none of the paranoia that has been recently acknowledged as an indisputable aspect of the colonial condition, the astonishing liberalism of her letters is undercut by a strain of keenly racial and historically motivated fear and by a clear sense of the distinctions between the “blacks” and Europeans.76 She notes (erroneously), for example, that the boatmen in Madras are most anxious for the safety of their European passengers because “should one single European be lost by a swamp, all the poor Blacks belonging to the boat are put to death.”77 Later, in an enthusiastic description of the hospital, Sophia initially lauds its policy of admitting “all indisposed persons,” only later refining it to all “Europeans,” an error that corresponds to the novel’s confusing references to “country-born” ladies, a term that can refer either to Europeans born in India or to mixed-race Anglo-Indians. From Sophia’s passing note that Indians cannot work as theater doorkeepers (because they have no authority) to her observation that her friendship with her Indian tutor is highly unusual, the book everywhere indirectly attests to the stringent racial hierarchy in colonial Calcutta. Sophia herself vacillates between contrasting observations, writing at first about the natives’ inherent docility but later attributing it to their religion, particularly the doctrine of metempsychosis, without which they would fall into wanton violence.78 This racial awareness erupts through the narrative surface in two major incidents that expose the threat of violence (to the British and Indians) endemic to colonial life. The first instance occurs during a routine tourist stop at the Black Hole memorial, an occasion that causes such an outpouring of feeling that the narrative abruptly stops: “the recollection of what I have related, so affected my spirits, that I begged to return home; and . . . shall endeavour to remember the concluding part of it no more.”79 Although others have forgotten the Black Hole, Sophia cannot, and a volley of cannon fire later in the novel sparks her fears of a second rebellion. The second trauma of the novel reverses the direction of colonial violence; just prior to

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her marriage to her English fiancée, Edmund Doyly, she learns of the rape of an Indian woman and the murder of her father by a British officer. As Sophia describes it, “the Eastern world is . . . the scene of tragedies that dishonour mankind. . . . I now rejoice, more than ever, that I am about to leave a country, where fiend-like acts are, I fear, much oftener perpetrated than detected.”80 Betty Joseph argues convincingly that the novel’s activation of sentiment in the Black Hole episode creates an individuation of historical trauma that reanimates the past while displacing responsibility.81 This is even more evident in the rape narration, where the reference to the tragedies of the “Eastern world” allows the locus of culpability to float uneasily between the East itself as a space of corruption and the colonial system that allows such horrors to go unprosecuted.82 Once again Sophia stops her narrative, ostensibly in order to turn the burden of witnessing over to the raped Indian woman and her “melancholy testimony.” Nicole Reynolds reads this as Gibbes’s activation of a silenced native voice, but in light of the novel’s abrupt jump to the concluding scene of Sophia’s return to England as a married woman, the productive unease of epistolary polyvalence ends, and rather than personalizing the experience (as with the Black Hole), the raped woman’s testimony is unrecorded and displaced by a scene of restorative British domesticity.83 Throughout the novel, despite Sophia’s pains to explain Hinduism, the bazaar, and the different types of native servants, Indians are mostly mute cogs in a delightful colonial machine. She explains that the British learn to use native phrases when communicating with servants and tradespeople, reserving English for “polite conversation,” thereby demonstrating English’s exclusivity and inadvertently presaging Charles Grant’s assertion of Britons’ superiority in language acquisition.84 The one exception among the natives is a Brahmin she meets, the nephew of her father’s seakar, or broker. Although their initial meeting takes place with the help of an interpreter, as their conversation becomes increasingly philosophical and amorous, it is clear that the Brahmin is speaking English.85 While this may merely be a case of authorial laxness on Gibbes’s part, the novel explicitly links sex and talking: the Brahmin’s celibacy is coded as “unsociable,” as Sophia describes how the joys of conversation surpass all other joys. . . . [T]hat I am a conversible being, is the attraction with this Gentoo devotee.—I therefore at length see, and subscribe to, the wisdom of confining

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Interpreting the Brahmin’s admiration as the result of his discovery of the pleasures of conversation, Sophia then describes him (and presumably all other hitherto silent Brahmins) as closeted converts, not to Christianity but to the religion of sociability. What she does not explicitly acknowledge in this letter is that her role as social evangelical has affected her as well. When a closely succeeding letter begins with her proclamation that she will “become a convert to the Gentoo faith, and have my Bramin to instruct me per diem,” the reader realizes that, as a “conversible being,” she is an eminently convertible being too.87 The Brahmin’s gift of true conversation sets him apart from her other vacuous (English) suitors, and it is this perceived ability that leads her to cast him as a potential lover even before they have met, as she reflects that: an admirer, Arabella, of his character would be to me a proof of my attractions I should be proud of. . . . The compliments I at present receive, are all of the commonplace kind, and may with equal propriety be addressed to any sister female; but to please a Bramin I must have perfections of the mental sort, little inferior to the purity and benignity of the angels. . . . [A]s celibacy is their [Brahmins’] engagement, the soul would be the only object of attachment and admiration. 88

In this rather audacious passage Sophia weaves together a spiritualerotic-intellectual complex, wanting the Brahmin as an intellectual admirer and acknowledging her pursuit of him as a kind of mental suitor. She sexualizes her intellectual ability, referring to her mental “attractions” and yearning for nonsisterly compliments. Even while neutering the implications of her comments by casting them in a religious light—ultimately, what is at stake is “only” her soul—religious discourse clearly provides an opportunity through which to explore otherwise unutterable feelings. Interestingly enough, on a different occasion the Brahmin, openly professing his admiration for Sophia, cites religion as a mechanism for coping with his feelings of excess sensibility (presumably his forbidden attraction to her). With religion thus alternately enhancing and suppressing feeling, the novel highlights the problematics of metanoia in Sophia’s supposed

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conversion to Hinduism. Much like her “orientalising,” her conversion seems merely rhetorical and, far from being an instance of going native, her announcement of supposed metanoia runs parallel to her eventual domestication; after the Brahmin dies, the narrative focuses more directly on her otherwise neglected fiancé. But the Brahmin’s death does not erase Sophia’s memory of him; rather, she plays on her understanding of Hindu metempsychosis to reincarnate him in her British lover: “Doyly shall figure away as my Bramin; and so well have I instructed him in every humane tenet of that humane religion that he will not hurt a butterfly.”89 From there the novel heightens this signification by turning the Brahmin’s questionable brown body into Doyly’s white one. In one of the novel’s concluding episodes Sophia receives the open admiration of the nabob of Chitpore, which causes Doyly great consternation. Reveling in this attention Sophia exclaims, “did you ever imagine your friend would make so magnificent a conquest?—Poor Doyly, how small he has felt himself ever since!—Forgive me my folly— I recollect my Bramin, and am myself again.”90 Here the Brahmin’s significance is truly revealed: he makes Sophia herself, and his translation into the white Doyly allows her domestication, now categorized as her true self. Similarly, Sophia’s analysis of the problems of effecting the Brahmin’s metanoia from silent asexual being to ardent conversationalist uncovers a subjective transformation that teeters between bringing the convert closer to his true self and allowing the convert to accept a normative subjectivity. This exposed conflict of true and constructed selves brings us back to Nussbaum’s insight that India teaches the Englishwoman to become herself, or, rather, the silenced domestic role she is expected to play: “as she translates India to England, she descends to a more traditional femininity. In the terms of the novel, India alters her irremediably.”91 India may be partly translated into England, as Nussbaum suggests, but it is both a foreignizing translation—one in which the target language alters and bends to fit the source—as well as a domesticating one. Sophia’s narrative inverts the more standard trope of the native female falling in love with the European male and thus fluctuates between maintaining and undermining gendered hegemony. The Brahmin, though not explicitly feminized, takes on effeminate aspects: it is his chastity, not Sophia’s, that is the barrier to any sort of union, and his rather convenient death foreshadows a proliferation of fictional exotic females whose deaths free their European lovers from potentially awkward situations.92 However,

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Gibbes’s novel pays refreshingly little attention to gender strictures or the importance of masculine or muscular imperialism. For both men and women, the theater, domestic life, and sociability are far more important than the hunts and expeditions of later colonial literature, and Sophia’s fiancée Doyly is praised for his abhorrence of hunting and his generally tender emotions. Despite or perhaps because of colonialism’s morbid subtext, Sophia writes the East as a site where sympathy is culturally inherent and transferable; her narrative of conversion exposes the benefits of “orientalising” beyond the corruption of the East so commonly associated with eighteenth-century Anglo India. Reading Hartly House as a narrative of conversion reveals the novel’s unpredictability and potential dialogism, as both Sophia and the Brahmin take turns as evangelical and convert. Although Gibbes carefully extinguishes the potential explosiveness of this encounter through the Brahmin’s timely demise, Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary takes on the challenge that Gibbes sidesteps and explicitly engages the negotiation between personal metanoia and social life. The Missionary explores the afterlife of de Quincey’s triumphant assertion of a transfigured ethics of metanoia by tracing the path of dialogic conversion in India, the difficulties of cultural translation, and the implications for the resultant social conflagration.

Translative Impasse By the time the Irish writer Sydney Owenson published her third novel The Wild Irish Girl in 1806, even generally supportive critics noted her tendency to overwrought language, romantic plots, and improbable characters. More adversarial critics accused her of moral sophistry, and of attempting to lead suspectible, novel-reading youth astray.93 Undaunted, Owenson would continue to employ the sentimental as a form through which to critique contemporary colonial policies. This insistence on the pairing of antiquated form with present politics parallels her ideological interest in the meeting of different cultural-temporal spaces. While sympathy in The Wild Irish Girl works toward establishing a community of feeling, the sympathetic trajectory in The Missionary engages a more problematic dialectic of feeling and difference. Despite some critical maligning of its style, The Wild Irish Girl’s popularity inspired a Celtic craze in Dublin and London, and when

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in society, Owenson was often called on to dress and act the part of her beautiful Irish heroine.94 While capitalizing on this exoticization, she remained a constant critic of English conduct in Ireland, and of English patriotism in general, favoring an intellectual cosmopolitanism that, in the wake of the French Revolution, was particularly unpopular. Owenson’s fictional critiques reflect this globalism; her travel novel Italy (1821) was such a searing indictment of the Hapsburg Empire that both the papal and Austrian governments banned the book and its author from their countries. (Not everyone detested the novel; Byron set aside his usual scorn of female authors and warmly approved of it.) The Missionary, however, is a peculiar text because its criticism is filtered through a web of historicopolitical allegory. Its setting in seventeenth-century Portuguese-controlled Goa alludes to colonial conditions in both nineteenth-century Ireland and India, while the novel’s description of the rapacious Spanish control of Portugal is meant to recall the nineteenth-century relationship between Britain and Ireland. In connecting seemingly different colonial histories into a unified genealogy of oppression, the novel presents an early awareness of the relationship between local and global colonialisms. On the strength of the novel’s metaphorical stew, many critics are apt to read it as primarily allegorical (India as Ireland): Balachandran Rajan declares that the India of Owenson’s novel is “not a real country but a contrivance, seen through the spectacles of Orientalist books,” an argument Julia Wright takes up to conclude that the novel’s interest in Portugal and India is only nominal.95 But such a conclusion belies the complexity of the allegory itself:creating strong parallels between different colonial locales, the novel does not so much elide colonies as compare them, a methodology replicated in her varied work on geopolitics.96 And much like the oriental tales of her male contemporaries, The Missionary seriously engages oriental scholarship: besides the novel’s multiple references to India’s role in shaping Western culture, its notes testify to its author’s real engagement with orientalist texts.97 Owenson’s republication of the novel as Luxima the Prophetess in response to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny further evinces the extent to which her intellectual and personal interests constantly engaged politics beyond Ireland. Owenson’s novels are generally classified as national tales, a genre Ina Ferris likens to translation because of its definition as a migratory text based around cultural interaction.98 Into the slower pedagogy of learning and experience (the journey through the foreign land

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that subtly influences the traveler), these narratives often feature a sudden turn, both emotional and physical, that alters the traveler’s previously closed consciousness.99 The immersive travel experienced by the protagonists of national tales naturally requires constant cultural and literal translation. The problem with this inherently translative genre, though, is the necessary cultural compromise the narratives embody: Ferris observes that target-based translation (translation oriented to the target language rather than the language’s source) offers a national identity based on its relation to the dominant language, which in turn constitutes national identity as porous by minimizing the importance of origins.100 When Owenson translates Irish customs for her British audience, then, their very translatability undermines their Irishness. From this, Ferris concludes that translation itself—whether sourceor target-based—is a potential cause for dismay because it represents cultural permeability and the mutability of cultural constructs. This unease over translation is conjured and then appeased in national tales like The Wild Irish Girl—particularly as it coincides with the female bildungsroman—as an inevitable clash between obsolete nationalists who must be removed for the construction of the modern nation and the female heroine whose marriage to the sympathetic cultural outsider-traveler symbolizes both modernity and national rebirth. In The Wild Irish Girl, Glorvina’s father, the ailing Irish prince, demonstrates the source-based nationalists’ impatience with translation when he laboriously corrects all of James Macpherson’s translative and cultural mistakes in Ossian, teaching the English Horatio the real stories.101 The prince, however, represents an outmoded way of living, and his objections to Horatio’s marriage with Glorvina (Horatio’s English ancestors deprived the prince of his lands) are forgotten after his death. In contrast to her father’s stultifying archaism, Glorvina’s marriage, and her constant translation of Irish customs to Horatio, moves Irish history and nationalism into the present day. The Missionary is modeled on the basic premises of national tales like The Wild Irish Girl and follows many of their conventions: the subsumption of the travel plot, the disorientation of the traveler who moves from “tourist” to “stranger,” and most importantly, the activation of cultural sympathy. However, its representative and symbolic layers—and the immutable foreignness of its subjects—tweak convention to produce an ending that is profoundly ambiguous and cannot resolve as neatly as the more “domestic” national tale. It is also ideologically unlike the oriental tale, which is so often concerned with

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the preservation and reproduction of a pristine cultural whole rather than on the dynamics of colonial interaction. The national grievance Ferris posits at the heart of the national tale is missing from the oriental novel, which substitutes for the nation a more nebulous evocation of specific oriental spaces marked by an explicit lack of national identity. Relatedly, the demonstration of the Humean sympathetic encounter via romance is troubled by the impossibility of consummation between racially incompatible characters. The national tale, at least in its early phases, uses marriage to signify cultural rapprochement but the oriental novel, as we will see, cannot utilize the sympathetic encounter in this way. Thus the impossible romantic encounter in The Missionary has a far more radical potential as it engenders sympathy in the reader without the possibility of an acceptable denouement. From the very beginning, The Missionary’s descriptions of the departure of the nobleman and missionary Hilarion from Portugal to Spanish-controlled Goa upend the standard loci of sympathy. Sympathy in the national tale generally involves a reversal in trajectory that renders the dominant culture of the reader wan and ineffectual in contrast to the rich habitat of the foreign, but The Missionary complicates this activation of sympathy through its protagonists’ distance in space, time, and culture.102 As a fifteenth-century Catholic monk, Hilarion is alien to the British reading public even before his departure to India. Although his initial characterization as an emotionally repressed monk was certainly familiar to an English audience steeped in gothic fiction, the monks in M. G. Lewis’s and Ann Radcliffe’s novels would have evoked sinister associations for Owenson’s audience. Hilarion, however, is not an agent of destruction, but a wellmeaning if overzealous missionary who is schooled in sympathetic understanding through his sexual and spiritual love for the Indian “priestess” (specifically a bramacharini, or female celibate) Luxima. Like the German Pietists, Hilarion favors an assimilated, trickledown approach to conversion and views Luxima’s baptism as the key to stimulating a mass, subcontinental transformation. With this as his goal, he travels from colonial Goa to Luxima’s home in Kashmir (the edenic heart of India in the eighteenth-century imagination), where he meets and unconsciously falls in love with her over a series of tremulous, sexually and spiritually charged trysts. After these clandestine meetings are ultimately discovered, Luxima is excommunicated and travels with Hilarion to Goa as a newly baptized, if balky, Christian. Suffering numerous hardships along the way, the two are eventually

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captured by scheming Jesuits (a more familiar trope to Owenson’s audience), who try Hilarion under the Inquisition and sentence him to death. However, at the auto-da-fé, Luxima, having escaped from a convent, attempts to fling herself into the pyre to save the missionary. This sparks a riot by the watching Indians against the Spanish, and Luxima and Hilarion escape in the ensuing melee. Before the lovers (and readers) can rejoice, Hilarion discovers that Luxima has received a fatal knife blow meant for him, and she dies after reaffirming her Hindu identity. Ultimately, Spanish troops repel the native uprising, and Hilarion returns to Kashmir to end his days in the valley where he first met his beloved Hindu priestess. In her reading of The Missionary, Gauri Viswanathan argues that the novel belies its radical promise because its regressive version of conversion denies the potential of spiritual transformation in favor of traditional sectarianism: Luxima never fully converts, and she dies breathing the name of a Hindu deity. Conversion is, by Viswanathan’s definition, an act of reading whereby cultural assumptions are critically reexamined through the perspectival shifts occasioned by the introduction of something new. Viswanathan’s book Outside the Fold details the process by which Indians who converted to Christianity became spectral figures recognized by neither their former communities nor the colonial government that had tacitly encouraged their conversions. In her analysis, the fissures caused by conversion and the subsequent backlash ultimately cede more power to the state, which functions as the neutral mediator of social splintering. Viswanathan concludes that liberal colonial administrators realized that Anglicized Indians were a more attainable, less controversial goal than Christianized Indians and abandoned native converts to fend for themselves. In contrast to these real-life converts, Owenson’s heroine dies clinging to Hinduism, a gesture that Viswanathan reads as a denial of the radical potential of conversion.103 Although Owenson uses the sentimental novel as the basis of sympathetic understanding for the reader (and not for the glories of Christian conversion), Owenson’s novel champions a quasi-sacral metanoia that identifies certain modes of conversion—not conversion absolutely—as imperfect models for personal and national liberation. Luxima’s failure to convert evinces the limits of the oriental novel, but Hilarion’s conversion from obdurate evangelical to sympathetic protoecumenist is where the radical promise of Owenson’s model comes to the fore. The novel’s purpose is ultimately to seek a

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new vocabulary for religious self-identification and reimagine rather than deny the value of spiritual transformation. Owenson’s story meshes the national tale (the story of a presumptuous stranger who learns the value of native customs, generally portrayed as impressive and rich) with a broader trope of unfulfilled exotic desire (in which the two cultures are not actually permitted any physical union). Gary Kelly observes that both “bardic nationalism” and what he calls “oriento-colonialism” are based on similar premises: a unification of cultural identity based on a now-fragmented cultural history.104 Certainly an uncanny referential affiliation exists between national and oriental tales, if only because many national tales trace cultural identity and the right to cultural sovereignty to Eastern roots: in The Wild Irish Girl, references to Ireland’s Milesian past and to the Eastern origins of various Irish customs abound. There is, however, a marked distinction between the two. National tales like The Wild Irish Girl offer hope for cultural reconciliation and difference in unity within the scope of political and personal union. Oriental tales, as we have seen, rarely move past racial and cultural incommensurability. So while the East in national tales becomes a marker of cultural pride (the Irish are not primitive yahoos, but the inheritors of an ancient culture), the East in the oriental tale always remains the East and is never allowed the jump into modernity that “union” affords. The Missionary straddles these two genres, melding aspects of the national tale with the oriental and, most tantalizingly, dangling the promise of potential union even to its very end. Luxima’s dying plea to Hilarion is: When I am no more, thou shalt preach, not to the Brahmins only, but to the Christians, that the sword of destruction which has been this day raised between the followers of thy faith, and of mine, may be forever sheathed! . . . [T]hou wilt soothe away, by acts of tenderness, and words of kindness, the stubborn prejudice which separates the mild Hindu from his species; and thou wilt check the Christian’s zeal, and bid him follow the sacred lesson of the God he serves, who, for years beyond the Christian era, has extended his merciful indulgence to the errors of the Hindu’s mind, and bountifully lavished on his native soil those wondrous blessings which first tempted the Christians to seek our happier regions.105

Although Viswanathan reads Luxima’s persistent Hinduism, her failure to fully convert, as evidence of the novel’s “inability to carve out a space where religious sensibility might flourish as a product of the self-creating experience of conversion,” she neglects the priestess’s

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petition for the dual conversion of both Hindus and Christians in this speech which reaffirms the inherent value of conversion while protesting its application within a system of coercion and domination. But Owenson’s insistence on Luxima’s obdurate religious conviction also stems from the author’s failure to conceive of a national identity in India, the pivotal concept propelling her oeuvre. As Hilarion travels through the country there is very little sense of unified identity—largely, it is suggested, because of caste divisions—and no sense of “center.” Even the representation of Kashmir as the beautifully static heart of Hindu India is punctuated by hints of growing unrest between warring Mughal factions, finally erupting at the end with the victory of Aurangazebe and his “bloody train.” Aurangazebe’s victory has especial meaning in the context of the novel because his usurpation of the throne marked the end of Mughal tolerance for Hinduism, creating yet another historical chronotope for the events that led to the 1806 Vellore Massacre, the historical event that inspired the novel’s concluding uprising. Despite Owenson’s approbation of certain Indian philosophies, namely advaita, or nondualism, Hinduism is represented as immutably unyielding and often grotesque; Luxima’s excommunication, for example, which takes place in a subterranean temple filled with hideous carvings and idols, evokes an exotically untouchable past not recoverable in modernity. Owenson may emulate classic orientalist stances on many Indian topics (Hilarion’s observation that Hinduism “wants but the holy impress of revelation, to stamp it as divine” smacks of William Jones), but her depictions of caste as an insidious social fragmentor repudiate the tacit orientalist approval of caste and foreshadow James Mill’s denunciations in their vehemence. Straddling orientalist and Anglicist convictions, the novel also has many moments that reify rather than reject colonial condescension. Critics have most frequently commented on Owenson’s use of Milton to, among other things, rigidly gender both East and West; and although the novel’s gendering of sympathy allows Luxima an agency Hilarion lacks, their passion is fueled by Luxima’s adoration and near-total surrender to an unmistakably superior individual.106 The relationship between the two is further charged by Luxima’s constant reference to Hilarion as “Father,” a title that alters in signification as their relationship progresses. As the missionary reluctantly discovers, spiritual and fleshly love are symptomatically similar and difficult to extricate from each other. While Luxima’s address of Hilarion as

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“Father” places him in the position of spiritual (and cultural) superiority, it makes the priest uncomfortable as his love for Luxima deepens and the term takes on shades of familial and personal meaning quite removed from their austere spiritual connotations, ultimately becoming downright embarrassing after he proclaims his ardor. This overlapping of spiritual and sexual language persists through the novel, paralleling Luxima’s divided subjectivity as a conflicted Christian novice and a love-struck Indian priestess. She is the novel’s ultimate embodiment of cultural fissure, the fleshly incarnation of an India that, from rigid caste divisions to the bitterly polarized Goans, is depicted as essentially fractured. The inevitable effect of these divisions come to a head during Luxima’s attempted sati during the autoda-fé. As her mind translates Hindu ritual into Catholic, her body registers the merging of these disparate ideologies: The sudden appearance of the singular phantom [Luxima] struck the imagination of the credulous and awed multitude. . . . The Christians fixed their eyes upon the cross, which glittered on a bosom whose beauty scarcely seemed of mortal mould. . . . The Hindoos gazed upon the sacred impress of Brahma, marked on the brow of his consecrated offspring. . . . A sudden impulse was given to feelings long suppressed—the timid spirits of the Hindus rallied to an event which touched their hearts and roused them from their lethargy of despair;—the sufferings, the oppression they had so long endured, seemed now epitomized before their eyes, in the person of their celebrated and distinguished Prophetess.107

Luxima’s appearance is an inversion of Pentecost. The various interpretations of her by the crowd lead not to universal understanding, but to an awareness of incommensurate difference. Or to use Humean terms, although the entire crowd experiences a mutual idea of her appearance, the impression of her is variously manifested, and the different significations of this simultaneous translation result in violence. Owenson’s description of the traumatic beauty of cultural hybridity is the culmination of the novel’s perpetual vacillation between the privileging of either cultural purity or mélange. Its beginning pages— a description of Hilarion’s monastery set amid the ruins of a Moorish castle—describe a European world that is both sublime and culturally porous. Hilarion, in particular, is molded by his immersion in historical palimpsest: “the ruins of Moorish splendour, the vestiges of Roman prowess; the pile of monastic gloom;—magnificent assemblage of great and discordant images! . . . What a powerful influence were not your wilderness and your solemnity . . . calculated to

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produce upon the mind of religious enthusiasm . . . as thine, Hilarion!”108 Contrasting the mix of cultures in Europe, Owenson describes India and particularly Kashmir in classically orientalist terms; traveling down the Indus, Hilarion discovers that the habits and customs of the people correlate exactly with the accounts of Alexander the Great. This magnificent stasis contrasts the historical chaos of Portugal, but again unlike The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson never absolutely endorses one cultural model over the other. Although Luxima’s character and characterization, like Glorvina’s before her, captured the imagination of Owenson’s readers (most notably Percy Shelley, who described the protagonist as “perfect” and repeatedly exhorted friends to read the novel), the novel’s sustained interest is Hilarion’s transformation.109 Unlike the wild Irish girl, Luxima as a character has no life beyond the pages of the novel. Owenson might have replicated Glorvina in the drawing room, but Luxima is so irretrievably other, so enmeshed in a past and foreign culture, that even her religious dilemmas are not represented with the same psychological depth and precision as the missionary’s. While her subjective split leads to her death, it ultimately enables her to act as a catalyst for Hilarion’s transformation. Although he hopes to use Luxima’s conversion as a model, in her dying speech she counters that her death is a more valuable tool for mutual cultural translation. Owenson’s insistence on Luxima’s inevitable telos as sacrificial object is troubling, but the novel’s depiction of her sympathetic agency reverses the direction of improvement from East to West. Luxima’s Indianness may doom her to a perpetual, beautiful stasis, but Hilarion’s Portuguese identity is an indication of Owenson’s interest in the complex intersection of global and local empires. His dual role as oppressor and oppressed parallels the involvement of dispossessed British soldiers in the conquest of India; Owenson would doubtless have been aware of the active role Irish troops played in the Vellore Massacre, the rebellion and ultimate suppression of native soldiers that the novel paratextually parallels to the riot following the auto-da-fé.110 He is a member of a colonized nation, which may also account for the immediate sympathy between himself and Luxima (who, thanks to the novel’s shifting temporal allegory, is arguably retroactively colonized), that “relation” that Hume mentions repeatedly as a catalyst for sympathetic transformation. But the monk possesses a warped sensibility, his solitary life having dulled what Hume would define as his natural human instinct for the social.111 Although his

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whole purpose is to effect metanoia in Luxima and, in turn, the subcontinent, it is his own transformation that the novel dwells on. The Missionary is, at heart, a portrait of a complex diagetic (and extradiagetic) exoticism expressed through the missionary’s psychological-sympathetic evolution. Owenson meticulously details Hilarion’s mutable mental state, paying particular attention to his suppression and reconstruction of sympathetic feeling: The complexional springs of passion in the character of the Missionary had been regulated and restrained by the habits of his temperate and solitary life. . . . [T]hough his perceptions were quick and rapid in their exercise, yet he had so accustomed his mind to distrust his first impulse that, all enthusiast as he was, he was less so from the vivacity of a first impression than from the mental operation which succeeded to it. The idea which was cooly admitted to his mind gradually possessed itself of his imagination and there gave birth to a series of impressions and emotions, which, in their combined force, finally mastered every thought and act of his life. . . . [I]t was thus that he frequently meditated himself into passion, and that the habits of his artificial character produced an effect on his conduct similar to that which the indulgence of his natural impulses would eventually have given birth to.112

Although at first glance the results of both analysis and spontaneous feeling seem to garner the same results, Owenson later refers to this zealous guarding of his sensations as “hypochondriasm.” Ironically, the monk’s exertion of mental discipline leads to a total loss of control, described much like the Hindu riot at the auto-da-fé, as his life is “mastered” by his overwrought impressions. What Hume describes as a seamless translation of idea into impression is turned by the missionary into an overwrought, artificial approximation of the same thing, or the mental equivalent of adaptive translation. Indeed, The Missionary is full of subtle instances of translation and mistranslation as the two emotionally connected but spiritually divided protagonists attempt to make sense of their religious differences. Hilarion is himself a literal translator—he gives Luxima a copy of the scriptures in “the Hindu language,” but she responds to his attempts to insist on a theistic rationalist interpretation of Christianity with incomprehension, always insisting on the similarities between their two religions.113 Her lexicon is fundamentally sympathetic in nature, and combined with her practice of advaitic nondualism, the philosophical belief in the indistinguishability of the Self and the Whole, she continually translates his statements of difference

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into acknowledgments of sameness. Throughout the novel Hilarion’s lack of fellow feeling hinders his attempts to translate the Bible meaningfully: during his first address to a Brahminical conclave about the “mandate of the Omnipotent,” his audience remains unmoved and returns easily to its own doctrine, “persuaded,” as the narrator points out, but not “convinced.” Contrastingly, Hilarion most impresses Luxima with his religious conviction when he prays for her and addresses her as “daughter,” merging spirituality with human feeling. Without this mutual human sympathy Owenson argues, spirituality takes on a masturbatory quality, as the missionary’s internal struggle between his religious calling and his innate desires manifests itself physically: “the blood flowed like a burning torrent in his veins, his heart quickened in its throb to a feverish pulsation—he trembled, he shuddered, he prayed, and was resigned.”114 Hilarion’s encounters with Luxima continually hover on the verge of orgasm before fitfully dissipating; his Certeauvian “ravishment”—the suspension of cultural-temporal boundaries during the ethnographic encounter—is thus manifested as an expression of his unfulfilled capacity for the social.115 While de Certeau’s definition of “ravishment” neglects the term’s violent implications, Owenson’s faith in the redemptive power of the personal locates the violence of ethnographic ravishment outside intimate encounters and in the greater colonial structure. As Outside the Fold recounts, converts to Christianity were ultimately neglected by the state and ultimately left to live a liminal existence between communities. Cast out from their Indian Eden, but unsanctioned by any higher authority, Luxima and Hilarion’s loss of cultural identity is synonymous with social death and mental derangement. Hilarion’s metanoia is folded into his personal bildung and thus he at least physically survives the violence of the novel’s end. But Luxima’s immutability and incomplete metanoia lead to a traumatic splitting of subjectivity that can only end with the fatal knife wound. By the novel’s conclusion, the Jesuits and the Kashmiri peasants’ misinterpretations of Hilarion as Luxima’s seducer demonstrate (both Indian and European) society’s tendency to read all cultural encounter in terms of mere ravishment. To say that Owenson does not believe in cultural translation and transference is misleading; both Luxima and Hilarion personally if temporarily benefit from their cultural and personal exchange. But the novel also acknowledges the futility of personal metanoia in an unchanging world; in particular, Hilarion’s admission to the disguised

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Jesuits about his changed attitude toward conversion evinces the limited potential of individual ethical transformation. It is no surprise, then, that the failure of Luxima and Hilarion’s romance intersects with the national tale’s general turn away from matrimony as the panacea for colonial conflict.116 Again, Owenson’s portrayal of India cannot be easily equated to the national tale’s definition of the nation through the depiction of thick cultural continuity; India’s stasis is the result of an ancient fragmentation, and the novel’s ending reference to the coming battle between warring Mughals is not so much an allusion to the imminent arrival of the British as much as an indication of internal and endemic schisms. Thus in the history of the movement from national tale to historical novel, the oriental novel contributes to but is also exceptional from both the national tale’s absorption of the stranger within the regional chronotope and the historical novel’s depiction of the present’s subsumption of the past.117 The Missionary has been read as generically and ideologically representative of the shift from orientalist to Anglicist modes of governance in the early nineteenth century, but it was also completed during a transitional period for the author, as she was refashioning her idea of the national heroine and, fittingly, futilely resisting her patrons’ active efforts to marry her off.118 Perhaps influenced by The Missionary’s bleak end, Owenson’s next novel, O’Donnel (1814), marks a deliberate turn away from her earlier, easily sentimental heroines to more complex female protagonists.119 Although Luxima herself is the epitome of this early sentimental model, the failure of union in the novel evinces Owenson’s growing dissatisfaction with the microcosmic potential of personal union within a colonial macrocosm. Her revision and republication of the novel immediately after the catastrophic events of 1857 suggests that, for the author, India remained an important signifier for the failure of empire.120

Memorials Hartly House’s opening description of India as a vast cemetery is echoed in its constant references to tombstones, graveyards, and other emblems of British frailty. The novel’s weirdest example of memorialization, though, is the “pagoda” Sophia promises to build in England to honor the dead Brahmin. (Contrary to all orthodox Indian custom, she also has a mourning locket made of his hair.) The Missionary has a similar conclusion: after Hilarion dies, neighboring

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Kashmiri shepherds find an altar in his grotto that contains an urn labeled “Luxima” that contains ashes, a Brahminical thread, and a bloody cross. Hilarion’s solitary existence after Luxima’s death is in direct contrast with her plea to use her death to foment mutual conversion. Once again returning to the life of a monastic recluse, he dwindles into insignificance just as massive historical changes occur. The futility of mutual cultural translation is embodied in the double significance of the urn on the altar, which, as “Luxima,” is both the funereal vessel as well as its contents (her ashes and the religious objects symbolic of her fatally split subjectivity). Although Hilarion does not effect social change, the altar’s substitution of a cross for a “Luxima” containing the cross may be read as Hilarion’s conversion to a quasi-humanist who worships the memory of the woman and her symbolic import instead of the cross’s religious import. Reflecting the novel’s interest in the vagaries of semiosis, the altar inadvertently becomes a memorial of a greater religious tragedy after Hilarion’s own death, as the nearby Indians reinterpret it as a reminder of the “seduction” of their beloved priestess by a treacherous stranger. While the construction of Hilarion’s altar fits the narrative’s tragic trajectory, the purpose of Sophia’s pagoda is more evasive. After describing India as one vast memorial to dead Britons, her desire to build a memorial to the Brahmin in England has multiple significations. While clearly alluding to the often-mocked Anglo-Indian mansions of returned nabobs, the fact that Sophia intends to build a pagoda and not a palace seems to hint at a more substantive hybridity beyond the display of wealth. It is also wholly unnecessary; besides the memorial locket, the Brahmin’s reincarnated presence in her husband makes it unlikely he will be soon forgotten. Sophia notes, however, that the pagoda is really not for her, but is there to “perpetuate the remembrance to my, or, what will be exactly the same thing, your [Arabella’s] posterity.”121 This elision of future generations, and Sophia and Arabella’s identities, does not absolutely explain the pagoda, but it reminds us that the novel’s shared letters do form something like an epistolary memorial that, like the pagoda itself, extends beyond Sophia’s limited time in India to influence the British reading public. Memorials are constructed for those who have not witnessed, and like that more bureaucratic form of hypomnesis (or rememoration), the archive, they provide crucial information to those who come after,

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not as a series of specific moments (like the archive) but as an outpouring of emotion. With their conjoining of archival information and sympathetic experience, both Hartly House and The Missionary embody the “heterogeneous dimensions of remembrance” that make up the true memorial: the threshold between the inexpressible “unforgettable” and the collective impersonal of the archive.122 It is also clear from the work of the last two chapters that one of the major differences between the oriental tale and the oriental novel is their relationship to the imperial archive. While the oriental tale works in tandem with the archive of materials it draws from, oriental novels, even while using the archive, also provide us with pieces that are missing from it. Thus the metanoia of cultural and physical romance in the oriental novel ultimately provides a challenging counterpoint to dominant narratives of imperialism. We cannot forget, however, that the transformations represented in these novels are only available to the British in India. The Indians in these novels are incapable of true metanoia, an attitude that, ironically, runs counter to evangelical projects that hoped to effect precisely the kind of subjective transformation in their Indian converts that proved impossible in fiction. Imperialism’s prolepsis presents a necessary impossibility at the heart of the colonial encounter that is instantiated in these novels’ depictions of failed romance.123

ch a p t er four

“Paths Too Long Obscure”: The Translations of Jones and Müller Blood may be thicker than water, but language is thicker than blood

max müller

Would the declaration of rights translate into Shanscrit?

jeremy bentham

Segmentary Lineage David Kopf characterizes Warren Hastings’s tenure as governor-general of Bengal after 1773 as indicative of his and the East India Company’s “transformation from merchant to empire-builder,” a reinvention marked by Hastings’s desire to administer from within Indian institutions.1 This policy of cultural “grafting” necessitated immersion in oriental learning, but as we have seen, the increasing Anglicization of legal and educational systems of Hastings’s successors made it steadily more difficult for scholars to justify their work on the grounds of usefulness. This is not to suggest that orientalist translation died out or became solely the interest of a small coterie of intellectuals; on the contrary, this chapter takes up the work of two of the most influential translators of the long nineteenth century—Sir William Jones and Max Müller—in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Romantic orientalism was interpolated into Victorian concerns about religion, language, and race. Between their prolific careers, these two men were responsible for developing a linguistic and mythological comparatism with farreaching effects. This was not, however, a seamless process: in Müller’s redefinition of Jones’s founding comparatism we may trace the battles over the very purpose of orientalist studies across the century. Both scholars were employees of the East India Company, but Jones’s tenure in India was shaped by enthusiastic governmental support and a broad public interest in the potential of the East. Beginning his own work in 98

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Oxford less than a century later, Müller repeatedly struggled with an administration that was by turns hostile and indifferent; in order to appeal to the public he had to demonstrate the relevance of his research to the scientific-linguistic discoveries of the late nineteenth century. While Jones’s translations stemmed in large part from his administrative tasks in India and the specific governmental necessities of the East India Company, Müller’s less material, more conceptual interests in a general comparative pedagogy, and his interest in the mythocultural basis of the Aryan arche, led to significant differences not only in the methods but the subjects of their translations. This chapter cannot hope to cover the work and influence of these two men in their entirety. Rather, it demonstrates how considering Jones alongside Müller provides a segmentary lineage of the translative decisions faced by orientalists as the century progressed, and how India as the site of Eden in the Romantic imagination was transformed into India as the origin of religion in the Victorian age. 2 The literary and political consequences of their scholarship comes to light in the chapter’s concluding section on two of the most famous translations-pseudotranslations of the century: Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (1859) and Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879).

Translation and Poesis The critical bibliography on Sir William Jones offers an illuminating glimpse into the current academic indecision over the ideological bent of early orientalism. Jones scholarship is divided between almost hagiographical accounts of the scholar’s numerous accomplishments and Saidian denunciations of his textual imperialism and administrative role in the empire. Unlike that of other important colonial personalities, the current reception of Jones cannot be neatly delineated along an axis of before and after the advent of postcolonial studies: recent and thoughtful scholars and critics of imperialism are often among Jones’s most ardent admirers.3 They point to his liberal, Whiggish sensibilities, his disdain for aristocratic privilege, and his genuine admiration for the literary works of Persia and India. Opposing critics highlight his active contempt for native pundits, a repeated suspicion of native honesty, and his all-too-conventional belief in the Indian inability for self-governance that contrasted with his cautious support for American independence from Britain. (He was a good friend of

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Benjamin Franklin, who referred to India as “that corrupting country.”)4 Offering a corrective mode of scholarship to both these positions, Rosane Rocher advocates “recover[ing] in as rich a texture as possible [orientalist scholarship’s] bicultural nature.”5 Taking up that challenge, I argue that the most richly textured of Jones’s works are those he seemed to regard the least: his poetry, into which his massive scholarship on music, botany, religion, language, and law was distilled. Reading Jones’s poetic work, especially the Hindoo Hymns, his series of poems on Hindu deities, demonstrates how broadly useful models like Balachandra Rajan’s, of Jonesian benevolence versus Mill-Hegel authoritarianism, are complicated by Jones’s own hinging position between those polemics. When his poetry is considered together with his translative and legal achievements, Jones the ideal eighteenth-century man of letters also emerges as the embodiment of colonialism’s dialectical imperative.6 When Jones arrived in India in 1783 he had already achieved remarkable fame as an orientalist and a linguist based largely on his Grammar of the Persian Language, which was an important reference through the nineteenth century, being reprinted nine times between 1771 and 1828 alone. Jones arrived in India shortly before Warren Hastings was summoned back to England and was part of the East India Company’s transition from supposed “nabobism” to the more self-consciously British forms of rule adapted by Hastings’s successor, Lord Charles Cornwallis. Although Cornwallis, like his predecessor, supported the advancement of orientalist scholarship, he also moved the colonial government along a path of Anglicization. In particular, his administrative racism paralleled Jones’s systematic attempts to strip away the influence of Hindu and Muslim legal pundits in colonial courts of law. Despite his republicanism, Jones believed very strongly that India necessitated rule by a sovereign British power. This belief inspired his program of legal translation in which native judges and legal interpreters would be replaced with translations of their own laws: as Saree Makdisi describes it, “Jones’s project involved not merely what Gauri Viswanathan refers to as ‘reverse acculturation’ but an attempt to virtually simulate and even to replicate the other, to understand the other ‘from within,’ to contain the threat of otherness not by transforming it but by reproducing it in a controlled system.”7 The pervasive influence of native pundits preoccupied Jones and crops up repeatedly in his correspondence as well as in essays like “The Best

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Practicable System of Judicature,” where his outline of the relation between the British, native scholars, and indigenous knowledge is telling: “The laws of the natives must be preserved inviolate; but the learning and vigilance of the English judge must be a check upon the native interpreters.”8 Despite Jones’s rejection of aesthetic mimesis and direct translation in literature, he insisted on the rigidity of legal translations to a fault. The legal interpretation done by Indian legal pundits (which he referred to as “lying”) was seen by Jones as akin to the common law he disliked and had fought against during his legal career in Britain.9 Thus Jones’s mistrust of legal pundits was at least in part a reflection of his many problems with the British legal system, and his systematic legal translations were calculated to make the Indian legal system follow the spirit, if not the letter, of his as yet unrealized ideals for British law.10 Practically speaking, the path to wresting legal control away from pundits could run a convoluted course; in a letter to Sir John Macpherson, Jones reported that he had “made the pundit of our [Jones’s] court read and correct a copy of Halhed’s book [A Code of Gentoo Laws, which Halhed had translated into English via Bengali and Persian] in the original Sanscrit, and I then oblige him to attest it as good law, so that he never now can give corrupt opinions, without certain detection.”11 This strain in his letters corresponds with his regret over the Indian incapacity for democracy. Both Jones and Hastings were insistent on adopting indigenous forms of law (as they understood them), and their earnest efforts at translating law treatises were spurred by their desire to prove that India had not been ruled by lawless despotism, but by a series of strict codes, although this did not sway their fundamental belief in natives’ incapability for selfrule.12 Jones’s translative work provided the basis for the 1793 Permanent Settlement Act (which made zamindars—revenue collectors and public functionaries under the Mughals—the hereditary owners of landed property) , and it seems that at least some of the implications of this far-reaching act—the deep structural changes to Indian agrarian practices made on the premise of mutuality, the attempt to reconfigure Indian land holdings to resemble rural Britain—are reflected in Jones’s particular style and attitude toward translations of Sanskrit texts as well as his own orientalist poetry: an attempt to retain original content while Anglicizing the form.13 Garland Cannon argues that the publication of Jones’s Persian Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick

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Languages in 1772 and then the first Hindoo poems in the 1785 Asiatic Miscellany rescued the legitimacy of free translation-adaptation from the “hoax poem” scandals of the 1760s and began “a drive for translations and imitations that were imagining themselves along anthropological lines.”14 In his musings on translation, Jones seems less interested in literal translation than in channeling the spirit of the original author into the translator, which allows the translator both creative freedom (because the translator is a catalyst rather than simply a conduit) and the position of collaborator in the process of literary creation: “read the original so frequently, and study it so carefully, as to imprint on the mind a complete idea of the author’s peculiar air and distinguishing features; and then to assume, as it were, his person, voice, countenance, gesture; and to represent the man himself speaking in our language instead of his own.”15 Jones’s rules of translation echo popular eighteenth-century elocution manuals, which insisted that the imitation of a gesture or facial expression produced not a facsimile of the emotion the gesture represented but the original emotion itself. Translation and the body—both characterized as secondary and dependent on some original text or internal sensation—were transformed from passive vehicles into mediums for inspiration.16 This critical perspective was not limited to translation; as the title of the famous essay “On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative” indicates, Jones rejected Aristotelian mimesis in favor of “Eastern” imagination and emotion as sources of poetic innovation. Poetry and music are not mimetic for Jones, but express harmonies that are part of nature, so artists become participants in nature’s creative process rather than mere imitators: “thus will each artist gain his end, not by imitating the works of nature, but by assuming her power, and causing the same effect upon the imagination, which her charms produce to the senses. . . . [G]reat effects are not produced by minute details, but by the general spirit of the whole piece.”17 This sense of translative engagement would permeate Jones’s own verse and provide the inspiration for his poetic invocations of “native voice.” In Jones’s fleeting references to the Hymns, which he wrote intermittently during his first several years in India, they are generally referred to as a welcome diversion from his more arduous administrative pursuits, but they are better understood as creative examples of his evolving translative praxis.18 When Sacontalá was published in 1789, Jones was surprised to find himself credited as the author rather than as the translator, and his response thereafter was to insist

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on the veracity and scholarly nature of his translations. But earlier, with the publication of his first book of verse, Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Tongues (1772), Jones had already stepped into potentially risky territory, moving away from purely functional translations into multisource texts creatively pieced together and labeled “translations,” and thus taking him into a literary field saturated with oriental tales of varying degrees of inauthenticity.19 Zak Sitter has argued that in response, Jones created his own mode of authenticity that both acknowledged and domesticated difference. 20 Sitter’s argument that Jones’s poetry in Poems demonstrates the kinship between European and Eastern literature certainly prefigures the later linguistic discoveries delineated in On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India, but Jones did not rely on a single method of poetic domestication or authentication; rather, as the evolution of his poetry indicates, he experimented with different methods. An early one is his acknowledgment of the original text by presenting it below his own translation, as he does for “A Persian Song of Hafiz,” a gesture that Sitter argues “dramatize[s] its [oriental difference’s] successful assimilation within the field of English letters.”21 But later, in his verse tale The Enchanted Fruit; or, The Hindu Wife: An Antediluvian Tale Written in the Province of Bihar (1784), Jones abandons both Anglicization and careful authentication, turning instead to dense annotation in order to give his original poem a sense of immersive authenticity. Indeed the first lines of the poem, which he wrote soon after his arrival in India, seem written primarily to confuse and distance, rather than enlighten or soothe, the average reader: “O LOVELY age, by Brahmens fam’d / Pure Setye Yug in Sanscrit named . . . not that, by Deities defended / Fish, Boar, Snake, Lion, heav’n-descended.”22 The first twenty-two lines alone have nine footnotes and would have bewildered all but the most learned reader with its onslaught of unfamiliar references. The Enchanted Fruit was published under the pseudonym Raj Lakshi Debi well into the 1870’s. The Hymns, in contrast, eschew both The Enchanted Fruit’s heavyhanded, often confounding translation through immersion, as well as “Hafiz’s” scrupulous incorporation of the original poem. Even more significantly, several of the Hymns also quietly drop the prelapsarian conceit of The Enchanted Fruit to represent an India that is defined mythologically and historically. Jones’s innovation in the Hymns, which he began writing in 1784 and composed sporadically over several years, was to preface each

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poem with an introduction, or “argument,” replacing the internal glosses. Eliminating explanation from the body of the poem might have served as a compromise between the annotation-heavy Enchanted Fruit and Jones’s declaration in his translation of the Persian Moallak’at (1782) that his own notes were ornamental and unessential to the text. 23 Kate Teltscher argues that “th[e] close association of the Argument with the hymns, the continuous exchange between the didactic and poetic voices, gives the Hymns something of the air of poetic exercises, as if they were demonstrations of the poetic possibilities of the prose introductions,” echoing those early reviews of Vathek that privileged the notes over the tale. 24 Certainly they are remarkable paratextual performances that situate the poems in a dense linguistic, mythological, textual (and sometimes overtly political) apparatus that serve as both interpretive and legitimizing agents for the succeeding poems. Abandoning footnotes, which suggest the persistent presence of the author, the argument interprets a poem before the reader even gets to it but abandons that control once the poetic threshold is crossed, a device that in the Hymns is reinforced by the poems’ rarely (but significantly) breached conceit of native supplication. This negotiation between authorial (here explicitly Western) control and interpretive (oriental) freedom is augmented by the arguments’ intellectual variety. In the argument to “Hymn to Camadeo,” for example, Jones provides the reader with his etymological proofs of the similarity between “Kamadeva” and the Greek “Cupid,” but these have nothing to do with the descriptions in the poem. Rather, they serve to contextualize the poem within a Jonesian linguistic framework. Contrarily, Jones provides some of Kama’s many names in the argument, but not two of the key ones he uses in the verse: “Eternal Cama! Or doth Smara bright, / Or proud Ananga give thee more delight? / Whate’er thy seat, whate’er thy name / Seas, Earth, and Air thy reign proclaim.” Are Smara and Ananga names for Kama (which they are) or names of his different seats? Neither the poem nor its argument provides an absolute answer. While the works in his 1772 Poems gesture to the oriental wholes from which they were extracted even while they display their adaptive possibility, the later Hindoo Hymns are the offspring of a dense orientalist network that cannot be absolutely traced to specific originals: even while Jones situates the poems for his readers, he resists fully translating his Sanskrit incorporations, allowing instead for moments of incomprehension and interpretation. Translation and poetry mingle so closely that,

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despite (or perhaps because of) the arguments’ scholarly cataloguing, the poems reveal translation’s inherent literariness. After providing a metatexual framework, Jones seems content to allow his readers greater freedom to translate unfamiliar terms for themselves. Thus, the Hymns convey not only the viewpoint of the native worshipper but also the liminal experience of a translator hovering between two languages. Contrary to popular belief, Jones came to India with little or no desire to learn Sanskrit, and even after his interest was piqued he often complained about its difficulty; he had to send both “Camdeo” and “A Hymn to Narayena” to Charles Wilkins for corrections and for the meanings of Sanskrit words he did not know. Thus the knowing-unknowing tension the reader experiences when reading the Hymns may be the poetic expressions of the author’s own coming to terms with a language he, in fact, never fully mastered. 25 Although Jones’s poetry bears a great debt to that of his colleague Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (who went to India eleven years before Jones), the Hymns differ greatly from Halhed’s work in tone and perspective.26 While Halhed’s poetry is written from a superior, external viewpoint as a colonial administrator or a Hindu deity, Jones’s hymns are all written to emulate the voice of a religious supplicant, his own rather daring innovation. Later Hymns do begin to make explicit references to the colonial presence in India, subtly reinforcing British hegemony by blending the religious fervor of the “native” voice with an appreciation for colonial administration. One of Jones’s frequently cited poems is the hymn to the river goddess, Ganga, a canny choice on Jones’s part because of Ganga’s multivalent significance as a natural entity, a goddess, and a historically important commercial channel. Jones plays on these associations, drawing a historiogeographical map of India whose teleology flows inexorably to British occupation. In the argument, Jones describes the Ganges and Indus Rivers’ natural demarcation of the Deccan peninsula “so as to inclose the richest and most beautiful peninsula on earth, in which the BRITISH nation, after a prosperous course of brilliant actions in peace and war, have now the principle sway,” cutting it off topographically from the rest of the subcontinent.27 As the poem traces the passage of time from Hindu epic events to the Mughal invasions and interweaves mythic, historical, and organic imagery, the invocation of the British in the poem’s final lines—they have been passively “wafted” from a “colder isle”—makes them part of the the natural evolution of subcontinental history.

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Jones’s argument also notes that his verse is an expansion of the form commonly used by Thomas Gray in his two Pindaric odes and in his odes to “Adversity” and “Music.” Adding lines to Gray’s stanza—itself a relatively new form introduced by Abraham Cowley’s translations of Pindar in 1656—and adding another foot to the final alexandrine, Jones makes the already solemn verse even more ponderous and conclusive, its tempo mimicking the grand sweep of time the poem depicts until the inevitable arrival of colonial ships. Tracing Ganga’s descent to the ocean as the joyful nuptial journey of a bride to her “destin’d lord,” Jones uses the metaphor as an indication of India’s willingness to be embraced by a mightier, benevolent superior. Although all the Hymns are written from the point of view of a Hindu devotee, Jones takes special pains in the argument to “Ganga” to point out that the poem is “the work of a BRAHMEN, in an early age of HINDU antiquity who, by a prophetical spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the BRITISH government,” and concludes with a prayer “for its peaceful duration under good laws well administered.” The final image of the poem is the vision of full sails on the bosom of the river itself, a subtly sexualized image of British merchant ships penetrating the country’s interior via this sacred passageway. Through the approbative voice of the narrator, the arrival of the British becomes a marriage rather than a rape, the acquiescence of the goddess-country to a more powerful master who will permit greater prosperity and freedom than earlier ravishers (the Mughals) while maintaining a firm, “husbandly” hand. The last two lines of the poem characterize this Indian-British relationship not in terms of trade or territory but governance: “as they [the British] preserve our laws, and bid our terror cease / So be their darling laws preserv’d in wealth, in joy, in peace!”28 The willing acquiescence of the ancient Brahmin and the Indian river embodies Jones’s belief (or desire to believe) that the translation and “liberation” of Sanskrit and its laws justified British imperial administration. But the deliberate invocation of the native voice by using “our” also blurs it with the voice of Jones and the British, who are also presented as the river’s supplicants (“Nor frown, dread Goddess, on a peerless race / With lib’ral heart and martial grace”) and who perhaps are praying for their own terror to cease. The poem’s attitude of mutual consent (and perhaps mutual terror) serves as a direct contrast to its most obvious poetic predecessor, Halhed’s “The Brahmin and the River Ganges” (1774), in which the author creates an imperious river goddess who sternly admonishes

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her ignorant subjects to appreciate the benefits of the British “rule of reason” and forgo native ignorance.29 Unlike that Ganga’s impatience with ungrateful Indians, Jones creates a flowing historical narrative that does not rebuke contemporary India so much as ignores it and assumes that the voice of the Indian past speaks authoritatively enough for its present and future. “Ganga” was not the last of Jones’s Hymns to propound the benefits of colonial administration, although it was the most subtle. “A Hymn to Surya” (1786), Jones’s slightly sarcastic tribute to the sun (he complained about the heat constantly) is a more deistic panegyric to “th’ Eternal Mind” that dispenses knowledge. In the poem’s penultimate stanza Jones drops the pretense of native worshipper to present himself as an author and linguist: “And, if they ask, ‘What mortal pours the strain?’ / Say . . . ‘From the bosom of yon silver isle, / Where skies more softly smile, He came; and, lisping our celestial tongue, / Though not from Brahmà sprung, / Draws orient knowledge from its fountains pure, / Through caves obstructed long, and paths too long obscure.’”30 With its depiction of an organic transfer of power—here knowledge—the poem serves as a companion piece to “Ganga,” but it takes a new tack by casting Jones himself as a lesser, intellectual sun who reveals Hinduism’s inherent monotheism. Jones becomes the illuminator of obscure paths as well as the great Sanskrit emancipator, and the responsibility of this role is illustrated in the poem’s final stanza in which Jones usurps the narrative voice and offers his own interpretation of Sanskritic Hinduism’s deistic underpinnings: “though the Sanscrit song / Be strown with fancy’s wreaths . . . Yet heav’nly truth it breathes.” The “Eternal Mind” is then revealed as the true sun and the moving spirit controlling his “flaming minister” (the corporeal sun) that obscures the ephemeral, omnipresent divine. The poem’s obvious condescension notwithstanding, it is still an extravagant display of Jones’s respect for Hinduism and Sanskrit. Jones was not the only orientalist to share this sentiment; only a year before, Hastings announced in his preface to Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagvat-geeta that he “hesitate[ed] not to pronounce the Geeta a performance of great originality; of a sublimity of conception . . . almost unequalled; and a single exception, among all the known religions of mankind, of a theology accurately corresponding with that of the Christian dispensation.”31 Jones’s distillation of this sentiment into poetry, however, demonstrates his belief that the merging of these traditions could be aesethetically galvanizing, rather than merely informative.

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Such cultural entwining is tempered, or at least better contextualized, in “A Hymn to Lacshmi” (1788), in which Jones defends his decision to study Indian mythology because “the allegories contained in the Hymn to LACSHMI constitute at this moment the prevailing religion of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believed by many millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whose manners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearly affect all Europeans, who reside among them.”32 Jones composed his Hymns more or less simultaneously but in fits and spurts, so the continuity of the tone of the triumphant imperialist and savvy administrator in “Ganga,” “Surya,” and then “Lacshmi” is somewhat remarkable. After retelling an epic tale that praises Lakshmi’s benevolence, the poem focuses on the goddess’s presumed fickleness and the devastation of famine that, it is implied, will be cured by the British, who, as in the other poems, emerge in the final stanzas. The British speaker (again the native speaker is abandoned) implores the goddess to bid her devotees turn away from paganism and nature worship: “Oh! bid the patient Hindu rise and live. / His erring mind . . . Clouded by priestly wiles, / To senseless nature bows for nature’s GOD.” Ironically, the power from abroad that promises prosperity and true religion is “the wand of empire, not the rod.” Even while bidding Lakshmi to set her devotees free, the poem intimates that the Indians will only be substituting one form of magic for another. And in retaining its tone of supplication to the very end, as in “Ganga,” the poem threatens to incorporate the British as worshippers too. Given the distinctly Augustan form of Jones’s Hymns, the propensity of his contemporary critics to mistake these original compositions for translations inadvertently attests to the efficacy of his translative theories. His purpose for the Hymns, as seen in the arguments, was to capture the essence of Hindu worship and demonstrate the usefulness of that practice (both the worship and its translation) to British colonial goals. The Hymns also demonstrate the intersection of his varying theories of legal and literary translation. On one hand, Jones seems to have wanted to communicate the emotional appeal of Sanskrit literature in a form that his British audience could appreciate—thus his own interpretational freedom and the incorporation of distinctly colonial strains into many of the poems. On the other, his simultaneous desire for fidelity of meaning contributed first to the extensive internal glossing and then to the didactic prefaces to his

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poetry in order to present as faithful a depiction of Hinduism as possible. Teltscher concludes her examination of the Hymns by declaring that “Jones fixes Hindu myths in a familiar landscape and so attempts to minimize the sense of cultural dissonance. . . . [T]he Hymns constitute an exercise in poetic appropriation,” but we have seen the ways in which the Hymns alternately adapt Hindu traditions and maintain their foreignness.33 The Hymns may seem to adhere aesthetically to an adaptive mode of translation, but they express a desire for incorporation, rather than absolute assimilation; that is, they formally, linguistically, and politically demonstrate their author’s desire to situate (without absolutely altering) India within the imperial fold.34 As a genuine cultural comparatist whose politically radical domestic agenda never translated into any meaningful reflection on the justness of colonial domination, Jones remains an ideological enigma. In his chapter on Jones in Ungoverned Imaginings, Javed Majeed concludes that: it is misleading to cast Jones as a “liberal imperialist.” . . . The concern to define and administer indigenous codes of law is in sharp contrast to what Francis Hutchins has called “the liberal commitment to India’s emancipation” from her own cultures. . . . [I]t [Jones’s simultaneous lauding and denigration of Indian cultures] reflects the dilemma implicit in the attempt to both respect the uniqueness of cultures, and to define a neutral idiom in which cultures could be compared and contrasted. 35

Considering Jones’s multiple theories of translation allows us to better contextualize his cultural beliefs. His India was not exotic in the conventional sense; he experimented with translating it into a somewhat “knowable” entity whose foreignness was containable, and to varying degrees he succeeded. It was up to other readers to liberate the images he provided from his signifying constraints, which authors like Thomas de Quincey did to horrifying effect. Although Jones did describe certain Hindu practices as grotesque (in his introduction to The Laws of Menu for example), he deliberately shunned typical portrayals of deities like Durga, the definitive symbol of Hindu barbarism in imperial mythography. In both his “Hymn to Durga” and “Hymn to Bhavani,” Jones portrays the goddess in her peaceful aspect as Parvati, making no references to the popular Durga festivals that so appalled and fascinated the British. 36 Considering Bhavani’s later fame as the murderous deity of thuggee, Jones’s depiction of Durga did not change

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British attitudes much, but many critics agree that Jones helped set the stage for the foundation of a “national” or unified “Hindu” identity in colonial discourse primarily through his codification of what he deemed to be Hinduism’s central texts. 37 Whatever the political effects of Jonesian orientalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, some of his admirers are quick to credit him with helping foster a sense of national cultural identity among Indians, using language that replicates Jones’s own sense of intellectual-colonial purpose and has chilling reverberations today in the wake of South Asian religious fundamentalism: though these fruits of Orientalist scholarship were enjoyed first by Europeans, in the long run, Asians benefited the most, since the image of the remote past was mostly positive. Hindus benefited enormously when Orientalists provided them with a systematic view of their own pre-Muslim past organized with chronological precision for the first time. . . . “[T]he task of integrating a vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals, and laws into a coherent religion and of shaping an amorphous heritage into a rational faith known now as Hinduism were endeavors initiated by Orientalists.”38

Both in itself and when considered in the light of subsequent history, Jones’s work attests to the dialogic relationship between poesis and colonial praxis. His poetry—an amalgam of free and direct translation—uses Vedic deities to enact the willing (and divine) ceding of the cultural stewardship of ancient “India” from the Brahmins to the British. Jones and Hastings’s insistence on finding definitive translations of law texts evinces the consolidation of imperium through the figurative power of studium and legitimized what Bernard Cohn has suggested was essentially “a European conception of the nature of Hindu law that was to influence the whole course of British and Indo-British thought and institutions dealing with the administration of justice down to the present.”39 Although Jones was passionate about the necessity of accurate historical records and criticized derivative works of translation (like Halhed’s Code of Gentoo Laws), his own commingling of the legal and literary demonstrates the inherent literariness of eighteenth-century historiography and the mutual dependence of fictional and factual narrative that characterizes the colonial experience in the late eighteenth century and beyond.40

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The Task of the Translator By the mid-nineteenth century critical colonial “investigational modalities” (like translation) had changed greatly from what they had been during the formative period of the 1780s and 1790s, and it is worth thinking about what happened to orientalism as an intellectual endeavor after this formative era.41 Raymond Schwab insists that the philosophical and cultural impact of eighteenth-century translation, his so-called Oriental Renaissance, found new and vibrant life in France and Germany but died in Britain: “the Oriental Renaissance . . . had only an ephemeral career in the same England to which it owed its origin. . . . [E]pisodes of colonial politics . . . came in gusts, reinforcing the English prejudice of Western superiority and minimizing, for the parent state, the Oriental Renaissance.”42 Schwab’s analysis erroneously characterizes French and German orientalist scholars as wholly open-minded cultural cosmopolites and he too eagerly abandons Britain, but his formulation does capture the broad repercussions of those shifts of ideological and political power I have explored elsewhere. The aftermath of this transition can be briefly illustrated using the example of the ideological battle embedded in the pages of James Mill’s History of British India, which by midcentury was a standard textbook for candidates for the Indian Civil Service. In 1840, a new edition of Mill’s History was published with accompanying corrective “notes” penned by Jones’s successor, Horace Hayman Wilson. As the translator of Kalidasa’s play Meghaduta and author of the Sanskrit English Dictionary, Wilson was a formidable orientalist and historian in his own right, but rather than author his own history of India he contented himself with expanding and annotating Mill’s. Indeed, Wilson’s introduction to the 1840 edition contends that—notwithstanding its numerous factual errors—Mill’s History is valuable because of its “industry” and “vigor” and, most importantly, because it keeps as its core the connection between Britain and India (even if Wilson believes that Mill is in danger of misrepresenting that connection) that orientalists had helped establish.43 Wilson’s annotated constraining of Mill’s polemic reads like a version of the pseudotranslation oriental tale, attempting to contain and qualify Mill’s vitriol while maintaining the spirit of the text. His demotion to mere annotator epitomizes the decline of orientalist study in the new imperial agenda.44 Intellectually, the diminishment of orientalism as a respected discipline in Britain parallels the narrowing definition of philology itself

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as a course of study, which shrank from the expansive study of literature and language in the eighteenth century to the specific study of ancient “classical” literatures in the nineteenth, making further distinctions between “Indologists” who studied Sanskrit and classical “philologists” who worked on Greek and Latin.45 Such compartmentalization posthumously invalidated essays like Jones’s “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India,” which, rife as it is with inaccuracies, is breathtaking in its scope. Mapping similarities between Greek and Hindu gods, Jones uses linguistic and cultural archetypes to insist on a “general union, or affinity between the most distinguished inhabitants of the primitive world.”46 Even after much of it was refuted, Jones’s work created enormous interest on the Continent and especially in Germany, where a growing interest in ur-literature and the cultural ramifications of his comparatism spurred an increasing avidity for knowledge about “primitive” spiritual texts that Jones had ignored. Jones’s aesthetic and administrative concerns drew him to classical poetry and law texts, but for nineteenth-century philologists like Max Müller, tracing the evolution of an Indo-European culture from its earliest beginnings in the Vedas to its evolutionary telos in western Europe became one of the focal points of Victorian indology. Müller’s most consequential renegotiation of orientalist studies was his obsession with the origins of religion, ultimately compelling him to attempt to replace stereotypes of Indian “superstition” with spiritualism. He championed India based not on its literary and aesthetic potential but for its status as the vessel for the preservation of original sparks of human spirituality. Müller is something of a missing link in considerations of Victorian intellectual culture. Although largely forgotten except by philological historians and Sanskritists, he was directly involved in or associated with the period’s most significant cultural battles. Arriving at Oxford one year after George Eliot’s translation of Leben Jesu, his work on comparative mythology thrust him headlong into the acrimonious debates between Tractarians and Broad Church intellectuals. But Müller’s influence was not limited to either Oxford or the strictly religious; he famously sparred with Darwin over the role of language in establishing humanity’s fundamental difference from animals. And as his stature as a public intellectual grew, his lectures on language and religion, especially the popular Hibbert Lectures, introduced the British public to the new sciences of religion and language, which would have a significant impact on the Theosophy movement

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in particular as well as late Victorian spiritualism more generally.47 His most enduring cultural contribution, however, may have been in his relationship to Indian reform movements, particularly in Bengal, where his philological theorizations of Aryan culture had a profound effect on the emerging Hindu nationalist movement.48 Müller has been neglected enough to warrant a thorough overview of his ideas (although this would be an exhaustive undertaking), but in this chapter I limit myself to a small sample of his translative undertakings.49 When Müller, contemplating a translation of the Rg Veda, arrived in England in 1846, he was, like Jones before him, already a serious and recognized philologist. Although France and Germany were the most active centers of orientalist scholarship, England’s one advantage in the field was its vast archive of ancient manuscripts. In order for Müller to prepare an edition of the Rg, he had to persuade the East India Company to fund his trip to London to access the archives. The Company was not particularly interested in this kind of scholarship and needed considerable prodding, as Müller mentioned in letters to his mother: “It was no easy task to persuade the Board of Directors [of the Company] . . . to authorize so considerable an expenditure, merely to edit and print an old book that none of them could understand. . . . Bunsen [Baron Bunsen, a friend of Müller’s] pointed out what a disgrace it would be if some other country than England published this edition of the Sacred Books of the Brahmans.”50 National pride, then, became the means by which he persuaded the Company to take on the costs of the translation, and shortly thereafter Müller secured a position at Oxford. After H. H. Wilson died in 1860, Müller hoped to succeed him as the Boden Chair of Sanskrit. Unlike Jones, who attempted to fit his etymological discoveries into a Mosaic ethnography, Müller’s comparatism was defined by his controversial historicization of Christianity as part of the “science of religion.” Müller read Christianity not as fully formed revelation but as an organically evolving religion that sprang from the roots of a polytheism that was itself a distortion of the original monotheism of the Vedas. Although he was a devout Christian, this upending of a normative Christian historiography haunted his career at Oxford and was partly responsible for his bitterly regretted loss of the Boden Chair to the resolutely evangelical Monier Monier-Williams. Muller eventually became a great favorite of Queen Victoria but his political influence was continually stymied. Although he persistently tried to use crises

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like the Crimean War to convince Charles Trevelyan, then assistant secretary of the treasury, of the importance of orientalist studies, his failure indicates the shift of the import of orientalism from partly administrative to largely academic. 51 Unlike Jones, Müller had little interest in the Middle East or China aside from ancient texts like the Zend Avesta, and only a secondary interest in Buddhism (Islam was also perhaps too modern for Müller); he focused primarily on Hinduism and its roots in what he termed “Aryan” culture. In his memoir Auld Lang Syne, Müller records his first introduction to India as a young boy; he claimed to know “[n]othing but that the people were black, that they burnt their widows, and that, in order to get into Paradise, they had first to be mangled under the wheels of the car of Juggernath. On my picture, however, they were represented looking tall, and, as I thought, beautiful, certainly not like niggers; and the mosques and temples visible . . . impressed me as even more beautiful and majestic than the churches and palaces at Dessau [Müller’s hometown].”52 His youthful comparison of oriental stereotypes to more positive and “factual” images of India foreshadows the older Müller’s famous reinterpretations of popular orientalism along an IndoEuropean axis. It is also symptomatic of his simultaneous insistence on the independence of linguistic studies from aesthetic and literary concerns and his integration of this linguistic study into the cultural and religious comparison that formed the basis for most of his popular works. 53 In his self-proclaimed role as India’s apologist, Müller’s task was far more difficult than Jones’s or even Wilson’s. In a series of lectures given at Cambridge for future civil servants in 1882, Müller adopts a distinctly defensive tone as he attempts to explain the value of Sanskrit and of Indian people almost one hundred years after Jones’s insistence on the importance of Eastern literature. The lectures covered such topics as “Vedic Deities” and “The Lessons of the Veda,” but the standout lecture was undeniably his second, “On the Truthful Character of the Hindus,” in which Müller vehemently denounced the stereotype of native untrustworthiness, a prejudice extending back to Jones but greatly inflamed in a post–Sepoy Mutiny Britain. Several years later in the introduction to the published edition of these lectures, which were collected under the unfortunate title India, What Can It Teach Us? (1883), Müller remarked that this ringing defense of Indian honesty was the most unpopular in the series; not

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unsurprisingly, in India, it was the most celebrated of the lot. The interrogative title of the lectures itself indicates how Müller’s comparatism was challenged by an audience increasingly embittered by its imperial burdens. The solution was to look back. Linda Dowling has pointed out that although Müller’s “science of language” sought to disassociate language from aesthetics, he was himself inspired by Romantic philology and unable to suppress his own literary instincts in his “scientific” writings.54 Throughout India, What Can it Teach Us?, Müller tries to rekindle the jaded British imagination by refashioning Sanskrit as the site of a new sort of exotic exploration: You know that at the present and for some time to come Sanskrit scholarship means discovery and conquest . . . Instead of feeling your hearts sink within you, when next year you approach the shores of India, I wish that every one of you could feel what Sir William Jones felt, when, just one hundred years ago, he . . . saw the shore of India rising on the horizon. At that time young men going to the wonderland of India, were not ashamed of dreaming dreams, and seeing visions…Though many great and glorious conquests have been made in the history and literature of the East, since the days when Sir William Jones landed at Calcutta . . . no young Alexander here need despair because there are no kingdoms left for him to conquer on the ancient shores of the Indus and the Ganges.55

Invoking the old language of geographical and militarist exploration for his linguistic pursuits, Müller turns Sanskrit once again into terra incognita and ties linguistic science to the very origins of literary exoticism: “there are more marvels still to be discovered in language than have ever been revealed to us. . . . [T]here is no word, however common, if you only know how to take it to pieces, like a cunningly contrived work of art, fitted together thousands of years ago by the most cunning of artists . . . that will not make you listen and marvel more than any chapter of the Arabian Nights.”56 While his public lectures appealed to an earlier period of exotic adventurism, Müller was not immune to the atmosphere of imperial fatigue permeating post-1857 Britain. In a significant shift from those of his earlier counterparts, Müller’s translations were invested in reconstructing the teleology of Aryan culture, not in understanding India or Indians; Hastings’s goal of collecting indigenous knowledge in order to effect acquiescence had little place in Victorian colonial policy. By the late nineteenth century the mythos of the British venture in India had evolved into the image of the benevolent imperial

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mother supporting a weak dependent, and anger over the Mutiny and then a rash of famines in Bengal and the Madras Presidency fostered the narrative of a colony whose welfare depended on the forfeiture of British resources. Despite Müller’s evocations of the glory days of orientalist studies, his musings on his role as the cultural interlocutor of a vast archive carried with them the flavor of a more conservative moral imperialism, as when he noted wryly that “a translation of the principal Sacred Books of the East can be carried out only at a certain sacrifice.”57 This exhaustion—political, intellectual—perhaps accounts for Müller’s dismissal of contemporary India. Unlike Jones, Müller did not study Sanskrit because he believed it held viable alternatives to present or classical European systems of literature or thought; he wanted to return to India in order to move past it. In his theorization of the Aryan, he created a dialectic in which Sanskrit and India were frontiers ultimately leading back to the bosom of Europe: “ India is not . . . a distant, strange . . . curious country. India for the future belongs to Europe. . . . [I]t has a place in our own history.”58 His approbation of the Indian character also necessitated a distinctly noncolonial, premodern vision of India: “We are speaking of two very different Indias. . . . I am thinking chiefly of India such as it was a thousand . . . three thousand years ago; they [who dislike India] think of the India of to-day. And again, when thinking of the India of to-day, they remember chiefly the India of Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras. . . . I look to the India of the village communities, the true India of the Indians.”59 Müller insisted that distrust for Indians was occasioned by British removal from the best sort, who flourished not in crowded cities but in unspoiled, ancient village communities. His description of the pastoral naiveté and self-sufficiency of the inhabitants of Aryavarta (land of the Aryas) offered a striking counterpoint to more commonplace characterizations of an India defined either as an extravagantly rich and careless aristocracy or as denigrated masses. It also explicitly rejected an imperialized (but not imperial) India—the three cities he names were all truly colonial, as opposed to indigenous, metropolises—in favor of a pristine past recoverable by the Western scholar.60 The implications of this regressive progressivism are captured in a scene from the author’s life recorded in Georgina Müller’s Life and Letters. Müller was among the first in England to witness a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s phonograph and was invited to

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speak into the machine, whereupon he recited one of the first slokas (verses) from the Rg Veda. Moncure Conway was also invited to the demonstration and related the following incident: Max Müller explained that we [the other invitees] had heard words from the oldest hymn in the world . . . and then the young people gathered round the smiling scholar [Müller], to learn that the hymns had all passed through thousands of years, in a phonographic way, each generation uttering precisely what was poured into its ear by the preceding generation, until their language died, to be recovered in the West, where for the first time the real meaning of Agni [the god of fire] and the human significance of the hymns, were studied and known.61

Presenting Vedic modes of recitation as technologically advanced, Müller also reduces the human recorders of the Vedas to mere machines who are essentially discontinued by superior Western products: mechanical phonographs, for one, but also interpreters and translators who unearth the “real meaning” of the Vedas in contrast to the passively receptive Indians. He also rather neatly cuts contemporary Indians out of this linguistic renaissance by staging the West’s recovery of Sanskrit as a metaphor for the modern phonograph, evincing the extent to which the Jonesian dream of circumventing native scholars was realized in Müller’s characterization of India as a giant archive. As he said on another occasion, “My curiosity to see India is not very great. It is the inner life, not the outward show I care for; and I can see more of the former from reading books, newspapers, and letters.”62 Unsurprisingly, Müller (like Jones) regularly dismissed native scholarly interpretations of texts, as he does in a particularly biting section of the introduction to volume 1 of The Sacred Books of the East.63 Pondering native scholars’ unanimous agreement on the meaning of the word “Upanishad” (as opposed to his own interpretation) he remarks, “We ought to take into account . . . the very general tendency among half-educated people, to acquiesce in any etymology which accounts for the most prevalent meaning of a word.”64 This translative policy invalidated Vedantic philosophical tradition, which flourished around the elusiveness of slokas, and replaced it with a vision of translation as the key to interpretive dominance: Müller described his English Rg as one that “settle[d] completely every word which raises the least doubt.”65 Isolating Jones’s general concept of linguistic grouping into specific language families (relying on the linguistic developments of Franz Bopp and Friedrich von Schlegel, among others)—Indo-European,

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Semitic, and Turanian—Müller combined linguistics and the historicization of religion to create a theory of the linguistic, racial, and religious continuity of an “Aryan” people. This famous theorization was of course dependent on Jones’s linguistic comparatism, although Müller transformed Jones’s theories into a philosophy of culture that was simultaneously far narrower and breathtakingly expansive. Now Sanskrit’s value was as evidence of the evolution of the Aryan race; its etymological links to other languages proved the existence of an even earlier language of a united race of Aryans before their geographical split. In the aftermath of Müller’s pre-Babel Aryan civilization, the Aryans who migrated to India represent the “passive and meditative” side of the race, whose “active and political” energies reached their zenith in northern Europe. Critically, Müller used his translations of the Upanishads to argue that monotheism was not an exclusively Semitic concept, but was present in early Aryan meditations as well. His linguistic theories suggested an affiliation between Indians and Britons more radical than anything Jones had suggested, even while his ardent belief in his role as a revivalist of “real” Hinduism mimicked Charles Trevelyan’s utilitarian policy of “un-teaching.” Müller would teach the British about India, but he would also teach Indians about their true selves and in doing so bring them into modern Christianity by taking them back to their original past. In a letter to his wife explaining his zeal to translate the Rg, Müller argued that “[i]t [ the Rg] is the root of their religion, and to show them what that root is . . . [is] the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.”66 This theory of passive conversion—and of an essentially Christian Vedantism—is one of the keys to understanding Müller’s life in England and his influence abroad. It was, as previously mentioned, a factor in his loss of the Boden Chair, which had been created specifically for the purpose of evangelism. However, his theory of Vedantic henotheism also made him popular with a number of Hindu reformers, who adapted his theories to various political and social ends. Müller’s admiration for and correspondence with a number of (mostly Bengali) reformers is an exception to his general neglect of modern India. He wrote or gave essays on the lives of three key members of the Brahmo Samaj (compiled into his Biographical Essays) and one on the tantric mystic Ramakrishna. While Ramakrishna’s appeal is more abstruse, Müller’s association with the Samaj fits neatly into his orientoimperial teleology. The Brahmo Samaj was a religious reformist group founded

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by Rammohan Roy for the purpose of returning India to its allegedly monotheistic, nonidolatrous, Vedantic past, a clear counterpart to Müller’s own scholarly goals.67 Roy’s trip to England in 1830, in particular, was regarded by Müller as an epochal event, the re-forming of a civilizational bridge that had been severed thousands of years before and that could not be restored by a merely unidirectional imperial flow (Britons to India). Long-sundered Aryan ties—racial, linguistic, religious—came together when Roy docked in London: “however strange his language may have sounded to his friends at Bristol, [Roy] was not a mere stranger when he arrived in Europe, but was returning, in reality, to his own intellectual kith and kin.”68 Although Müller was often accused of religious heresy, his thoughts on Roy in the introduction to Sacred Books of the East demonstrate his desire to fit Roy’s reforms into his larger purpose: “he [Roy] discovered in the Upanishads and in the so-called Vedanta something different from all the rest [of Hindu practice], something that ought not to be thrown away, something that, if rightly understood, might supply the right native soil in which alone the true seeds of religion, aye, of true Christianity, might spring up again and prosper in India.”69 Although Roy’s reforms stopped short of either embracing Christianity or wholly repudiating the caste system, Müller’s approval of Roy led to the series of essays on Roy and his successors, including Debendranath Tagore and the more radical Keshub Chunder Sen (founder of the splinter group the Brahmo Samaj of India) and Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj. Müller’s correspondence with Sen was also expanded to a rather extraordinary relationship between him and the Samaj newspaper, The Liberal and the New Dispensation. Müller is a ubiquitous presence in several of The Liberal’s numbers; his translations of Kant were reviewed, translations of his own works were debated, his Sacred Books of the East was advertised, and he himself often submitted articles and letters on specific topics. In 1892 the paper printed a letter Müller had written to Sen commending him for his attempts to translate “God Save the Queen” into Indian vernaculars. Müller himself had been struggling to translate the song into Sanskrit, and he took the opportunity to use etymology to offer Sen some politically poignant advice: “You must no longer look upon the Queen of England as your conqueror. She is your Queen, and Queen, you know, is closely associated with the old Vedic word gani, which means Mother.”70 These attempts by Müller to legitimize imperial conquest by rewriting it as a useful, if occasionally

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awkward, family reunion ultimately failed on several fronts. Discomfited by his ethnological theories, Victorian ethnologists soon turned away from Müller and began to use “Aryan” not as the signifier for a capacious linguistic tree but as an increasingly narrowed marker of ethnic superiority.71 In India, translations like his Rg, one of the gifts Prince Edward carried to Indian princes during his 1875 tour, were used by Indian reformists to define an emerging Hindu nationalism. The Samaj did work to purge Hinduism of supposedly “non-Vedic” practices like idol worship and sati, but the majority of its followers rejected Christianity for a newly vigorous, ethnically defined Hinduism. On both sides of the empire, Müller’s expansionist theories were adopted in letter, but narrowed in spirit. Of course, Müller was not solely, or even mostly, responsible for the development of late nineteenth-century Hindu nationalism. His theories, however, were at least partly adopted by the emerging reform movement, and he was revered by several of its leading proponents. Swami Vivekananda, for example, recounted a visit to Müller in language that implicitly reaffirmed Aryan ties by linking the Victorian scholar to ancient Vedic seers: “the silverheaded sage [Müller] . . . the trees, the flowers, and calmness and the clear sky, all these sent me back in imagination to the glorious days of Ancient India, the days of our Rajarishis and Brahmarishis [superior ranks of ascetics].”72 Vivekananda ultimately used Müller’s characterization of India as the home of the spiritual Arya as proof of India’s fundamental superiority to Britain, a move that simultaneously borrowed from and inverted Müller’s kinship theory. Vivekananda, whose spiritual initiation under Ramakrishna was an important catalyst for his political work, was supposedly initially encouraged to visit the mystic while reading Wordsworth’s The Excursion, and this seemingly unlikely combination of Romantic naturalism with tantric spiritualism emblematizes the multivocal process of India’s incipient nationalism.73 It is worth noting that more recently Müller’s reputation in India has suffered, as the title of a recent book, Max Müller, a Lifelong Masquerade: The Inside Story of a Secular Christian Who Masqueraded All His Lifetime from behind the Mask of Literature and Philology and Mortgaged His Pen, Intellect, and Scholarship to Wreck Hinduism, amply demonstrates. Müller’s lifelong obsession with the Rg Veda was not unlike the general imperial process of using the colonies as sites for a variety of civic experimentation. N. C. Chaudhuri has noted that “although the

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Rg Veda kept him [Müller] occupied for thirty years, it was a means to an end, serving him somewhat in the fashion of a laboratory.”74 The idea of empire as laboratory goes at least as far back as Jones and the experimental policies of the East India Company in the late eighteenth century; however, Müller’s work was almost wholly divorced from practical policymaking, extending instead into parallel disciplines (e.g., anthropology) and popular culture. This radiative legacy is the subject of the concluding section.

Cultural Regifting and Translative Heresy Müller’s career may have been one of constant struggle to regain support for serious orientalist study, but exotic imitation continued to be a subject for the literary imagination through the nineteenth century. Much of it was merely costume, as in Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum or Alfred Tennyson’s “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” but two of the most popular oriental poems of the period—Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam and Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia—were texts whose scholarly underpinnings harkened back to the earlier mode of the late eighteenth-century pseudotranslation. If we can indeed designate these as oriental tales, of a sort, how did this genre, conceived during a period of imperial germination, fared in the era of imperial triumph? This chapter concludes by briefly situating this literature within the linguistic, ethnological, and translative contours it has already mapped. Both The Rubáiyát and The Light of Asia are well suited for a critical revival because the subcultures they spawned have overpowered the works themselves. In the case of the Rubáiyát this is particularly true; the variegated manifestations of “Fitz-Omar” madness in Omar Khayyam clubs, Mardi Gras themes, and ornate pocket editions have reduced the poem to nothing more than a series of quotable fragments.75 The Rubáiyát’s dramatic fall from grace is responsible for the urgent tone in many of the articles in a recent issue of Victorian Poetry dedicated to recuperating the poem and its author from both critical oblivion and the postcolonial wastebasket. Edward Said sets the tone for most contemporary assessments of The Rubáiyát when he categorizes the poem as one in a secondary level of “free-floating,” nonspecific, acquisitional orientalism, a reading Barbara Black takes up in her assessment of the poem’s “pretty, crafted, possessable, diminutiveness.”76 In the aforementioned issue of Victorian Poetry,

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Annmarie Drury takes (qualified) issue with these arguments, and, reading The Rubáiyát in the context of FitzGerald’s other translations, observes that the “prettifying” and condensing of The Rubáiyát was an editorial mode of translation that FitzGerald applied to all his translative work, regardless of origin. Specifically, Drury reads The Rubáiyát’s translative inconsistencies as symptomatic of the poem’s structural and narrative dependence on arbitrariness.77 Her argument is useful, but it rests largely on accepting FitzGerald’s belief that his mode of loose translation—which reads suspiciously like imitation— is indeed “translation.” While not dismissing FitzGerald’s noted derision for Persians and Persian culture (he did, after all, express a desire to “take liberties with these Persians who (as I think) are not Poets enough to frighten one . . . and who really do want a little Art to shape them”), Drury carefully distinguishes commonplace Victorian prejudices from what she considers FitzGerald’s particular love and respect for Khayyam.78 The author emerging from Drury’s analysis sounds remarkably like Sir William Jones, torn between aesthetic admiration and contempt, and the comparison is not unwarranted: FitzGerald’s main resource while learning Persian was Jones’s Grammar, and he referred to his own initial translative attempts as “a poor W. Jones’ sort of parody.” One crucial factor that distinguishes Jones from FitzGerald, however, is the scope of their respective visions. For Jones, all Eastern poetry was a source of inspiration for the West. FitzGerald, conversely, sees Khayyam as exceptional in Persian poetic history, a feeling that reverberates, tellingly, in reviews of the poem that stressed its exceptionality—its Englishness—among Eastern translations.79 The history of The Rubáiyát and its multiple editions makes it difficult not to read it as a story of pure imperial acquisition. Published anonymously in 1859 by the antiquarian book dealer Bernard Quaritch, the poem rose dramatically from initial obscurity to extraordinary international fame, a story amply documented and perhaps even more amply exaggerated.80 FitzGerald published four different versions of The Rubáiyát between 1859 and 1879, and each successive edition marks the poem’s progression away from translation and toward something more like original creation, as FitzGerald’s revisions were based on improving poetic effect, not translative fidelity. From the beginning, however, FitzGerald made fundamental changes to Khayyam’s original beyond mere compression. Daniel Karlin notes the transformative effect of FitzGerald’s arrangement

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of the original ruba’i, traditionally organized alphabetically, into a narrative sequence, leading him to conclude that “the structure of the poem, in one sense, ‘translates’ nothing, because it has no counterpart in the original text.”81 Unsurprisingly, by the time the final edition was requested, FitzGerald was ready to move away from Quaritch—the purveyor of translations and foreign grammars—to a more mainstream literary publisher (although Quaritch was finally able to dissuade him), a subtle indication of his embrace of authorship. FitzGerald himself referred to his “transmogrification” of the poem, suggesting an almost paradigmatic transformation of the Persian original, and his insistence on referring to the poem synechdocally as “his Omar”—eliding author and poem—evinces the extent to which Omar Khayyam acted as FitzGerald’s poetic muse rather than the original author of a translated work. Reflecting on FitzGerald’s insistence on treating each new revision as a new and distinct poem, Christopher Decker observes that “he never wished to suggest to his readers that there was some abstract urtext from which the versions of the poem were derived . . . or some ‘final’ text toward which both poet and poem had been struggling.”82 Thus FitzGerald omitted both the origin and the telos that usually accompanies a translation—a verifiable source text with a certain meaning that, with due translative diligence, can be recuperated in a different language—and in doing so created what the reviewer Charles Eliot Norton described pointedly as not a translation, but as the “redelivery of a poetic inspiration.”83 When critics praised “Omar” and recounted the poignancy of his journey through doubt and acceptance, their enthusiasm blurred the semihistorical Omar of FitzGerald’s introduction with the wholly fictional “Omar” the poem conjures through its new narrative structure.84 At best, FitzGerald’s “redelivery” corresponds with Dryden’s definition of imitative translation, although his radical narrativization pushes the poem in the direction of a pseudotranslation oriental tale; replacing both urtext and poet with the quasi-fictional “Omar” is reminiscent of earlier orientalists’ fictional negotiations of the mythic reality of a textual Orient. Certainly the critical backlash that accompanied The Rubáiyát’s popular decline echoes an earlier unease toward the oriental tale: their shared status somewhere between an original work and a translation, the interplay of fact and fictionality, and the foreignness of the source language, all of which made verifying The Rubáiyát’s shifting claims of authenticity difficult to verify.85 As the orientalist Jessie

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Cadell remarked in his 1879 review, “As very beautiful English verse, no one can doubt that Mr. FitzGerald’s Khayam [sic] fully deserves its fame. As a translation we are less satisfied with it. . . . It is a poem on Omar, rather than a translation of his work.”86 There are, however, striking differences between The Rubáiyát and its Romantic predecessors. Most crucially, FitzGerald’s poem was celebrated for its uncanny anticipation of Victorian doubt, whereas earlier oriental tales were read for their representations of difference. Instead of highlighting implausibility as a marker of oriental authenticity, a central feature of late eighteenth-century exoticism, The Rubáiyát eschewed the fantastical (and flat-out eliminated the poem’s homoeroticism) for relatability.87 A brief comparison of annotations is helpful here. The 1859 Rubáiyát has twenty-two, mostly brief, annotations, which, even for a poem of seventy-five quatrains, pales in comparison to, say, Henley’s notes for Vathek, of which there are over two hundred—erudite, lengthy, and often with their own accompanying notes. The purpose of FitzGerald’s annotations, moreover, is often ambiguous; for quatrain 20 (“Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears / TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears— / To-morrow?— Why, To-morrow I may be / Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years”) he notes that there are a thousand years for each planet. We can assume this is based on Persian cosmology, but since FitzGerald does not specify (or verify), it could also be his own creative effect. The explanation, moreover, is not necessary for our comprehension of the passage, but it does call attention to the poem’s repeated cosmological troping, although again this is more a function of FitzGerald’s narration than that of the original Persian ruba’i. Like Byron and Jones, FitzGerald leaves in untranslated words and unmistakably Eastern phrases. Unlike Jones’s native supplicant in the Hymns and Byron’s polyvocalism in The Giaour, he creates a poetic persona— “Omar”—that is also clearly himself. The poem’s gestures to translative authenticity are ultimately submerged by an assimilative impulse markedly different from either an incorporation (Jones) or assertion (Beckford) of Eastern difference. Despite Drury’s argument that FitzGerald adopted the same translative policy for all works, regardless of origin, FitzGerald’s Persian translations-imitations cannot be considered on the same plane as his translations from other languages because he did not regard all languages as equal. Even though he dismissed most Persian poetry, he also believed that Persian was easier to translate into English than

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Spanish because of its linguistic similarities: “Unlike as the two Peoples may be, we English may yet translate, and read in translation, from the Persian poetry more literally than Greek and Latin—partly owing indeed to some affinity in the structure of our Languages.”88 Arguing that Persian and English have a greater “affinity” than English and Latin (or Greek or Spanish) seems an astonishing conclusion, but it prefigures a similar argument Müller would make in his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861). In the section on mixed languages, Müller connects Persian to the Indo-European language tree and then goes on to discuss how to trace English’s linguistic background through its hybrid vocabulary: “There is, perhaps, no language so full of words evidently derived from the most distant sources as English. Every country of the globe seems to have brought some of its verbal manufactures to the intellectual market of England.”89 English’s hybrid capital, however, cannot wholly obscure its origins: “Languages, however mixed in their dictionary, can never be mixed in their grammar. . . . English, though it did not retain a single word of Saxon origin, would have to be classed as Saxon, and as a branch of the great Teutonic stem of the Aryan family of speech.”90 Müller turns English into a Babelian tower, but one that has circumvented God’s curse by incorporating its incredible diversity into a single, comprehendible language, assuring his audience that English could retain its imperial lexical hybridity without fundamentally altering its national and racial identity. Similarly, FitzGerald’s argument that Persian was linguistically (but not culturally) related to English makes his usurpation of The Rubáiyát a natural extension of a translative evolution traceable to the roots of language. Daniel Karlin argues that The Rubáiyát, unlike other orientally inflected poetry of the period, exhibits a respect for a culturally specific Persian history and poet, rather than a generalized Orient. But contemporary reviews demonstrate that what compelled audiences was not that it introduced a distinctly other culture to Britain but that, in FitzGerald’s transmutation, it became a culturally nonspecific poem about human, rather than tenth-century Persian, nature. This universalism was usually reserved for Greek and Roman literature, but the new ideas of linguistic comparatism made such a vast leap possible even while revealing the poem’s acquisitional impulses. Thus, even though the poem retained an exotic veneer, FitzGerald was not interested in exploring the uniqueness of Persian culture but in finding a poetic voice that expressed thoughts similar to his own. Like that of

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Müller’s philological work, the popularity of The Rubáiyát is indicative of a greater Victorian interest in mythic schemas at once universal and unmistakably Eastern. The evolution of the poem through its many editions parallels the growing nineteenth-century interest in mesmerism, theosophy, hypnosis, and other forms of appropriable, transmutational spirituality with Eastern or pseudo-Eastern roots. When Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia appeared in 1879, the same year of The Rubáiyát’s fourth and final edition, it capitalized on the orientalist craze FitzGerald’s poem had helped renew while taking it in new and newly problematic directions. Like The Rubáiyát, The Light of Asia’s dramatic rise and fall in late nineteenth-century cultural consciousness has long consigned it to a space on the shelf with other Victorian oddities. Arnold’s poem did not elicit the same popular frenzy as FitzGerald’s, but it did elicit some rather hysterical critical responses. We may take the strong (both positive and negative) reactions to the poem to be symptomatic of its role in a crucial moment of cultural renegotiation, as the British interest in Buddhism coincided with the advent of both Darwinian theory and the Victorian crisis of faith.91 In Arnold’s recounting of the life and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, what both excited and troubled critics were the similarities—narrative and philosophical—between Christianity and Buddhism. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ecstatic review in the International Review described the poem’s loftiness of tone as equaled only by the New Testament, a reaction that to other critics revealed its inherent heresy. Arnold’s introductional assertion that “most other creeds are youthful compared with this venerable religion [Buddhism]” upended biblical time lines and in turn, messianic prophecy by making Jesus merely a salvational runner-up.92 What is also clear from the critical uproar over Arnold’s poem is that The Light of Asia was not taken as merely a poetic flight of fancy but as an accurate translation of Buddhism’s central tenants. This interpretation is certainly affirmed by the poem’s presentation of itself. The title page lists the translated title of Arnold’s primary source, the Abhiniskramana Sutra, as a secondary title (the Sanskrit title is written under its translation) and claims to be “told in verse by an Indian Buddhist.” It’s only in his introduction that Arnold makes clear that the “Buddhist votary” is merely an imaginative medium. Aside from the very brief introduction, the poem has no annotative borders of any kind, even though Arnold incorporates many references and Sanskrit words whose meaning, if explained, would enhance its reading

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experience: that Siddartha’s mother is named Maya, or “illusion,” seems a significant detail in a poem whose ultimate conclusion is that the world is itself illusory, yet Arnold does not provide that information. This removal of a distanced, critical Western voice suggests two things: either the author’s desire for a truly exotic immersive experience or his belief that no interpretation is necessary because the poem expresses universal ideas that require no mediation (especially given the parallels to Christ). Although the first possibility seems most dangerous, the second—in which acquisition or assimilation turns troublingly into similitude—reveals the real source of tension for the poem’s naysayers. Arnold’s dating of Buddha (rending asunder Mosaic historiography) echoes Müller’s earlier, comparatist arguments about the antiquity of Hindu religion, although The Light of Asia arguably ups the ante: whereas Müller used etymological evidence to prove the kinship between various religions, Arnold simply interpolates biblical language into the poem, giving the philologist’s abstract theories more immediacy. Colin Graham argues that Arnold’s usurpation of recognized spiritual and secular voices of authority inured his readers to his unfamiliar subject even while destabilizing the rigid Occident-Orient binary.93 This methodology suggests that alongside Arnold’s various inspirations—Müller, the Bible, Tennyson—we must also place Sir William Jones. Arnold’s Indian Idylls (a translation of stories from the Mahabaratha) cites Jones’s role in bringing unknown Eastern literature out of obscurity, but Light of Asia reveals Arnold’s true debt to the scholar by emulating the Jonesian model of alternately assimilative and alienating poetry. It also bears distinct resemblances to earlier oriental tales: the descriptions of Siddhartha’s harem, for example, which were castigated for their sensuality, are reminiscent of the descriptions of Mokanna’s harem in Moore’s Lalla Rookh. And in language that echoes Southey’s own criticism of Kehama, Christopher Clausen argues that the Light of Asia’s success was achieved through its unlikely marriage of proper verse to “the psychedelic universe of Buddhist mythology.”94 As much as Arnold’s poem draws from biblical and Tennysonian epic traditions, it also hints at more problematic poetic predecessors. Clausen argues that Light of Asia was the first poem to “set out an Oriental religion feelingly and in detail for the consideration of English readers,” but the inverse is also true: Arnold’s poem flourished (for a time) because it was published during a period of extraordinary

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speculation about the religious and linguistic kinship between seemingly opposite peoples.95 The poem’s decline in popularity may therefore be ascribed not merely to its poetic errors (which are abundant) but to the parallel movement away from Müllerian ethnological capaciousness to more narrow definitions of Self and Other. The criticism of both The Rubáiyát and The Light of Asia, especially of the latter, also attests to the growing unease with which Victorian audiences reacted to foreign challenges to cultural supremacy. As Homi Bhabha notes, “Blasphemy . . . is a moment when the subject-matter or the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation.”96 Graham asserts that the poem is a “cultural phenomenon,” but it is also symptomatic of a phenomenological moment in imperial history during which intellectual products from the East were translated (troublingly) into English and then gifted (often with even more troubling implications) back to their original inheritors. In his India Revisited, Arnold includes in its entirety a speech made by the president of Maliga Khanda College in Colombo in honor of his visit: By your transcendent genius and under the inspiration of a noble heart, you have caused the revered name and sublime doctrines of our Lord Buddha to be respected and valued by crores of people of various Western nations. . . . [O]ur children’s children will sanctify your memory, when some worthy interpreter shall have rendered your splendid sentences and golden words into our own vernacular. . . . It is a misfortune to Ceylon that as yet so few of our people have sufficient knowledge of English to enable them to read your work in the original. But the rumor is spreading throughout Asia that a wise and eloquent friend has arisen in the land beyond the seas and is shedding a moonlight lustre over the Dhamma.97

Like Jones, Arnold too has become an illuminator of obscure paths; indeed, the description of Arnold’s “transcendent genius” makes him into a kind of Buddha, spreading the doctrine of enlightenment to the West and then, the speaker hopes, back to the East. Eschewing the Sanskrit Abhinishkramana Sutra as well as any Singhalese Buddhist text-translations, the president embraces a new “original,” which is Arnold’s. Alongside the unevenly reciprocal relationship of EastWest–West-East discourse, we cannot forget the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a corresponding cycle of there and back again. There is a paucity of theoretical vocabulary to describe either such cultural regifting or its reappropriation, although the analysis of both Müller and Arnold demonstrates its necessity. If, as is widely

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understood, gifts are concrete representations of social obligations, regifting in the context of this chapter lays bare an even more complex network of debts. Inaugurated by Jones’s grudging awareness of his obligations to his native interpreters, regifting reaches a dubious conclusion with Müller, whose suggestion that Indians did not realize the value of their cultural largesse until he explained it is an attempt to use translation to sponge off the original label.98 In the realm of colonial exchange, the essential power of a gift (and especially a regift) lies not in the object itself but in the interpretive force of its transmission. The examples of Müller and Arnold demonstrate, moreover, that regifting has unforeseen consequences for both gifter and (re) recipient. Colin Graham suggests that Arnold’s orientalist poems are transcultural, by which he means they (unwittingly) threaten Western cultural hegemony.99 Certainly the criticism of both The Rubáiyát and The Light of Asia, especially of the latter, demonstrates the various forces allied against such (inadvertent) realignments of the EastWest imperial balance. Transculturation, however, is not simply the adaptation of foreign customs by a culture; as Diane Taylor observes, it implies the uprooting of an older culture (most likely through colonial violence) that leaves room for the importation of the foreign in a way that affects sociopolitical conditions as well as the aesthetic: a true cultural shift, in effect.100 Although, as I have described above, Arnold’s poem does seem indicative of some kind of real transformation, it ultimately had an assimilative, rather than extirpative, force.101 Mary Pratt briefly alludes to such reverse transculturation in Imperial Eyes as “heretical,” and, while she likely refers to the problems of simply inverting the term, in the case of Müller this charge is doubly true, as it can reference both his undermining of religious orthodoxy through translation and the explosive effects of the reappropriation of his regifting.102 The instances of cultural regifting and reappropriation that lurk at the edges of this chapter are thus a crucial site of cultural shifting in both the imperial center and the colony, the recognition of which is essential to revivifying our sense of imperial cultural transfer. The potentially incendiary results of this unpredictable there and back again are an ironic echo of the trajectory of FitzGerald’s translative theory of accidental imitation—imitation that occurs without design or intent—and that always involves an element of surprise.103 Müller, Arnold, and even FitzGerald evince the reordering of early Romantic exoticism along a philological, comparative axis. Their

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recurring recourse to strands of Jonesian orientalism within the new contexts of comparative mythology and the science of language testifies to the extent to which pockets of Jones’s legacy lingered, often dangerously, within Victorian society and to the ways in which the Romantic craze for Eastern “costume” was itself translated into a vogue for an Eastern spiritualism that remains a site of global commodification today. But these works were also part of a new model of transfer in which the exotic was transported back to the colonies, where it had unforeseen consequences. Locating The Rubáiyát and Light of Asia in the linguistic and religious disputes of their time demontrates how these texts participate in both the culture of Victorian imperialism and its imminent cracking. Unsurprisingly, a major obsession of nineteenth-century literature is the fear of cultural contamination that is the result of colonialism’s materiolinguistic presence. If, as George Steiner has argued, translation ideally resolves in restored parity, the concluding chapter examines what happens when parity is replaced with paranoia and translation goes awry.104

chapter five

Translation’s Bastards: Mimicry and Linguistic Hybridity As well we may fetch words from the Ethiopians, or East or West Indians, and thrust them into our Language, and baptize all by the name of English . . . and hence it cometh . . . that some English-men discoursing together . . . are not able to understand what the others say, notwithstanding they call it English that they speak—R. V(erstegan), Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, ed. 1673, pg. 223 Hobson-Jobson (Anglo-Indian dictionary)

Mistranslation and Pollution As previous chapters have demonstrated, later nineteenth-century philology alternately asserted and denied linguistic, cultural, and ethnic links between Greek gods and Hindu gods, English and Persian, active Aryans and passive Aryans. This recognition and then dismissal of possible kinship took place most definitively after the rejection of Müller’s kinship theories changed anthropology’s parameters from philological to exclusively ethnological ones, but, to return to de Quincey’s encounter with the Malay in Grasmere, it is obvious that the racial tensions in linguistic comparatism were present from its instantiation. Even as de Quincey’s use of Greek as linguistically interstitial points to his awareness of comparative linguistics’ language tree, any tangible connection beyond words is repudiated by the essential racial difference established between the Malay and de Quincey’s maid, as the author observes that “[a] more striking picture there could not be imagined, then the beautiful English face of the girl . . . together with her erect and independent attitude . . . contrasted with the . . . Malay, enameled or veneered with mahogany . . . [and his] slavish gestures, and adorations.”1 John Barrell has famously argued that the Malay may be read as a surrogate for both de Quincey’s eldest brother, William, and for de Quincey himself, a

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kinship that is at once psychological and rooted in the shared vice of opium eating. 2 This tension between the linguistic and physical (or intellectual and tangible) reaches its height in The Confessions toward the end of its most famous dream, in which de Quincey is pursued and absorbed by the mythological history of the East: the narrator records a turn from “moral and spiritual terrors” to material horror, emblematized by the “cursed crocodile.” De Quincey’s crocodilian cathexis has been amply studied, but my interest lies in a particular moment within his nightmare when he enters a Chinese house only to find that the furniture itself has become “instinct with life” and turned into crocodiles. As luxury goods from the East were coveted by and increasingly available to the British middle and upper classes, de Quincey’s vision suggests that oriental products potentially harbored an essential Easternness whose “inoculation,” or grafting, of East with West could be a source of profound horror.3 We have previously seen how racial miscegenation was increasingly prohibited in colonial-to-imperial India. This chapter suggests that as the nineteenth century progressed, a far more worrisome and subtle problem was the presumed insidiousness of cultural pollution and hybridity. Tillman Nechtman’s recent book on nabobs has argued that the hyperbolic discourse surrounding the orientalized Englishman stemmed from uneasiness over his material proof of a globalized Britishness.4 This chapter reverses Nechtman’s directionality by tracing evolving anxieties over cultural pollution through the tropic figure of the “babu,” or Anglicized Indian. Although the babu is a well-established signifier of postcolonial theorizations of mimicry, the diverse array of representations of the hybridized Indian and the native gentleman abroad over the course of the century complicate assumptions of the mimic’s mottled ambivalence. Shifting representations of the culturally adaptive Indian coupled with the fear, so obvious in de Quincey, that decontextualizing, or translating, Eastern objects and texts would not remove inherent pollutants. For James Mill, the existence of degenerate orientalia was not half as dangerous as its mobility when unleashed in the West: some of the most enlightened of the Europeans who have made inquiries concerning the ideas and institutions of the Hindus, have been induced . . . to believe and assert that this people [Hindus] had attained refined and elevated conceptions of the Divine Nature. . . . [T]hose ingenious men, from some of whom we have largely derived instruction, appear to have thought [thus] . . . and, as . . . they adopted the opinion themselves, [thought] that others

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ought to receive it on the same foundation [the names used in Hindu texts to describe Brahman].5

But Mill’s concerns about infectious Eastern knowledge were often shared, albeit to a lesser extent, by the very scholars he criticized. Jones’s heavily edited translation of more erotic Sanskrit literature like the Gita Govinda (1792) has been read as his attempt to familiarize a foreign culture, but his stated elimination of passages “too luxuriant and too bold for a European taste” suggests that Indian culture could also be purified through translation, a sentiment we have already seen unevenly expressed in his poetry. That modern Hindu culture was a denigrated shade of the past was a standard orientalist reading, but Jones did not want to reconstruct Mauryian India. He wanted an exportable version of Indian poetry that would erase the embarrassing flaws of the original versions: thus his translation of Sakuntala systematically eliminated all descriptions deemed overtly sexual, including numerous references to the heroine’s “rounded thighs.”6 Clearly, while foreignizing translation (translation that bends to the source language rather than to the target) may have been the ultimate goal of the comparative linguistics he helped instantiate, Jones was still tied to an eighteenth-century tradition of adaptive translation. And by the time de Quincey encounters the Malay, such adaptive buffering seems inadequate to cope with the excessiveness of oriental objets. As British orientalists delved ever deeper into the growing archive of oriental texts, they discovered discomfiting linguistic parallels between themselves and their colonized subjects that suggested an Indian might lurk at the heart of Britishness. Likewise, the undermining of de Quincey’s psyche in the dream sequence through the mental and physical collection of orientalisms suggests, ironically, that the material expansion of British colonialism was concomitant with a growing psychic uneasiness over the ability of trade and capital to annex and neutralize the potential pollution of British culture in both the periphery and center. My examination of representations of the hybridizing Indian focuses on their intersection with satire—a genre whose opacity is particularly suited to an examination of the potencies of cultural interpenetration. The two satirical novels I consider—Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) and F. Anstey’s Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. (1897)—were written by British authors attempting to reproduce the voice of the native in their own writing. This claim to representation must be taken seriously:

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many authors have claimed to speak for colonized subjects, but it is quite another thing to claim to speak in the voice of the colonized subject, particularly the colonized subject in the imperial center. British authors choosing to mimic Asian—in this case Indian—travelers made vulnerable their own customs and social norms, not just those of their visitors, to a supposedly “Othered” gaze. Using Kipling’s Mowgli stories from The Jungle Books as a contrasting hinge, I argue that these three texts map a dramatic shift in conceptions of the relationship between translative pollution and power through the nineteenth century and in their representations of traveling (and static) natives offer differing accounts of culture’s portability.

Showing the Lions William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (1782), an advice book in the guise of a travelogue, includes a memorable critique of the young men in the East India Company’s employ who, “withdrawn from the tuition of parents and guardians,” adopt “the practice and rules not only of predecessors and colleagues in office, but also of all around them, whether Gentoos or Mahomedans.”7 Macintosh’s is only one of many such representations of AngloIndians or “nabobs,” who, over the course of the eighteenth century, came to be seen at best as the epitome of exotic lassitude and at worst as a theatrical caricature of the danger that cultural permeability presented to the state. From the tawdry stumbles of the eponymous character in Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) to Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan’s dramatic reenactments of the evils of nabobery during Hastings’s impeachment trial, nabobs signified a social and cultural upheaval whose “aggregate” presence “threatened to naturalize [empire] as part of the national landscape.”8 In Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan’s analysis of modern diaspora as constitutive “betweenness,” his explanation of hybridity’s eminent spectacle sounds hauntingly like the nabob’s staging of exotic abundance and the staging of the nabob as exotic excess.9 Although the Hastings trial can be considered the apogee of antinabob vituperation, P. J. Marshall observes that the prosecution’s antiquated mode of punishment—impeachment—was an indication that by the late eighteenth century the nabob, like impeachment itself, was an outmoded figure in an age when growing governmental control could effectively control public individuals as never before.10 Thus,

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as colonial power was slowly transferred from Company to Crown and the language of administration assumed increasingly moral overtones, colonial fiction often replaced the nabob with the noble colonial soldier as a figure who threatened neither the importation of foreign customs nor the sudden ascendancy of a lower-class nouveau riche. In both W. M. Thackeray’s The Newcomes and, earlier, Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, returning soldiers conveniently come home with money rather than vast collections of exotic spoils and help restore, not overthrow, the landed gentry. And one of the best literary depictions of this shift from commerce to administration, orientalization to Anglicization, is Vanity Fair’s depiction of the effete nabob Jos Sedley’s replacement by the selfless William Dobbin. Although Hastings’s trial symbolically expiated both the guilt and fears associated with nabobery, the various and multiple dangers of cultural pollution and oriental excess continued to resonate long after the decline of the nabob’s political and fictive agency. The nabob is only one early example of “the ambivalent mimic,” a figure of partial representation who exposes the hollowness of cultural identity and the ideological split between imperial and national discourse. Homi Bhabha argues that the mimicry’s ambivalence (not quite–not white) is ultimately subversive, but he ignores both the manipulability of mimicry—its ability to be co-opted by colonial discourse—and the early presence of colonizing (as opposed to colonized) mimics like the nabob in imperial discourse.11 Acknowledging the nabob as a mimic or a protomimic complicates any assumptions of the mimic’s subjugated subjectivity.12 The nabob’s bifurcation made him ripe for attack in fiction and on the stage, but his true reckoning was the Hastings trial, a long-running imperial tragicomedy that deflected larger questions about subcontinental governance by accusing its administrator of nabobism. Hastings’s contemporaries were well aware that the dictate to admininister adaptively but not adoptively was nearly impossible.13 Thus his trial, and the rhetorical excess of the prosecutors Burke and Sheridan, was ultimately an eloquent avoidance of the central, irresolvable paradoxes of the British presence in India: “the lie of the impeachment proceedings [wa]s . . . its failure to admit that Hastings’s misdeeds were merely synecdochical of the colonial operation.”14 What is equally striking, though, is that Hastings’s defense did not attempt to dilute the prosecution’s arguments about his exceptionality but tried to spin it positively: citing the Asian fondness for despots, Hastings

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compared himself to Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. This emphasis on singularity is in contrast to the eagerness of both parties to speak on behalf of all of their Indian subjects: we have seen in previous chapters how both the defense and prosecution turned to supposedly native sources to act as collective witness. It follows naturally that Elizabeth Hamilton’s novelistic response to the Hastings trial, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, also seizes on the trope of the translated native voice. Hamilton’s satirical reading of both foreign and domestic policy through the eyes of Zaarmilla, the Indian protagonist, is a vindication of not only Hastings but also of the orientalist approach to cultural exchange. Using the model of the satirical oriental novel, Hamilton proposes the opposite of cultural pollution: a truly symbiotic colonist-colonized relationship that is necessary for the survival of both parties. Satire’s targeted criticisms make its humor particularly dependent on a mutual cultural idiom even within a genre that is already considered resistant to translation.15 In his study of Augustan satire, W. O. S. Sutherland defines satire as having three characteristics. The first is a contrast of values: one set of values, no matter how oblique, serves to critique the other. The second is the preferment of one set of values over another, leading to a mode of critique based on falsehood (exaggeration, stereotype) stemming from truth. The third characteristic is the willed ignorance on the part of the reader who pretends to be deceived in order to engage in the satirical mode.16 Sutherland’s rather bloodless definition downplays satire’s inherent violence, a verbal effervescence that is controlled, as Henry Fielding describes in Joseph Andrews, by making the target of scorn a diffuse one.17 Fielding’s favoring of private mortification over public shame reflects the new(er) public-private practice of novel reading; he implies that closeted contemplation is efficacious not only for the reader but also for the author, who escapes the charge of libel. This approach was not one that Hamilton ascribed to: her satirical portraits in Translation were “severe” enough for her biographer Elizabeth Benger to cast about and cite the author’s ongoing melancholy as an excuse.18 Hamilton’s is only one in a long line of influential orientalist satires written in the form of the epistolary travel narrative starting with Giovanni Paolo Marana’s L’Espion Turc (1684), which Conant also cites as the first oriental tale.19 The oriental travelogue’s distortion of perspective made it a particularly popular vehicle for satire. Writing from the point of view of the puzzled foreigner made both local

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customs and those of the visitors subject to a supposedly “Othered” gaze. While the protagonists of oriental travelogues like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) wandered around a selfcontained, quasi-allegorical Orient, satires like Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760) and Charles Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) offered scathing critiques of European urban life penned by “Eastern” visitors. These early travelogues—allegorical or not— were, however, only superficially “oriental.” In Citizen of the World, Altangi’s quaintness ultimately proves a thin veneer for the author’s satire of English society rather than a serious engagement with Chinese culture. Written thirty-six years after Goldsmith’s letters, Hamilton’s novel does demonstrate an abiding interest in “India” (coded as Hindu) and in Indian-English relations; Zaarmilla’s journey to understand Englishness becomes a reverse echo of the author’s (and reader’s) immersion into Indian culture as history (coded here as exoticism) and satire are in symbiosis. 20 As an exposition of an intellectual but weak Hindu culture overrun by Muslim tyrants, Translation’s “Preliminary Dissertation on the History, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos” is, as Pamela Perkins and Sharon Russell have noted, mostly a regurgitation of extant orientalist scholarship.21 The dissertation is curious, however, because of its seeming irrelevance to the novel’s satiric foci (English society and female education) and to the narrative itself, which is amply footnoted. Despite its seeming structural incongruence, the dissertation’s exposition of Indian history allows the novel’s satire to engage more fully in the reality of colonial and domestic politics. Hamilton’s cultural commingling in Translation was, for reasons outlined below, an innovative but perhaps instinctive response to a life characterized by various negotiations: of her Scots-Irish ancestry, of her glittering literary life in London and especially Edinburgh after years of near seclusion in the Scottish countryside, and of her melding of radical and anti-Jacobin politics.22 Translation itself is composed of a series of letters written by the protagonist, Prince Zaarmilla, to a native companion. Impressed by the very English and Christian virtues of the colonial officers he meets, and disgusted with Indian cultural stagnation, Zaarmilla travels to England to confirm his theories about the superiority of English culture only to be successively dismayed by the decay of morals and values in a society that seems flawed in comparison to his own. The already political premise of Hamilton’s satire is further underscored by her dedication of the novel, literally and metaphorically, to

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Warren Hastings. Published in the immediate aftermath of his trial, the novel is as much a defense of Hastings’s tenure as governor-general of Bengal as it is a critique of British social decay. Indeed, it insists on their interrelation. Much like the various usurpations of native voice during the trial, Hamilton’s own native voice—the prince—obliquely refutes Burke’s accusations of Hastings’s rapaciousness and cruelty by expressing his deep gratitude to the British: “Even when the heavens withheld their fructifying distillations . . . and ghastly famines stalked through the provinces around, the benignant charity of the English chiefs sustained the lives of thousands.”23 Although Prince Zaarmilla does not name Hastings, the incident clearly refers to the charges that Hastings had acted with indifferent cruelty to victims of the Bengal famines. More subtly, Hamilton interweaves the notorious theatricality of the Hastings trial into the main narrative. The traveling Indians (Zaarmilla and an earlier correspondent, Sheermaal) journey with relative ease and anonymity through England until published accounts of British atrocities in India turn the prince into an unwilling celebrity. He is falsely quoted in a newspaper denouncing the Hastings government and, stripped of his anonymity, becomes a manipulable object for national guilt: The disagreeable consequences of this affair, have not stopped here [the publication of his supposed attack on Hastings]; I can no longer stir abroad, without attracting the gaze of observation. . . . [A]ll those [places] of resort, in the outskirts of the town, have advertised me, as part of their bill of fare. . . . In fine, I can no longer find happiness in this metropolis, and would with pleasure at this moment re-embark on the bosom of the ocean.24

Apparently indifferent to irony (or adding to the lacquer of authenticity), Hamilton has Zaarmilla protest the usurpation of his voice and go one prophetic step further to insinuate that the end of Hastingsesque orientalism would render India and Indian culture artifactual, resulting in native unrest. The prince only becomes a spectacle after he is used as a voice of protest, and this ventriloquism results in the first manifestation of a desire to quit England. Hamilton’s mocking depiction of imperial apologists’ guilt, which Zaarmilla describes as “delirium,” is of course an allusion to the theatricality of Hastings’s trial, whose dramatic highlights included Richard Sheridan’s famous swoon after his four-part oration denouncing Hastings, and which was notable for its near-scandalous blurring of public and private spaces, particularly during Burke’s notoriously

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graphic descriptions of the indignities visited on Indian women by Hastings’s cronies. 25 Burke’s Indian spectacle, at least in the initial stages of the trial, also transformed what was initially conceived of as an internal bureaucratic problem—the misdemeanors of middle manageament—into a national tragedy: his early declaration that “all the Commons of England [resent] as their own the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the peoples of India” blurs the lines between colonized subjects and British citizenry. 26 This appeal to sentiment may have compelled Hamilton, an anti-Jacobin author, to adopt a “sentimental” form like the epistolary novel, which is usually associated with radical fiction. 27 Indeed, the rhetoric of Translation mirrors Hamilton’s personal experience with negotiation, as it twines seemingly incompatible political affiliations: as a feminist text that skewers feminists, an evangelical work that lauds Hinduism, and a satirical novel wrapped in sentimental form, Translation enacts a formal and ideological melding that underscores the cultural cosmopolitanism it espouses. Hamilton’s almost complete substitution of exotic veneer for scholarly rigor indicates the seriousness of the message behind the satirical face. As the novel makes clear, the colonial mission embodies an ideal Britishness that has almost vanished from the homeland. In a sly refutation of the charges of Hastings’s “going native,” the officers and administrators Zaarmilla meets in India convince him of the inherent superiority of British culture, an illusion that is only shattered once the prince actually travels to England. During a description of AngloIndian life in Calcutta, Zaarmilla notes that “by far the greater number of those with whom I converse, are men who, though they have not the words of their Shaster [Bible] often in their mouths, seem to have imbibed a part of its spirit in their hearts.”28 Contrast this portrait of British society with Zaarmilla’s reflections after spending several months in England: “my ignorance . . . persisted in cherishing the ill-founded notion that all the people of England were Christians! I . . . confess—that of the many religions prevalent in this strange country, Christianity (as it is set forth in the Shaster) has the smallest number of votaries.”29 If Burke turned Hastings into the focal point for colonial guilt and the reciprocal pollution of British values by oriental modes of governance, Hamilton points the finger back home, arguing instead that the vestiges of “true” and traditional British society are found in the colonies (or in those British homes with family in the colonies). Zaarmilla’s impossibly virtuous Anglo-Indian

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friends—Captain Percy, Captain Gray, and Morton—represent an ideal he turns into stereotype, suggesting that British values would die out at home if not for the saving grace of colonial expansion that fosters these values abroad. The gentlemen populating Hamilton’s novel anticipate a later model of duty to empire subjugated to the cult of bourgeois domesticity, refuting the more common contemporary portrayals of Company men as profligate adventurers, wastrel aristocratic second sons, and the excesses of British society. The novel’s interpretation of Indian history in conjunction with its critique of English society demonstrates Hamilton’s early grasp of the intertwined histories of the subcontinent and the British Isles. As we know, many orientalists (e.g., Jones and Wilkins) fully believed in both the cultural and economic value of the colonies to the mother state. Few if any, however, would have argued that India, particularly Indian history, was intimately connected with and vitally important to an understanding of Britishness. Hamilton’s enthusiasm for and positive depictions of Hindu-Indian history—the benevolence of its rulers, the happiness of the native populace—along with her satire of contemporary British society suggests that India presented valuable alternatives to corrupt domestic norms. This radical use of orientalism contradicts a normative British historiography that reads imperial and domestic histories as separate, disconnected entities.30 The novel undermines progressive historicism for a model that is not only positively regressive but also located outside the space of modernity as her temporal regression is accompanied by a concomitant evacuation of the center for the colonial periphery. Translation narrates a distinctly hybrid future in which elements of Hindu society are not merely archival products for the scholar but essential models for returning Britain to its nobler, more Christian past. Thus the novel’s historiography manipulates the future anterior: it attempts to control and interpret Indian pasts in order to construct a newly integrated empire. Hamilton’s cultural nostalgia also dictates her approach to the novel’s overriding concern—the neglect of female education—to which both Hindu and British cultures plead guilty. Although Hamilton’s depiction of the relationship between Britain and India falls along predictable gender lines (England is indeed masculine compared to India), her quasi-feminist, regressive historiography undermines the very hierarchy she puts forth—the femininity of Hindus, coded as “tranquil,” “peaceful,” domestic, and “parental,” becomes an enviable asset rather than a weakness: “the manner in which the Rajahs of

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the Hindoos exercised the rights of dominion . . . bears so little analogy to that practiced by the petty sovereigns of such European states as are placed in circumstances nearly similar. . . . There [in India] the right of sovereignty bore the mild aspect of parental authority. The Prince considered the people in light of children.”31 Perkins and Russell argue that unlike that of her radical counterpart Mary Wollstonecraft, Hamilton’s theory of education “suggests that improved education for women will return society to a happier past and that, in providing that education, society will be true to the religious principles it already claims to embrace.”32 As an oriental novel, Translation follows the model of Hartly House and (to a lesser extent) The Missionary by creating a space where essentializing gender tropes are revalued. Though her radicalism is partly obscured by her insistence on working within the patriarchal structures of both imperial and “domestic” rule, Hamilton’s juxtaposition of the glorified past of a feminized and ultimately failed culture (the mythic Hindu state) with an anxious exposition of the current state of British females allows her to conflate the causes of two very different groups: Hindu men and British women. Hamilton’s perpetual anxiety over gender roles brings us back to the novel’s generic hybridity. Claire Grogan observes that Hamilton’s confluence of genres (footnote novel, satire, oriental study, and reform novel) reveals a gendered and cultural fluidity, arguing further that Hamilton “has to forego [sic] her female voice and style for that of the male writer.”33 But it is perhaps more accurate to say that Hamilton, acutely aware of her intellectual cross-dressing, alternately effaces and asserts her authorial agency. She cannot escape addressing orientalism’s presumed masculine proclivities, but her paratextual presence suggests layers of both rebellion and quiescence at work. Although she establishes a strong intellectual presence in the novel via its extensive footnotes, she also assures potentially scandalized readers that her “motive” for publishing the letters was the soothing effect of “sorting” through them after a “fatal event”: the death of her brother Charles Hamilton, himself an orientalist and the obvious model for the novel’s virtuous Captain Percy. Her Memoirs further undermines her scholarly agency by informing readers that she “insensibly” picked up her orientalist training after Charles’s return from India.34 Hence, while Hamilton clearly scorns those who oppose female learning, her Memoirs offers a placating justification for her work by

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positioning her brother-translator as the facilitator of her own literary project, referring to him as the intellectual father of her “black baby” while distancing herself from the role as “mother”-creator of the novel.35 Despite the seeming obviousness of the title, Hamilton does not posit herself as the translator of the rajah’s letters, opting instead for the more traditional role of female as organizer, collector, and reader. Interestingly enough, Zaarmilla is also not the translator. In a brief passage near the close of the novel, Zaarmilla mentions to his correspondent Maandara that “it ha[s] been my custom to write down such conversations as I intended to recite to you, in [English], and after having given it to some English friend to translate, have from the corrected copy made the translations intended for your use.”36 The convoluted process of the transmission of the letters and the bland reference to an unnamed “English friend” on whom both Zaarmilla and Hamilton depend effectively obscure any agency of authorship-translation. The opacity of the position of translator in the novel, and the minor place it has in the actual text, brings us back to its elliptical title. In the aporia of authorial agency, Hamilton employs a mode and a genre—translation and the epistolary novel— that operate under the guise of factuality. And because translation is considered derivative, and letters informal, conversational, and private, the role of the author is left blank. While this aporia allows Hamilton to separate herself from the more radical female contemporaries (Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays) she satirized in her fiction, it also helps the novel, like many an oriental tale, to straddle the line between fiction and fact.37 While the oriental tale had, by the end of the eighteenth century, a long association with social critique, Translation moves beyond simple satire to prophesy a dual cultural revolution. Hamilton’s layered evocation of Hindu, colonial, and British customs offered her readers a truly global vision of empire as the catalyst for useful transcultural praxis. Reaching past Burke’s and Hastings’s use of the singular native voice as the representative for the collective, she has her Indian prince become the voice for Indian men and British women, offering a kind of intellectual miscegenation that, as we have seen, more radical female novelists like Sydney Owenson shied away from. By reading a Hindu past into the colonial present and future, the process of this cultural translation reflects the Žižekian concept of revolutionary time where the future anterior collapses the past into the present and future such that history as a progression becomes a continuous

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present that reformulates progress not as a forward motion but a backward one. The heterotopic space of the travelogue explodes the seeming innocuousness of Hamilton’s translative gestures; benevolent British orientocolonialism will return both India and Britain to their respective and quasi-utopian pasts through the symbiotic dissemination of knowledge. Her palimpsestic social goal—Hindu effeminacy layered with Christian piety—requires a kind of cultural exchange hinted at only tremulously by her male orientalist counterparts. As Mona Narain has argued, “morality [in Hamilton’s novel] is authentic only when it is ratified by both Self and its mirrored Other.”38 Emphasizing the cultural and historical symbiosis between India and Britain, Hamilton’s ‘black baby” is a cultural and generic fusion and arguably one of the earliest pieces of colonial literature to tackle the issues of reform, cultural exchange, and imperial duty that were to haunt novelists, colonial administrators, and Indian nationalists in the later stages of British imperial governance. Fostered by the vision of a colonialism that allows historical commonalities to transcend gender and national borders (imperialized British females, feminized Indian males), her belief in a universal moral community necessitates both English political power in India and knowledge of an Indian cultural tradition in Britain. In Hamilton’s novel, cosmopolitanism and benevolent colonialism are partners, affirming David Parker’s observation that “the terms on which cultural differences are encountered, appropriated, and absorbed have never been free from power; from being embedded in the asymmetrical relationships and pressures of commerce, colonialism, and military force.”39 Hamilton’s cultural universalism is not an absolutely horizontal humanism, though, and however seemingly horizontal her pairing of Hindu and Christian histories, they take place within the political dynamic of British paternalism and at the expense of Mughal history, which is written out of the subcontinent as even more foreign than the British. And yet her integration of histories and cultures across time and space demonstrates the intersection of colonialism with a reformist cosmopolitanism in which colonization becomes the catalyst of mutual social improvement: a cosmopolitanism that enables and is enabled by immersion in one’s own culture as much as by cultural exchange. If fictional translation enables a series of critical engagements— generic, political, gendered—in Translation, translation and fiction engage on very different terms in the real-life counterpart to Hamilton’s novel, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810). Travels

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recounts the journies of the so-called Persian Prince, Abu Talib, a munshi (secretary), writer, and (in his own words) desperate and unemployed East India Company assistant who traveled from Calcutta to London in 1799, seeking both intellectual enjoyment and a speedy death. Happily only the former was forthcoming, and when Abu Talib returned to India in 1803 he composed the Masir-i-Talibi, a narrative of his travels in Persian, which was subsequently translated into English by the orientalist Charles Stewart. A brief glance at this text and, in particular, at its critical reception reveals the future of the colonial cosmopolitanism Hamilton envisioned. Like other orientalists, Stewart was acutely conscious of questions of authenticity that invariably accompanied Eastern texts and took great pains to assure readers of the fidelity of his translation, relying on (ironically, given the oriental fictions he was contending with) paratextual padding. In the introduction to the second edition he informs readers that a copy of Abu Talib’s Persian manuscript would be available for viewing at his publisher’s, and added an advertisment whose sole purpose was to refute rumors of the Travels’ inauthenticity. But the problem of affirming the “real” oriental within the mythopoesis of orientalism dogged the text: Reginald Heber’s approving and unusually lengthy review of the Travels in the Quarterly Monthly likens the text to “genuine treasures of Golconda” compared with the fictive baubles that precede it but later expresses a passing regret that the text does not contain “more of the Oriental leaven,” a lack that both confirms and troubles the text’s authenticity.40 Stewart anticipates this critical disappointment with the book’s lack of “Oriental imagery, or flights of fancy” in a note, and adds with some exasperation that the stereotype of the Eastern baroque is due to translative, not cultural, practices.41 This is misleading: Stewart argues correctly that extant translations of oriental texts favored poetry and drama and neglected a corpus of writing, primarily Perisan, that more closely adhered to emerging Western ideas of the historical. He does not mention, though, that his translation eliminates many of Abu Talib’s poetic conceits in order to make the Travels conform to the parameters of Western travel writing.42 Clearly the Travels’ “realness” was challenged by its lack of what was considered constitutive “orientalness”—ornate allusion, verbosity—even as the translator obfuscated its orientalness in order to make the text more “real.” A sense of the public’s saturation with orientalism’s troubling fictionality is evident in a sneering review in the Eclectic Monthly that begins

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by dismissing Stewart’s authentication efforts because “we have been so thoroughly saturated with the European travels of fictitious Asiatic personages” before condescendingly allowing “that the present work must be indebted for what attention it obtains to the presumption of its being what it purports to be.”43 If the Travels is a remarkable iteration of the there and back again transmissions of Eastern texts discussed in the previous chapter—a voyage to England composed in Perisan and then translated back into English—what is particularly noteworthy about the critical response is the resistance shown to this particular instance of cultural regifting. Heber begins his review by reflecting on the particular pleasures that the outsider perspective may bring to the local inhabitant—the “shewing the lions” that renders the familiar unfamiliar—but he describes Abu Talib’s observations of English society and its flaws as nearly identical to Southey’s in his fake Spanish travelogue, Travels in England. Abu Talib apparently cannot show the English something they cannot show themselves, and the text becomes less of a critique and more of a curiosity. The review concludes happily anticipating how the Travels’ descriptions of England’s military and technological prowess might inspire a “spirit of imitation among those who had before considered the Europeans as a race of warlike savages.” Heber is ultimately not as interested in Stewart’s translation of the Travels as he is in the Persian original and its influence on native readers. Heber’s resistance to edification from the East notwithstanding, he is very much alive to the “emphatic interconnectedness of sexual and imperial fantasy” that Daniel O’Quinn identifies as the Travels’ governing topos.44 (And one that is almost wholly absent in Hamilton’s portrayal of her near-ascetic Hindu prince.) Heber observes that “ladies” in particular will be anxious to read the Travels because of their acquaintance with Mirza Abu al-Hasan, a Persian envoy who visited Britain just prior to Stewart’s translation. He describes how London’s female elite ascertained “by actual experience, the length of a Persian’s [al-Hasan’s] beard, and the texture of his skin,” invoking the shocking image of an Eastern potentate being groped by a cluster of white women. But if manipulating sexual exoticism was, as O’Quinn suggests, a way for Abu Talib to engage socially and critically with his European audience, Heber ultimately sees colonial closeness only in terms of how it advances the cause of an emerging imperial ideology. Nigel Leask observes that Abu Talib’s narrative offers a unique perspective: that of a native intellectual uncrippled by

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feelings of historical inadequacy that would afflict subsequent generations of colonial subjects.45 Heber, who was several years away from being appointed bishop of Calcutta, is a voice from that future: his review begins by locating the value of Abu Talib’s observations in the relatively small civilizational gap between Indians and Europeans, which allows this native traveler—as opposed to a “far-fetched curiosity in human form” like the Pacific islander Mai—to appreciate the true superiority of the British. The Masir-i-Talibi was composed on the cusp of a transformation in both European travel writing and imperial expansion, but both author and translator belong to an earlier period where imperial intimacy and intellectual exchange were afforded more leniency than would be shown in this new era . By the time the Travels hit the London markets, the sort of mutual education that cosmopolitan experience ideally produces was, as we have seen, increasingly neglected or under attack. And as the idea that wisdom could come from the East lost its allure, orientalist fictionality, that potent and fluid discourse between fantasy and antiquarianism, was also becoming a less and less acceptable cognitive protocol. In its place came a new sort of mythmaking.

Of Mimics and Monkeys With the aforementioned interment of the nabob away from the real and fictive colonial landscape, many of the translative anxieties (and satirical stereotypes) attributed to him were transferred to a new and decidedly nineteenth-century creature of colonialism: the native mimic. We know that the educational reforms sponsored by liberal Anglicists had reversed the direction of orientalist studies: instead of translations of Indian poetry saving English literature, English was to become the medium through which to translate English culture onto a new, hybrid class of Anglicized Indian intellectuals. But in addition to this subset of quiescent imperial servants, Macaulay’s educational reforms also help produce unruly assemblages of revolutionary nationalists and overly bookish Indian gentlemen.46 Where nabobs once flaunted money to elevate their social status, these native “babus” were represented in the British press as posturing nincompoops whose chief characteristic was the adoption of a grandiloquent and archaic style of English. The most famous of these fictional babus is, of course, Kipling’s Babu Huree Chunder Mookerjee, the obese

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effete spy in Kim who is described as “India in transition—the monstrous hybridism of the East and West.”47 Unlike Kim, the Irish boy who, chameleon-like, has the ability to deftly appropriate other cultures as his own, the babu, marked by his fondness for florid, affected English, will never pass. While Kim provides characters like the babu and the lama with obvious and rather static use value, Kipling’s earlier Jungle Books (first published in 1894) present a more subtle and complex treatment of mimicry and language within the colonial system. Although The Jungle Books are a loose collection of animal fables with many shared characteristics, the Mowgli stories interspersed throughout the two volumes can be grouped to form a single narrative.48 Kipling takes two popular Victorian tropes—the symbiotic yet contentious relationship between “blood” and education and theories of racial and species evolution— and uses them to tell the now-famous story of an Indian boy raised by wolves who dominates the jungle before carrying the lessons he has learned in the wild back to the village. Several of the most well crafted of the Mowgli stories focus on his learning to survive in the Jungle with the animals as his guides, breaking down their complex social structures for both the boy and his readers. The twinned triumphs of these stories are Mowgli’s defeat of the rogue tiger Sher Khan and Mowgli’s subsequent mastery of the rules of the Jungle. In a fairly blatant historical analogy, the tiger (a symbol for Mughal oppression in imperial mythography) who rules by fear and tyranny is defeated by the human boy who is the accepted master of the Jungle. Sher Khan and, in other stories, the wild dogs who attempt to invade the Jungle, represent elements who threaten to upset its tightly controlled balance of power. In the story “Kaa’s Hunting,” however, the enemy is the bandar-log, or monkeys, whose crime is not disrupting the Jungle hierarchy but mistaking their role in it. Mowgli first comes across them in a moment of weakness, when he is tired and angry from the necessary discipline of learning lessons. Enticed by their similarities to himself (notably their two-leggedness) and their playfulness, Mowgli is warned against them by Baloo, his teacher: “they [the bandar-log] are outcastes. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen. . . . [T] hey are without leaders. They have no remembrance. . . . [W]e do not notice them, even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”49 Living in the jungle and yet not with it, the bandar-log inhabit the crumbling ruins of an ancient Indian city that they claim to have

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built. This self-aggrandizement is all too reminiscent of the orientalist insistence that contemporary Indians clung to vestiges of an ancient civilization that they could neither understand nor appreciate. But the primary problem with the bandar-log is, as Baloo’s speech to Mowgli indicates, their lack of a language system and subsequent imitation of “real” language, one of the primary forces of discipline in the animal world. The bandar-log are mimics and, as such, their language is parodic and secondary. As Daniel Bivona observes: The idea of apelike mimicry—repetition without meaning—then contrastively testifies to the signifying ‘depth’ of human language. . . . As a corollary, the ability to generate new words is said to guarantee the existence of consciousness—indeed, self-consciousness. . . . [T] his Victorian bildungsroman is ultimately concerned with vaunting an order of discourse which escapes the mirroring of the Imaginary and accedes to the representational power of the Symbolic in Lacan’s sense. Pure mimicry closes off access to the metaphorical power of language. Those who can only repeat cannot master the repetition-with-difference that is characteristic of metaphorical representation.50

Metaphorical language is the key to power in The Jungle Books: once Mowgli learns the “Master Words” (“We be of one blood, ye and I”), he is allowed unlimited access to the entire jungle system and dominates it. His greatest gift, moreover, is his ability to translate these master words, where the skill lies in precisely the “repetition with difference” that Bivona sees as the distinguishing feature of real language. Once Mowgli is able to translate these words into all the various Jungle languages, the animals are bound to him in kinship. The bandar-log, in contrast, imitate without real understanding; mimicry is thus a parody of “real” or “good” translation. Lacking the power to comprehend the words they chatter, they are simultaneously buffoonish and deadly in their carelessness. They do not intentionally seek to kill Mowgli, but they do inadvertently starve him and unthinkingly put him into a snake-filled pit, and they do not know the master words. More than with any other set of animals in the Mowgli stories, Kipling takes great care to detail the role of the bandar-log in Jungle society. They are the ultimate temptation for Mowgli because they are uncannily similar yet different and offer the prospect of perpetual indolence rather than education. Fulfilling so many stereotypes of native lassitude and cruelty, “bandar-log” is unsurprisingly similar to bandhar logan, or “good people,” as the Bengali intelligentsia referred to themselves, and this alliterative resonance between the

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quasi-human monkeys and their real-life counterparts is one of the stories’ more pointed allegorical allusions.51 Bivona refers to the rigidity of the master words and their immediate linguistic signification as a “childish linguistic utopia” in which language can and does have palpable consequences. In effect, the secondary, mimetic function of language becomes “magical”—the words’ symbolic potentiality produces the real with no gap of signification. Like Alice’s wanderings through Wonderland, Mowgli’s jungle stint represents a coming to terms with the rules and regulations (linguistic and otherwise) of the adult world. But if Wonderland reflects a perspective in which adult rules of language and conduct appear nonsensical and arbitrary, Kipling’s Jungle is a tightly controlled society in which play is always directed toward or sacrificed for education, and education is duly rewarded with power. Mowgli may be a kind of prelapsarian Adam, but the Jungle is no Eden. It is a vast network of allegiances, codes, and protocols that rely on linguistic and physical force to keep violence in check. It is also a utopian allegory of a specifically colonial society in which the social hierarchies of the animals are transparent and justified. When Mowgli returns to his native village he has difficulty understanding the comparatively arbitrary systems of caste and religion: “Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man.” In a sense Mowgli becomes an ideal colonial mimic—after being educated in the rationally ordered world of the militarized Jungle, the random cruelty of Indian social norms bewilders him though it is his “native” culture. Even Mowgli’s return to the human world in the final story, “The Spring Running,” is dictated by the laws of nature (his implied sexual stirrings), which are an extension of the all-powerful Law of the Jungle and not any inherently human impulse or desire for civilization. Emphasizing the pleasures of responsibility over empty play, The Jungle Books display Kipling’s most ponderous moralizing. In place of his poems’ cheeky, vernacular insight or Kim’s witticisms, Kipling’s animals are frightfully oratorical, almost oriental, in their ponderous musings. In Kim, the boy spy grapples with an ongoing identity crisis (“I am Kim. . . . Who is Kim?”), whose hasty resolution near the novel’s close has consistently struck readers as forced. In contrast, Mowgli’s arguably even more vexing biological confusion—what species is he?— is negotiated with relative ease. The Law of the Jungle provides the answers to all crises, including Mowgli’s on the eve of his return to

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civilization: “It is the Law. . . . Little Frog, take thine own trail; make thy lair with thine own blood and pack and people . . . [but remember] Master of the Jungle, the Jungle is at thine call.”52 Despite the elegiac farewell to boyhood at the end of “The Spring Running,” the Mowgli stories embrace one of the fantasies of adolescence: the ability to move organically between opposing worlds. Late nineteenth-century literature is fond of seeing imperial spaces as immutably divided; E. M. Forster’s description of English and Indian settlements joined only by the sky in A Passage to India is the epitome of a literary world divided into black and white towns. In Kim’s opening scene of the young boy astride the Zam-Zammeh cannon, we are introduced to a colonial world with neat cultural and historical bifurcations that do not shift in response to Kim’s crises of identity. But the Jungle, even with its fondness for universal laws and master words, is one of the very few representations of colonial geography that resists such splitting. Despite Kipling’s attempts to distinguish the logically militarized Jungle from the randomness of village caste and religious laws, their social alignments are constantly paralleled. When Baloo lectures Mowgli against associating with the bandar-log, his admonition echoes those laws governing intercaste pollution: “we do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die.” It is tempting to read the allegory in The Jungle Books along a fairly strict politicohistorical axis; Don Randall makes a compelling argument in Kipling’s Imperial Boy for the Jungle as an extended metaphor for Indian colonial history. In Randall’s explanation, the Jungle represents the chaotic native world that is understood and categorized by colonial politics. Drawing from Ronald Inden’s theorization of colonial systems of knowledge-power, Randall observes that the “Hinduism” that reveals “no apparent order” is nonetheless posited as “knowable” (86). This “jungle,” is, “after all, a part of the orderly world in which the jungle officer of the Indian mind, the Indologist, wishes to live.” . . . Kipling’s writing of the Law in the Indian jungle thus conforms quite closely to what Inden puts forward as Indology’s central tenant—that world-ordering rationality must be imposed on India by an external agency.53

Randall draws a fairly elaborate allegorical map in which Kipling essentially distills the key moments of Indian history into the Mowgli stories. Thus, Sher Khan represents the foreign Muslim invader who is defeated by Mowgli, who represents colonial authority. Randall reads

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“The Spring Running,” in which Mowgli saves his mother from being stoned by her fellow villagers, as analogous to the supposed defilement of British women by Indians during the Mutiny, with Mowgli representing the heroism of the British in contrast to the savage, uncolonized natives. This reading is persuasive, not the least because of its unity and overarching historical embrace. But such an analysis too tightly constrains the allegory’s symbolic fluidity. Mowgli, unlike Kim, is a native boy, not a white one, which immediately problematizes Randall’s colonial-native division, especially when the British are an acknowledged if somewhat mystical presence. The allegorical procession Randall describes suggests a historical progression belied by the temporally disjointed structure of the Mowgli stories that, in the first edition of The Jungle Books, were published without any thought to creating an uninterrupted bildungsroman. For the Outward Bound edition of The Jungle Books, Kipling did respond to the popularity of the Mowgli stories by publishing them chronologically and in a separate volume from the other stories, but the original temporal disjunction of the first edition helps underscore the synchronicity of the novel’s coterminous worlds—the colonized jungle does not replace the ancient Indian village, as Randall’s reading would suggest, but rather exists in uneasy truce with it. Jungle society may be superior to the village, but Man has characteristics (gaze, notably) that make him superior to all the jungle animals. Most importantly, in both “The Spring Running” and then “In the Rukh,” the only Mowgli story not included in The Jungle Books, Mowgli abandons both village and Jungle—modern, colonial India, in Randall’s reading— for English-controlled spaces that exist on the fringe of the other two worlds. Releasing Kipling’s allegory from a historical narrative allows us to explore the richness of its ambiguity, exemplified in its ever-shifting positions of power. In the story “Letting in the Jungle,” Hathi the elephant is master of the Jungle, which is superior to the village, even though he, like all the other animals, is afraid of humans. Yet at a command from Mowgli, Hathi and his elephants easily destroy Mowgli’s natal village in revenge for the stoning of Messua, Mowgli’s human mother. Mowgli’s manhood allows him mastery over the animal world, but the story is the first to explicitly acknowledge Mowgli’s innate human superiority, not just because of his gaze but because of his manipulation of historical narrative (he spurs Hathi to action by reminding him of the Sack of the Battle of Bhurtpore). Taking into

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account the entire world of Mowgli stories—not only the Jungle but also the ancient ruins within it, the native villages, and the spectral presence of the British—Kipling creates a deeply compelling imperial macrocosm in which the interactions and power dynamics are highly unstable, constantly shifting, and originally uncertain. The Jungle itself may be tightly structured, but the metaworld of the stories is far more fractious and ambiguous. In the ongoing struggle between village and Jungle, the British, who remain largely invisible, are the only obviously unchallengeable power. In “Letting in the Jungle,” the villagers complain about having to cover up their plans to stone Mowgli’s parents lest the English, “a perfectly mad people, who will not let the villagers kill witches in peace,” hear of their plans. Consequently, when Mowgli’s parents flee, they make out for the distant town where they have heard of a tribe called “the English” who reject superstition and arbitrary violence. Much like the Law of the Jungle itself, British rule is depicted as unfathomable and unassailable. The one exception to Kipling’s persistent representation of hapless, helpless natives is Mowgli, who rises above the shifting balance of power between Jungle and village precisely because of his hybrid identity. When Mowgli returns to Messua in “The Spring Running,” she initially mistakes him for a forest spirit: “As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp, strong, tall, and beautiful . . . he might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a jungle legend.”54 Mowgli’s quasi-divinity might make him a potential contender for the truly godlike powers of the British, but Kipling resolves any potential contention between the two in “In the Rukh,” in which the rogue potency of both the hybrid Mowgli and the Jungle are neutralized when he becomes the gamekeeper for a British forest warden.55 Satya P. Mohanty argues that Kipling’s characters inhabit a dichotomous world of invisibility and spectacle. Extrapolating from the work of critics like Bernard Cohen, who focus on the colonizer as a figure of spectacle, Mohanty posits the inverse but related trope of invisibility in which “the white man [i]s . . . capable of invisibility in a context that renders him eminently spectacular.”56 In other words, both the theatricality of the Victorian durbar and the seamless, silent mastery of the native world are necessary to create the panopticon of colonial rule. In the Jungle Books, the most potent example of this is the stories’ “editor,” the jokey persona who has “collected” these stories from a number of animals—native informants—and translated

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the animal languages. In this way, the Jungle Books may seem to be a parody or recreation of the oriental tale, when it is in fact an aggressive rewriting. Kipling’s use of allegory upends orientalist fictionality with cloaked truths: as Tess Cosslett points out, “Kipling is being ‘realistic’: his tales are not wholly mythological or fabular, but contain historical verisimilitude . . . and his stories are grounded in a realistic world.”57 Where the tale suggestively and problematically blurred fiction and truth, Kipling’s modern short story is obviously fictional but grounded in Victorian anthropological truisms. The allegory is not easily resolved, but it is safer. What Kipling’s colonial allegory underscores is that the most wellknown Victorian fantasy worlds—Wonderland, the Jungle—contain within their promise of childish utopia the recognition that the real worlds they gesture toward are highly compromised and deeply divided. To resolve this the Mowgli stories present language as a tool to navigate both the Jungle and the uncomfortable overlap between the colonial and the indigenous. Language fractures the wholeness of the allegory but also places Mowgli in a unique position: his coming of age is inseparable from its colonial context and represents the maturation of a new kind of educated native. The Mowgli of “In the Rukh” is the ideal colonial subject: simultaneously mimic and master translator. He becomes the inverse of the detested hordes of bandarlog, a character whose liminal condition affords rather than hinders cultural exchange. Even though he is unfamiliar with the ways of the village, he can, with the invisible help of the British, navigate the village world through his mastery of the Jungle law and all its creatures and thus, the wild wolf-boy from the Jungle grows up to be the unlikely fulfillment of the liberal fantasy of imperial education. In an implicit rebuke to oriental tale—the narrative of empire’s inception— Kipling uses the short story form to create allegories of the Raj in its triumph.58 Unlike the wandering of the native royalty in Translation and the Travels, one of Mowgli’s most reassuring traits as imperial servant is his relative immobility; he may wander between village and Jungle, but he stays comfortably within colonized spaces, finally allowing the British to co-opt his knowledge of the Jungle while remaining safely within its bounds. In reality, educated colonial subjects venturing to Britain, as they did in increasing numbers to the close of the century, narrowed the gap between mimicry and mockery that Bhabha locates as the space of colonial imitation.

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Baboo “Funkiness” In Rozina Visram’s catalogue of nineteenth-century British reactions to various types of Indian travelers to or expatriates in Britain, royalty alone escape much of the stigma attached to “black foreigners.”59 Adapting well to the British craze for aristocrats of all races, Indian princes and princesses mingled with the British elite and participated in the sports of country life, perpetuating the fantasy of India’s exotic wealth. In reality, however, by the late nineteenth century a new group of Indians began traveling to Britain in large numbers: middleclass students. Unlike their noble counterparts, these travelers came with specific and practical educational goals: for many years both the bar and civil service exams were available only in Britain. As neither rajahs nor lascars, these migrating “baboos” who aroused both scorn and unease were ideal signifiers for the anxieties of late Victorian culture.60 In Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (1886), the earliest negative use of the word “babu” is recorded in 1850. Until around that point, it would appear that the English used the term in the same way Indians, mostly Bengalis, did: as a moniker of respect. Like the Mughals before them, however, the British had long regarded Bengalis as a lazy and dissolute “race.” Macaulay’s description of Bengalis in Warren Hastings (1841) includes a handy list of babu stereotypes: “The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. . . . During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity are qualities to which his constitution and situation are equally unfavorable.”61 While the lascar, or Indian sailor, was already a recognizable fictional symbol of the liminal, the outcast, and the squalid in domestic fiction, babus— increasingly common figures in colonial literature—became examples of the perils of overeducating an unassimilable people.62 Thrust rather abruptly into metropolitan centers of learning, many Indian students naturally believed that adopting English manners and habits would save them from racial discrimination. However, this often produced exactly the opposite result, as those Indian students were often regarded as “hybrid mimetic product[s] of [an] English university” for their attempts at integration.63 The many anxieties caused by this hybrid mimesis are on full display in F. Anstey’s Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. T. A.

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Guthrie, or F. Anstey, as he was popularly known, is now recognized, if at all, as the author of Vice Versa, the popular children’s novel, and for Voces Populi, a column he wrote for Punch. After failing to establish himself as a writer of serious fiction, Anstey seems to have embraced his second-tier status as a writer of comic novels and sketches: the penultimate chapter of his autobiography, A Long Retrospect, which mostly records conversations with authors like Tennyson and Henry James, begins with the painfully obvious reflection that “my life has been singularly deficient in adventure.” But A Long Retrospect also evinces the author’s fascination with language and dialect, and the influence of the two on class and status, all central themes in Baboo Hurry. Take this early description of his father: “he could not be called a well-educated man, but his English was correct and free from any trace of either the Cornish or Cockney accent.”64 Anstey’s justification for writing Baboo Hurry was a youthful fascination with “Babu English,” as it was termed, and he based his research on the advice and expertise of AngloIndian friends. Even though A Long Retrospect devotes some time to political events, its sole indication of any exposure to the imperial reality of the times is a sniggering recollection of a youthful visit to the Crystal Palace some thirteen years after the first exhibition: “in . . . the Palace were life-size groups of savages of various tribes which I [disliked], not having realized before that such unpleasant-looking people existed.”65 Despite Anstey’s air of detachment, Baboo Hurry’s narrative of an idiotic, amorous Indian law student thematically engages both the British political response to Indian nationalism and the dark rapist and effeminate Hindu caricatures rampant during the later half of the nineteenth century. When, in 1883, Parliament approved the Ilbert Bill allowing Indian magistrates to try cases against the British, its passage was fiercely contested by Anglo-Indians who argued that it would rekindle the racial antipathies that led to the 1857 Munity.66 The Ilbert controversy coincided with the Indian National Congress’s push to eliminate the low age limit for taking the civil service exams, a stipulation that hindered Indians who were taking an exam in a nonnative language. The bill’s eventual passage caused London’s Indian population to grow significantly: the number of Indian students, which had been increasing only incrementally in the 1880s, made more dramatic leaps in the 1890s and exploded in the early twentieth century.67 Although people cautioned Anstey against printing the book for fear of inflaming Indian outrage, he scoffed at such warnings, remarking that:

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While the series was appearing in Punch [it appeared in serial form under “Jottings and Tittlings by Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee” before publication as a novel] protests were made by some on the ground that it was calculated to produce ill-feeling among the influential . . . high-class natives in India. I doubt whether these were . . . accustomed to regard the Bengali Babu with such veneration . . . and certainly the articles were not resented by any of Mr. Jabberjee’s fellow students, some of whom wrote to Burnand [Punch’s editor from 1880 to 1906] offering to do them better on very moderate terms. 68

Anstey’s response, a sneer at the humorlessness and acquiescence of native students, also emphasizes the authenticity of his fictional “Baboo,” who begins the novel offering to write for Punch and improve its flagging literary standards. Anstey’s position with Punch is one argument for a reconsideration of his mostly forgotten work. Despite Baboo Hurry’s relative obscurity, the novel, it is worth keeping in mind, an offshoot of sketches that appeared in Voces Populi, was apparently popular enough to warrant a drearily similar second novel, A Bayard from Bengal (1899). And Anstey’s now insignificant status in Victorian letters does not take into account the general readership his association with Punch would have afforded him. (P. G. Wodehouse refers to a “Mr. Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee” in his 1909 novel Love among the Chickens.) Moreover, Anstey’s novel is symptomatic—though perhaps to an extreme—of the sorts of racial caricature common to late Victorian audiences: Baboo’s futile pursuits of British women combine the Indian reputation for excessive sexuality (following the rape myths of the Mutiny) with the equally common stereotype of Bengali effeminacy.69 Not insignificantly, the novel’s feeble afterlife exhibits an anxious tendency to refute any charges of racism by casting it as an example of a gentler, funnier Raj: the author of A History of Punch (1957) notes fondly that “Baboo English . . . is less familiar as language-teaching in Asia has improved. Anstey caught the Oriental student at his prime . . . There was no racial superiority, no colour-bar in Anstey’s humour. . . . Twenty years later all kinds of patronising and hurtful reticences would have prevented the publication of the series, twenty years in which Britain has grown more wounding to its subjects overseas.”70 We have already seen how comedy may serve as a form of social exclusion based on translative impasse. The superiority of English humor has been argued by everyone from Bill Bryson to William

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Congreve, who in a letter to John Dennis in 1695 assured his friend that he agreed with the conclusion that “there is more of Humour in our English writers, than in any of the other Comick poets, Ancient or Modern.”71 But equally as important as delineating who is in on the joke is establishing who may not be able to joke at all: an extreme example of comedy’s social violence is the adage, formed from aggregate implicit insinuations, that natives can’t be funny.72 The racial politics of humor break down along ethnic lines: “Negroes’” laughter is uncontrolled and excessive, but “Asiatics” are solemn and ponderous. Oliver Goldsmith, speaking as the fictional editor for the fictional author of the letters of Lien Chi Altangi (layers and layers of witty prevarication) points out that the “the Chinese are grave and sententious, so is he [the author]. But in one particular, the resemblance is peculiarly striking: the Chinese are often dull; and so is he.”73 In both Citizen of the World and Translation, the satire is dependent in part on ludicrously deadpan native observers who consistently do not “get” English society or English humor. This is of course partly how the satire is formed: Altangi and Zaarmilla’s incomprehension is proof of the fundamental hypocrisies of British society. But it is also more than that. These two are culturally, even racially, incapable of having fun. Traveling with a military escort to Calcutta, Zaarmilla is repeatedly baffled by a young soldier’s attempts at “high jinks,” reading humor as insubordination. This instance in Hamilton’s novel is not a satirical critique of English society; it is proof of the Indian’s inability to grasp humor. A place of privilege is then offered to the reader, who gets the satirical humor directed toward both British society and the uncomprehending foreign interlocutors. Lacking an ability to be consciously humorous may seem a frivolous concern, but in the context of colonial literature, it too often signifies fundamental intellectual incapacities and a natural insidiousness that is in contradistinction to standards of Englishness. The pleasure of superiority granted the reader through the enjoyment of comedy is thus doubly loaded when read in light of colonial subjectivity. (The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan provides a useful corrective here, as one of its striking features is the khan’s use of playful, flirtatious humor as a method of cultural critique.) Playing off the conventions of earlier colonial satire, in Baboo Hurry stereotype becomes subjectivity, as the “baboo” becomes “Baboo,” an aspiring law student who travels to London to study for the bar exam. Like Abu Talib, he is mistakenly identified as a

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prince—a title he chooses not to dispute—and on the strength of this is engaged to his landlady’s scheming daughter, whom he subsequently jilts in order to pursue a more genteel connection. That opportunity failing, and with his real identity exposed to his aristocratic friends, Baboo is sued by his former fiancée for breach of contract and represents himself in trial. He is found guilty by the jury, but fined a mere twenty-five pounds, after which the novel ends anticipating his return to India. The novel is based around comic scenes of mischance, as the babu stumbles through various scenes of British life (trips to Scotland and Avon, the theater, etc.), and is punctuated by Baboo’s obsession with Punch, where as a contributor he concurrently publishes the narrative of his life in England that leads to his exposure as a fraud. Unique in Anstey’s novel is the extent of Baboo’s involvement in British life—the foreign traveler is no longer a mere social observer, but a participant (witness the two marriage attempts). Structurally, though, the novel is similar to earlier oriental satires: the unsuspecting native wanders through society and offers alternative perspectives on “normal” life. But if in Hamilton’s and Goldsmith’s novels the point of the satire is to render the knowing reader sympathetic to the perspective of the foreign observer, Anstey reverses the focus of his satire to rest glaringly on the babu himself. Tellingly, he arrives in England not claiming to know an ideal version (Zaarmilla’s vision of British society is based on the Bible and interaction with various colonial officers) of English society, but to have mastered it. In his first letter to Punch, Baboo claims, among his other accomplishments, the ability to “turn out rhymed poetry after models of Poets Tennyson, Cowper, Mrs. Hemans, Southey & Co., done to a tittle, so as not to be detected.”74 Baboo’s claims to perfect mimicry empty him of any identity and, even more urgently, threaten to render the identities of the great poets equally meaningless. And yet the reader, even this early in the novel, knows that this cannot be true: Baboo’s reference to an outdated canon and his flowery, comic misconstructions of English neutralize this otherwise dangerous potential. The novel’s very first sentence, “Permit me most respectfully to bring beneath your notice a proposal which I serenely anticipate will turn up trumps under the fructifying sunshine of your esteemed approbation,” demonstrates his bastardization of English, particularly his mangling of succinct idiomatic phrases (“turn up trumps”) which do not mingle well with stereotypically ornate oriental speech. Baboo’s continual translations-mistranslations of idioms neither efface nor are effaced

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by the original. Instead, they become awkward portmanteaus that reveal the seams between two incompatible paradigms: English brevity cannot merge with Bengali loquacity. This is not to say that British subjects emerge unscathed by the novel’s satiric hits. Anstey’s mockery of Baboo’s pseudocosmopolitanism is also a critique of the British aristocracy and the lower classes who are united in their blind panderings to fashion. Those foolish enough to ignore Baboo’s idiocies because of his supposed status are castigated, but the focus of Anstey’s novel always returns to the satirization of Indian aspirations to Britishness. Anstey’s manipulation of the stereotype of the mimic underscores the slipperiness of equating mimicry with resistance.75 Eschewing the rebellious sense of play often associated with the mimic, Baboo defines and damns himself with stereotypes, leading to his painfully humorous liminality (humorous at his expense) and split identity. Mimicry represents the fractured identity, the incompatibility of skin and self: the mimic’s attempt at cultural emulation is always belied by racial difference. Baboo cannot be British because his identity as a “bloomin’ blacky,” as the street urchins call him, is inescapable despite—indeed, because of—his attempts to assimilate. Playing on Said’s thesis on writing and representation in Orientalism, Bhabha insists on mimicry as second-order mimesis—a vapid derivative that cannot withstand either the exegetic gaze or the cultural stresses accompanying any cross-cultural exchange: “mimicry repeats rather than re-presents.”76 But Baboo is not the only victim of Anstey’s ventriloquism: his disposability and reproducibility (there are, as Anstey’s response to his novel’s detractors suggests, hundreds just like him) also reveals the fragility of the culture being endlessly and uselessly mimicked. Mimicry reveals the essential split between culture as racially and nationally fixed and culture as universally communicable, resulting in an ungovernable lacuna. For Bhabha, this rupture is best represented by “non-sense”: the “oboum” of Forster’s Marabar caves and Kurtz’s incommunicable horror.77 While acknowledging Bhabha’s useful employment of “non-sense” as ineffable, incomprehensible, untranslatable voicing, I think it is also important to look at those instances when cultural rupture is made tangible: “non-sense” as satire, slapstick, and comic mischance. Jokes are, after all, synechdocal manifestations of a cultural system in which silences and common understandings—the pause between question and punch line, the blank before comprehension—insist

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on a shared sociohistorical background. Humorous encounters, like colonial ones, are based on contradiction and the social collision of incompatibles.78 And satire (comedy based on anxiety over social ills) parallels Bhabha’s definition of colonial paradox: the relationship between colonizer and colonized is one in which domination and paranoia exist simultaneously, not only as a function of the colonial unconscious but also as an acknowledged facet of imperial governance.79 British colonial administrators were not unaware of the inherent flaw in governing autocratically in the name of freedom but viewed it as a necessary evolutionary step in the governance of more socially “primitive” cultures: What is power worth if it is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery; if we can hold it only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed and which, as people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilized to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization. 80

In this speech to the House of Commons in 1833, Macaulay posits the idea of empire as a mutually beneficial system in which colonizer and colonized are mutually elevated. Implicit in this speech, however, despite its seeming liberalism, is the impossibility of ever becoming English. The temporal gap between the so-called three-thousand-year mass of superstition and the “civilized world” makes the possibility of the debased race catching up to its benefactors dubious as best. The belief that freedom was an essential facet of Britishness made it at once the justification and impossible goal of the colonial mission. Anstey’s novel seems at first to eschew serious questions of power and culture, portraying a character of almost no interiority who is little more than the sum of his linguistic jumbles. Some of Baboo’s ridiculous speeches, however, reveal political and cultural contradictions that cannot be easily dismissed and which magnify the potency of this fairly frivolous work in spite of itself. Reflecting the “baboo”’s cultural spectrality, Anstey describes his protagonist as both a fervent royalist and an Indian nationalist. On one hand, Baboo is comically assertive of his status as a British subject: his “citizenship” grants him immunity from attacks by small dogs and smutty old women on trains. But this is infrequently punctuated by a sense, albeit an immature one, of political and national agency. At a dinner party in

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the home of an upper-class friend, the first person Baboo meets is a former Anglo-Indian who immediately sees through his pretensions to Indian royalty and initially terrifies him by addressing him in Bengali. During the course of dinner, Baboo offers up his own version of a viable political future for India: there was no doubt that we Bengalis were intellectually competent to govern the whole country, provided only that we were backed up from behind by a large English military force to uphold our authority, as otherwise we should soon be the pretty pickles owing to violence from Sikhs, Rajputs, Marathas, and similar uncivilized coarse races. And Sir Chetwynd [the Anglo-Indian] expressed his lively satisfaction that I appreciated some of the advantages of the British occupation. 81

Baboo enacts one of the fundamental paradoxes of the British Raj: the education of Indians in English in order to foster subservient Anglicization was backfiring badly (witness the formation of an Indian Congress in 1885), and the native arguments for self-rule intersected awkwardly with assurances like Macaulay’s that Indian freedom was the ultimate goal of British colonization. Anstey solves this problem by demonstrating the immaturity of Baboo’s political consciousness: his reliance on British might and on native regional differences calcified through Western ethnography impede any construction of a unified, national, consciousness. As Baboo’s attempts to insinuate himself into British society are continually ridiculed, the novel has only one moment when readerly sympathy might align itself with the protagonist. Unable to procure a Scottish dictionary before his trip to the Highlands, Baboo elides Scottish and Indian histories as proof of English arrogance: How many of your boasted British cabinet, supposed to rule our countless millions of so-called Indian subjects, would be capable to sit down and read and translate—correctly—a single sentence from the Mahabharat in the original? Not more, I shrewdly suspect, than half a dozen at most! So it is not to be expected that any more interest would be displayed in the language and literature of a culture like Scotland, which is notoriously wild and barren. . . . Oh you pusillanimous Highland chiefs and other misters! How long will you tamely submit to such offhand treatment? . . . When that day dawns [when the Scottish will demand Home Rule] . . . Young Bengal will be with you in your struggle for Autonomy. If not in body, assuredly in spirit. Possibly in both. 82

Of course, Baboo’s call to arms to the Scottish is hopelessly anachronistic: he soon discovers that the wild, untamed Scotland of his

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imagination is a literary and imperial fabrication. More significantly, though, he uses the ability to transfer information cross-culturally— translation—as an indication of the right to sovereignty. Here Anstey’s humor becomes even more tongue-in-cheek, as it is highly unlikely that even one, let alone six, cabinet ministers would have been able to translate anything, let alone the Mahabharata, from Sanskrit. And however legitimate Baboo’s statements, the sentiment is quite useless, as the Scotland in the novel (and presumably India, by extension) is merely a tourist stop devoid of the nationalist fervor Baboo presumes. His momentary fantasy of a transimperial nationalist rebellion against the empire fades when he attempts to speak Gaelic to an elderly Scottish man and is met with utter incomprehension. Anstey’s novel suggests that the essence of culture lies precisely in what cannot be translated: idioms, jokes, and nonsense. Baboo’s painful efforts to emulate those aspects of British culture only serve to reveal his cowardice, dandyism, egotism, and hyperbole; in other words, his inherent Bengaliness. Baboo Hurry’s portrayal of the babu reflects the late-Victorian construction of an effeminate Hinduism that resulted from a turn away from the orientalist dependency on the manuscripts and literary traditions preserved by Brahmins to “empirical” ethnographic research (and a valorization of more “muscular” Islam and hardy Vedic Aryans). Sharply contrasting early orientalists’ admiration for Brahminical intellectual practices, a description of Brahmins in the ethnographic Hindu Tribes and Castes (1872), for example, describes them as “wily,” “ambitious,” and “proud and arrogant.”83 Aptly demonstrating these qualities, Baboo is not only aware of such stereotypes, he self-consciously articulates and manipulates them, justifying various idiotic actions as the inevtiable consequences of his “natural timidity” and “excessive funkiness.” This acceptance of caricature dooms Baboo to perpetual ridicule, but Anstey suggests that comic subordination may come with some advantages. The novel climaxes with Baboo’s trial (which reads like a poor but striking foreshadowing of the Adela-Aziz trial in A Passage to India) as he defends himself against a charge of breach of promise for breaking off the engagement with his landlady’s daughter. Before jury deliberations, the judge offers the jury two explanations for Baboo’s behavior: If the jury think me a gay sort of Hindoo deceiver, who has heartlessly trifled with the affections of a simple, unsuspecting English girl, that will lead them to award substantial damages. If, on the other hand, they consider myself an inexperienced Oriental ninnyhammer

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of a fellow, who has been entrapped into an engagement by an ambitious, artful young woman—why, that may incline them to inflict a merely nominal penalty. . . . [T]he jury should find little difficulty in arriving at a fairly accurate estimate of the loss which a young lady of British birth and bringing-up would sustain by her failure to secure such a husband. 84

The judge’s instructions and the jury’s verdict—to find Baboo guilty but fine him a paltry twenty-five pounds—reveal a truth about the damning ambiguity of the colonizing gaze, if little about the actual locus of guilt. While the low fine marks him an “inexperienced Oriental ninnyhammer” duped by a woman, she is still a British woman and thus intrinsically valuable. In essence Baboo is only “worth” twenty-five pounds, which for him is both material victory and cultural condemnation. Of course, neither the racial nor the moral ramifications of the verdict—the joke, if you will—have any effect on Baboo, who takes his low valuation as a victory because it saves him money. His self-proclaimed “success” in London is captured in his friend Howard’s notes on the case as Baboo delivers his own concluding statement: “JAB will spout and won’t get to the point; but, all the same I fancy, somehow he’s getting round the Jury. He’s such a jolly innocent kind of old ass, and they like him because he’s no end of sport.”85 Anstey’s condescending description of native naiveté notwithstanding, the novel is chock-full of instances of Baboo’s unscrupulousness: his passive theft of a gold-topped umbrella (he takes it by accident and then declines to return it), his instinctive lasciviousness, and his veneered avarice. He is, in fact, a “Hindoo deceiver” as well as “ninnyhammer.” This combination of infantile transparency and vice makes colonized cosmopolitanism not only impossible, Anstey argues, but potentially dangerous, as babus become both the prey and seducers of the lower classes.86 Baboo often describes his own cowardice, or lack of honor, somewhat euphemistically as “funkiness,” but the term’s more modern usage to describe a kind of unsettling rings equally true, while his total inability to read the culture and situation around him make his legal “victory” ominous.87 He ends the novel with the prospect of a victorious journey back home, but unlike Zaarmilla, Altangi, Abu Talib, or even Rasselas, he has learned nothing from his experience. Baboo represents the total failure of cultural universalism and the dangerously comic ramifications of culture’s failure to translate. Indeed, the novel’s satire produces a gaping cultural hole not easily filled: there

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is not a single model British citizen in the entire novel, so Britishness can only be found by retroactively erasing Baboo’s palimpsestic errors. The danger of mimics is that in their mangling of social norms they accidentally reveal problems and stresses in the culture they can never attain. Baboo’s comic homelessness—where can he possibly belong?—demonstrates the failure of the colonial mission, and the concomitant failure of “culture” in its most universal, Arnoldian sense. In the move from Hamilton to Kipling and Anstey, we see how, as Asians became real presences in British metropolitan life, their cultural presence in the British Empire became far more disconcerting than it was during earlier stages of the imperial process. Translation fundamentally complicates relationships between colonized and colonizer: idealistic Indian princes inspire British social reform, monkeys demand personhood, babus mimic poets laureate, and the myth of a pristine “happy England”—and empire as the potential production of many happy Englands—is rent asunder.88 And what of the babus themselves, whose gross volubility in fiction belies their (seeming) self-representational silence in reality? In lieu of a conclusive answer, I close with a suggestive example.89

Epilogue: Slant Speech As Anstey’s Baboo is represented as synechdochal for a whole class of babus, over time the definition of “baboo” itself became correspondingly expansive. Hobson-Jobson notes that the definition of the “superficially cultivated, but too often effeminate Bengali” that spurred Anstey’s novel was ultimately broadened to include any “a native clerk who writes in English,” turning a specific ethnic slur into a hypernym. If Baboo Hurry demonstrates the unassimilability of British and Indian cultures, the goal of Hobson-Jobson as defined by its compilers, Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, to trace the assimilation of subcontinental words into both Anglo-Indian and British vocabularies, seems decidedly the opposite. Although the dictionary was enthusiastically received, its title, an example of the assimilations the book focuses on, was repeatedly criticized. Traci Nagle argues that the rhyming reduplication—common in most South Asian languages—of “Hobson-Jobson” has negative and infantile connotations in English. Thus the title’s semantic layering is not so much illustrative of common Anglo-Indian linguistic adoption as it is of “the negative attitude that so many British colonial

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officials took toward the Indians they ruled.”90 The unease over Hobson-Jobson’s title came arguably from its incorporation of such linguistic (implicatedly cultural) hybridity as inherent to its self. Rather than maintaining the official, administrative stance that characterized most Anglo-Indian lexicons (Nagle observes that the dictionary’s subtitle, “A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discursive,” was more the norm), Hobson-Jobson makes the diversity it records constitutive. The dictionary’s stated mission may have been to distinguish English from its colonial additions, but its title demonstrated a more troubling and unassailable fusion. Hobson-Jobson’s second purpose was undoubtedly to demonstrate how many Indian terms were “in fact organic remains deposited under the various currents of external influences that . . . washed the shores of India during twenty centuries and more.”91 Indian languages, the authors point out, are saturated with words of Dutch, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Malaysian origins, and it is often impossible to trace these words to an absolute etymological source. As a result, Hobson-Jobson is often not so much authoritative as suggestive, the compilation of linguistic flotsam bound only by the lexical borders of empire. It was also not the first dictionary to embody, both troublingly and triumphantly, that subcontinental linguistic diversity. A fascinating native predecessor to Hobson-Jobson is P. Singarapelavanderam Pillay’s A Tamil Vade-Mecum, or Guide to Ungrammatical Expressions Used in Ordinary Conversation; Consisting of the Vulgarisms of the Tamil Language Explained and Illustrated by Copious Examples. For the Use of Foreigners (1859). Tamil dictionaries were already available for the European student, notably John Peter Rottler’s standard A Dictionary of the Tamil and English Languages (1834), but A Tamil Vade-Mecum, eschewing the niceties of a formal lexicon to promise an insider’s view of a Tamil culture hidden from Europeans, reads simultaneously as dictionary, travel guide, cookbook, and almanac. Many entries seem to have been included as veiled warnings to British soldiers, like korukku, which Pillay explains is slang for venereal disease, along with several colloquial expressions for untrustworthy women. Pillay, who was a Tamil Christian serving as a tutor to British officials in Madras and obviously Western educated—a “baboo” in the broadest lexical sense— suggests in his preface that Europeans never hear natives in “familiar and unrestrained conversation” and thus never truly learn indigenous

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languages, but his real concern is that this lack of European understanding harms natives, who are unable to communicate for themselves in courts of law and must rely on intermediary translators.92 Pillay’s dictionary was not the first of its kind; that honor probably goes to the 1812 Grammar of the Hindoostanie Langauge by Ali Hassan, an assistant to the professor of oriental literature at Addiscombe College. Although Hassan insisted that his Grammar would “correc[t] several material Errors that are to be found in works of a similar kind on English,” Michael Fisher notes that it was received with disdain by Charles Stewart (translator of Abu Talib’s Travels) and the Sanskritist Alexander Hamilton, to whom it was sent for approval.93 Dubbing the work a “literary curiosity,” thereby diminishing its scholarly quality, Stewart and Hamilton condescendingly note in their correspondence that Hassan had attempted “one of the most difficult undertakings in Literary acquirements, viz. that of translating from his own into a Foreign language, and therefore it could not but be expected that a person who has resided but a few years in this country should in some measure fail in explaining in English the intricacies of Oriental Grammar.” This passage recalls Abu Talib’s list in the Travels of the twelve defects of the English. Aside from a want of chastity and extravagance, the eighth fault of the English is their assumption of mastery over foreign languages and fields of study they are recently acquainted with. Stewart and Hamilton’s correspondence raises a number of questions unwittingly pertinent to themselves: is it more difficult to translate from one’s own language into a foreign one or vice versa? And how many years must one reside in a country before its language can be used for scholarly purposes? Stuart Blackburn argues that prior to the introduction of European languages to southern India, Tamil’s encounters with other indigenous languages (notably Sanskrit) resulted in assimilation, not translation, which he argues was a response developed to adjust to the sudden appearance of a wholly foreign idiom.94 As Tamil became an object of study for Europeans and native scholars, “[t]his linguistic shift also produced a shift of perspective. . . . [T]o translate your mother tongue is to conceive for it a purpose beyond your own use. . . . [L] anguage was not only malleable, it was itself a tool for ideological and social change.”95 A Tamil Vade-Mecum both obscures and highlights the native academic treatment of Tamil. Many entries contain allusions to Western translations of Tamil texts, Latin terms for flora and fauna, or rough etymologies that highlight foreign incorporations.

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But Pillay, perhaps reflecting an older tradition of linguistic assimilation, often neglects the obvious Sanskrit origins of words like anthapuram (inner rooms), which are listed as if they are Tamil. Other words, like aaspatham (asylum) seem clearly derived from English (hospital), but Pillay neglects the connection. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of A Tamil Vade-Mecum is the obvious presence of its author, who rather than disappearing into objective lexicography assumes the role of native guide: quibbling, inconsistent, garrulous, and ultimately evasive. He frequently takes European translators to task, noting with some irritation that Rottler’s dictionary mistakes aiyalai (a liver complaint) for acanai (small fish in a tank).96 Although headwords are generally arranged alphabetically, there are several instances of groupings by subject, as when Pillay’s musings on the word akamudayaan (male householder) lead to a long list of “improper” expressions men use to refer to their wives (who are never addressed by their names in public), including maadu (cow) and Oo! Complementing Pillay’s own position between societies, A Tamil Vade-Mecum seems aimed at Europeans already familiar with formal Tamil but still ignorant of the “true” speech of natives. But Tamil is not the only language under observation: English, as it emerges in the lexicon’s interstices, is also subject to a skeptical gaze. One of Pillay’s entries is the compound term konappechu, which he defines as “irregular speech” (without pausing to break down the word into its individual components of konal [slant] and pecchu [speech]), which is also a slang term for English. The local saying he provides as an example attests to both English’s preeminent but suspect status and the once-vibrant Tamil economy’s dramatic stagnation under British administration: “If I would know one or two words in English, I will get two Doodees daily, without any hard labour.”97 For all that English is konapecchu, Pillay is eager to demonstrate his fluency with European learning. Defining the Chorkappanai, a festival, as the celebration of Mahabali, Pillay lavishly cites Reginald Heber’s description of the coastal ruins of Mahabalipuram (“city of Mahabali”), including Heber’s references to The Curse of Kehama.98 And after providing the translation for chammapaachai (mother language, or Sanskrit), Pillay stops to reference a series of European linguists who posit that Hebrew, and not Sanskrit, is in fact the original chammapaachai. Tracing linguistic diversity to postbabelian divisions, Pillay offers a remarkable synthesis of comparative and biblical linguistics that adopts the idea of a language tree—German, Dutch,

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and Anglo-Saxon are all offshoots of Gothic—to the conclusion that the roots of language lead not to an Aryan past but to a Christian one.99 As A Tamil Vade-Mecum moves into proverbs and short prose sections, there is less and less translation offered to the reader. Its final pages comprise a story about tax collection written entirely in highly vernacular Tamil. As Blackburn observes, the story’s criticism of various government officials would have been unintelligible to all but the most experienced colonial officials seasoned in the local vernacular and slang, or perhaps to an exceptionally diligent student of Pillay’s own text.100 In contrast to the colonial understanding of the “fixity” of Eastern society, the Tamil culture that emerges from A Tamil Vade-Mecum is already hybrid, vibrant, and culturally dense as well as resistant to any easy translation, as Tamil is a language of context and condition, embedded in history, poetry, caste, and religion. In proposing to offer his students the real Tamil not found in official dictionaries, Pillay simultaneously extends and withholds knowledge; the Tamil VadeMecum offers glimpses of an “authentic” Tamil culture while subtly suggesting that this culture will never be fully co-opted or understood. Disrupting the very concept of a bilingual dictionary, A Tamil Vade-Mecum suggests that English and Tamil are anisomorphic: languages speaking past, rather than toward, each other. If Hobson-Jobson promises (without fully delivering) the origins of all Indian and Anglo-Indian words in English, A Tamil Vade-Mecum’s lure of “real Tamil” offers instead a portrait of the imperial culture of South India, buttressed by European commentary, Sanskritic allusion, Christian fervor, and many linguistic irregularities. When the stagnating cosmopolitanism of colonized Tamil culture meets the slant speech of imperial English, the baboo result is not so much a mimicry of colonial lexicography as it is a reconsideration of its very purpose.

Conclusion

When I was growing up, every Indian-American household I visited had two yellow-bound volumes in the family bookshelf: The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. These translations of itihasas, or historical epics, were the work of C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) for the Barathiya Vidya Bhavan (Institute for Indian Knowledge). Anticipating India’s impending nationhood, activists founded the Bhavan in 1939 to translate a series of classic Indian works into English and across the major Indian vernaculars; it was consistently supported both before and after Independence by a coterie of politicians including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Vallabhai Patel. The Bhavan’s first publication was Rajaji’s Mahabharata, now arguably the most popular translation of that epic. Rajaji, a Tamil Brahmin, was himself a member of the nationalist elite—one of Gandhi’s protégés—and had just stepped out of a transitionally imperial post as governor-general of India, succeeding Lord Mountbatten, until India was officially declared a republic. The Mahabharata occupies a curious position in the history of orientalist studies; although it was integral to the cultural life of Indian Hindus, its exegesis in Western academia prior to 1950 was mostly confined to summaries (as in Talboys Wheeler’s 1867 The History of India) or abridged translations, and it was not considered significant enough for study by Indologists like Max Müller, who mentioned it only contextually. True, the task of translating one hundred thousand Sanskrit slokas is a daunting challenge—most translators attempting the entire Mahabharata die before they finish—but the absence 169

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of a complete translation in the canon of British orientalist works is a telling omission.1 Even when the Mahabharata began to garner serious interest—mostly from German orientalists—Western scholars focused on deconstructing the text as a series of redactions and subsequent appendages in order to separate the supposedly newer, more philosophical pieces of the epic from the earlier, “Homeric” recounting of a violent civil war.2 One section scholars were most insistent on excising from the original “epic” narrative was the Bhagavad-Gita, which, as we have already seen, was one of the foundational texts of British orientalism. Rajaji’s preface to the first edition makes clear his understanding of the Marabharata as a whole text, one whose importance lies in its relation to the formation of a national culture. His first examples of that sort of culture, however, are not Draupadi and the Pandavas, but “Gulliver, Pickwick, Sam Weller . . . King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Alice and her wanderings in Wonderland,” suggesting that these characters, and not the Mahabharata’s, would be most familiar to his Western-educated audience. Perhaps discomfited by his own ease with the British canon, Rajaji then repudiates it, defining literary gravitations in quasi-Herdervian terms as locally and nationally specific, because “literature is so vitally related to life and character . . . [that] the personae and events of one national literature have not an equal appeal to all.”3 Rajaji’s appeal to radical difference obscures the convolutions of his own relationship to itihasa. Like Gandhi, he did not learn Sanskrit until late in life, and in order to get some sense of the Sanskrit “originals” (as opposed to more familiar Tamil adaptations) he was reliant on English translations.4 Nor is his English Mahabharata a sloka -by- sloka translation from Sanskrit to English; its 444 pages capture only a fraction of the standard text. Despite his insistence on the general Indianness of the epic, Rajaji’s folksy, heavily abridged adaptation (his equally popular and succinct Ramayana was once scathingly referred to as “Enid Blyton’s version”) betrays the translator’s reliance on the south Indian tradition of kaalakshepam, the “the spending of time,” or performative storytelling, as well as on original and English sources.5 This reversion to an oral narrative tradition leads to surprising omissions: just as the recitation of the Bhagavad Gita is about to take place in the epic, Rajaji, assuming his audience’s familiarity with the text (and perhaps channeling previous European scholarship?), leaves it out.6

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Through the six prefaces Rajaji wrote for the Mahabharata, as new editions were reprinted between 1950 and 1958, his sense of the role of the story as an explicitly Indian epic never falters, but his meditations on what it means as a translation and, by extension, as a piece of world literature constantly shift. Caught between his insistence on the centrality of these narratives to a very culturally specific national consciousness and his belief in the inherent universality of the epic message, the translator can never seem to decide whether this consciousness is truly translatable or not. Sometimes The Mahabharata is a whole text, but in other prefaces it is described as redacted. Often it is culturally specific, but at other times Rajaji describes it, and all great literature by extension, as the “common story of humankind.” If, as Frantz Fanon warns, postcolonial revisionist histories may inadvertently mimic colonial ones by fetishizing authenticity, Rajaji’s prefaces evince sedimented layers of history and language that, in an example of the exoticism of the postcolony, alternately resist and advocate such calcification. English becomes just one of the many languages alongside Bengali, Hindi, and Kannada to receive the Mahabharata as interpolated through Tamil tradition, while his conflicting prefaces collectively resist any coherent re-creation of Indian authenticity.7 But the purpose of the Baratha Vidya Bhavan—to translate Indian epics into Indian languages as well as English—was an evangelical tactic repurposed by Indian nationalists who no longer trusted oral traditions with the dissemination of what was now deemed canonical literature. Or as Rajaji argued, the tradition of learning itihasas at home no longer fit the dislocations of a rapidly modernizing India.8 These English epic translations were the decisive step toward Rajaji the nationalist assuming the role of the suta, the bard or professional historian, for a national and global audience. J. P. Waghorne notes that while British governance disrupted the role of the suta in Indian courts, Victorians were beginning a global study of bardic traditions that, as we have seen in previous chapters, helped motivate a specifically nationalist interest in itihasa.9 Waghorne’s reference to Victorian scholarship parallels this book’s study of Max Müller’s religious comparatism, but if we recall that the revival of interest in (albeit more local) bardic traditions was also indebted to Romanticism, we may experiment with situating Rajaji’s interpretive quandaries alongside an earlier tradition of bardic nationalism in the West, a move that enables a fresh understanding of the role of itihasa and translation in a postimperial India. If we cease to think

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of translation as merely a cog in the imperial culture machine, and tie colonial translation more firmly to its postcolonial present, what emerges is a more compelling, decidedly unstatic history of translation that is multivalent rather than merely bidirectional, and in constant flux. Thus my purpose in invoking the Mahabharata is not to trace its labyrinthine critical history, but to demonstrate how Rajaji’s grapplings with the purpose of itihasa engage the legacy of the translative history mapped out in the preceding chapters of this book and how, in turn, considering questions of translation allows for new literary and historical perspective on the relationship between colonial literature and its legacy in the postcolony. Rajaji’s text and its diasporic second life demonstrate how, for postcolonial bourgeoisie, the negotiation of that status is lived via a constant translation between vernaculars and English (and, in the case of India, sacral languages like Sanskrit and Arabic).10 And as problematic as many of Rajaji’s assertions may be (his identification of the Western-educated Hindu male as the emblematic Indian is inherently flawed), his obvious struggles with translation’s imperial legacy may be vastly preferable to its contemporary, technocratic alternative, in which our awareness of translation as an acknowledged center of conflict diminishes and translation, in essence, disappears. On the one hand, this is an absurd proposition; the realities of globalized conflict and capitalism and the diaspora they engender seem to ensure that translation will continue to remain a locus of ideological contestation. And yet the increasing mechanization of translational practices, accompanied by the dominance of English in the literary marketplace, threatens to relegate translation as praxis to the bowels of a computer. In this arena, the traditional conflicts of translation are dwarfed by a greater fear: what happens when there is nothing left to translate? George Steiner’s After Babel, a text relatively unconcerned with the colonial implications of translation, reads the loss of translation as evidence of cultural annihilation: “when a language dies, a world dies with it”; and Jacques Derrida’s “Tours de Babel,” a treatise that explodes Steiner’s translative hermeneutic, reaches surprisingly similar conclusions.11 Even while globalization offers increasing intimacy between cultures, thus far this intimacy has been guided by the hegemony of English. Rita Kothari observes that the recent flurry of translation activity in India might refute concerns about translation’s continuing diminishment except that all of

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this activity centers around vernacular-to-English translation at the expense of a far older tradition of intervernacular translations.12 And while Rajaji’s definitions of culturally specific national consciousness seem to have been replaced with the globalism of the Internet (which offers no less than twelve instantly viewable Mahabharata translations), his Mahabharata is one unexpected site of the kind of rough, or visible, translation—and the rethinking of cultural hegemonies such translation engenders—that is a welcome counter to the growing invisibility of translative processes now. While cyberspace renders translation simultaneously unnecessary and continuous, tools like Google Translate have the potential to render translation into merely a mechanistic replacement of word pattern with word pattern. Google Translate has been justifiably lauded for its “contextual” as opposed to strictly semantic approach to language, but it also promises translation at the click of a button and seemingly devoid of any human, cultural, interpretive interference, thus obscuring the work of thousands of human interpreters whose translative labors form the basis of its database.13 To take Google Translate to its mechanistic extreme (and although the possibility of using Google Translate on whole books is currently far-fetched, Google Books does offer a translation feature), the advent of instantaneous translations free of obvious interpretive messiness—Rajaji’s or Müller’s or Beckford’s—promises translations of texts that are bereft of their Benjaminian afterlife, their cultural context stripped bare, which, if we take Walter Benjamin’s linking of a text to its translation seriously, kills the text itself. Of course, Google Translate is merely symptomatic of the greater Anglo-American disinterest in translation and the grossly asymmetrical dominance of English-language publications in the literary marketplace, an issue that has plagued translators for decades. In an effort to rescue translation from market-driven oblivion, many contemporary translators champion translation as the riposte to cultural imperialism, arguing that the free flowing of language combats political and linguistic tyranny. It is easy to posit translation as the solution, but much harder to pinpoint the origins of the problem: Edith Grossman suggests a Romantic emphasis on originality as one cause for our current disregard, but as we have seen, the Romantics passionately and actively used and wrestled with translation.14 In the struggle between monolingual globalization and a more heterogeneous alterglobalization, the story of nineteenth-century translation provides both a diagnostic history and possible solutions.

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This rewriting of translation as both the victim of and savior from cultural despotism is, I believe, a false promise: as the multitudinous voices that constitute imperial Babel (and Imperial Babel) demonstrate, translation is both a challenge to linguistic usurpation and an apparatus of that tyranny. As much as translation may garner the free exchange of ideas, it is also easily made into a tool for both local and global oppression. Bringing translation out from the shadows illuminates a vast network of political, cultural, and linguistic intersections that do not disappear if we ignore them, but merely retreat underground. This book has demonstrated how the stakes of colonial translation are raised higher if we understand the implications of its truly polyvocal nature: to better understand the projects of imperialism in the nineteenth century, and in turn our own, it is worth examining the ways in which seemingly invisible processes of cultural transmutation play a profound role in shaping cross-cultural discourse. Perhaps the most valuable argument that can be made for translation is not to neuter it, but to recognize anew its capacity for liberation and usurpation, its malleability and its unpredictability, and its continuing importance as a marker for cultural, ideological, and technical battles of the past, present, and future.

notes

preface 1. Thomas de Quincey, The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (New York: Penguin, 1986), 91. 2. Phillip Wagoner and Thomas Trautmann write about the Madras school of orientalism and its differences from the Calcutta school. Phillip B. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and the Production of Colonial Knowledge,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 4 (2003): 783– 814; Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: the Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 3. Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature: 1800–1910: Western Impact, Indian Response (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991), 261. Das does not count Sake Dean Mohamet as the first Indian author writing in English, possibly because The Travels of Dean Mohamet was published in Britain rather than in India. 4. Cavelly Boria, “An Account of the Jains,” in Asiatick Researches; or, Transactions of the Society; Instituted in Bengal, for Enquiring into the Histories and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia (Calcutta: Hindoostanee Press, 1807), 244, http://books.google.com/boo ks?id=qMp3mmMy220C&pg=PA244&dq=an+account+of+the+jains& hl=en&ei=1gu4Tt6CN4rDgAfa650o&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=bookthumbnail&resnum=5&ved= 0CEAQ6wEwBA#v=onepage&q=an%20 account%20of%20the%20jains&f=false. 5. Basim Mardan, “Lost after Translation,” New York Times, November 20, 2006, Opinion sec., http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/opinion/20mardan. html?scp=43&sq=translation&st=cse. 6. Mardan was finally able to relocate with his family to Norway after PEN International, the literary society, intervened. According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, only fifty primary special issue visas a year are issued specifically for Iraqi and Afghani translators. Travel.State.Gov, http://travel. state.gov/visa/immigrants/info/info_3738.html. 7. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 17. 8. Ibid., 10.

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1. tr anslation’s tr ace 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 514. Fred Burwick and Ruriko Suzuki have written usefully on the role of translation in Romantic culture. See Fred Burwick, “Romantic Theories of Translation,” Wordsworth Circle 39, no. 3 (2008): 68–75; and Ruriko Suzuki, “Translation in the 1790’s: A Means of Creating a Like Existence and/or Restoring the Original,” Romanticism on the Net: An Electronic Journal Devoted to Romantic Studies 2 (1996): n. pag. The influence of German authors like playwright August von Kotzebue and the large number of translations of Blackwood’s have been documented in Bayar Quincey Morgan, Alexander Rudolph Hohlfeld, and Walter Roloff, eds., German Literature in British Magazines, 1750–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), 42–43. 2. For two recent studies that repudiate any generalizations of eighteenthcentury translation, see Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Julie Candler Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3. This phrase actually comes from Hans Aarsleff in The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 127. Both Louis Kelly and Aarsleff also situate the language revolution in the late eighteenth century. Louis Kelly, The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). The tendency to generalize about translation practices before this time period has been noted in Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, 13–14. 4. The exact contours of Tooke’s philosophy are still being debated. Good sources include Paul Lamarre, “John Horne Tooke and the Grammar of Political Experience,” Philological Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1998): 187– 207; Susan Manly, Language, Custom, and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke,Wordsworth, Edgeworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Andrew R. Cooper, “‘Monumental Inscriptions’: Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke, ”ELH 66.1 (1999): 87–110; and Jane Hodson, Language and Revolution in Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 5. See, for example, Hodson’s work on Tooke in Language and Revolution. 6. Much of my understanding of Herder’s philosophy, including radical difference, is indebted to Michael N. Forster’s introduction in Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xiv–xviii. Quotation from Herder, “Fragments on Recent German Literature,” in Philosophical Writings, 33. 7. James Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 88. 8. Herder’s fragments from Über die neuere deutschen Literatur: Fragmente are found in Douglas Robinson, Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Saint Jerome, 1997), 8.

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9. Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, 72–74. 10. Ibid., 89. 11. In “Fragments on Recent German Literature,” Herder observes that “[t] he literature of foreign peoples and languages is often imported among other nations as a foreign colony; and because of this mixing together . . . inherited truths got restruck to the point of unrecognizability, half-understood concepts became ghosts, incorrectly perceived objects became bizarre forms.” Herder, Philosophical Writings, 50–51. 12. Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 73. 13. Ibid., 139. 14. Both P. J. Marshall and Raymond Schwab argue that orientalism never had more than a fleeting presence in British culture. P. J. Marshall, “Taming the Exotic: The British and India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Exoticism and Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 46–65, and “British-Indian Connections c.1780 to c.1830: The Empire of the Officials,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael Franklin (New York: Routledge, 2005), 45–64; and Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680 –1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). But Marshall’s and Schwab’s arguments about orientalism’s failure to root in British cultural consciousness do not adequately account for its myriad diffuse and often circuitous influences and fail to appreciate the very real consequences of the ephemeral. We may take as only one example of this ephemeral influence Daniel O’Quinn’s analysis of Eastern presences on the British stage and his observation that “British imperial policy and British cultural production are suffused by similar self-consolidating fantasies of rule.” Daniel O’Quinn, “Torrents, Flames and the Education of Desire: Battling Hindu Superstition on the London Stage,” in Franklin, Romantic Representations, 65. 15. Arthur Anthony Macdonell, A History of Sanskrit Literature (New York: Appleton, 1900). 16. This argument is made in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 87–88; Jerome McGann, “Rethinking Romanticism,” ELH 59, no. 3 (1992): 735–54; and Saree Makdisi, “Romanticism and Empire,” in A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Jon Klancher (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2009), 36–56. 17. Sir William Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, ed. Satya Sheel Pachori (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 143. 18. Makdisi, “Romanticism and Empire,” 44. 19. Jamey Hecht, “Scarcity and Poetic Election in Two Sonnets of John Keats,” ELH 61, no. 1 (1994): 103–20. 20. Charles Rzepka, “‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet,” KeatsShelley Journal 51 (2002): 44–45. 21. Ibid., 73.

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22. Goethe outlines three stages of translation in the notes to West-östlicher Divan (1819). Antoine Berman observes that this third stage of translation is not the “highest” stage but the “ultimate” one. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 58–59. 23. Thomas Frosch, “Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’” Explicator 62, no. 3 (2004): 148. 24. Herder, Philosophical Writings, xvii. 25. Susanne Schmid, “Introduction: Romanticism, Reading, and Translation: The Processes of Literacy,” Wordsworth Circle 39, no. 3 (2008): 67–68. 26. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 115. 27. Peter France, “Looking Abroad: Two Edinburgh Journals in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 46, no. 1 (2010): 7, 14. For a striking example of the dissemination of translative influence, see Jerome J. McGann, “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes,” Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 3 (1986): 303–24. 28. Unsigned review of Voyage aux Indes Orientales, by C. F. Tombe, Quarterly Review 6, no. 12 (1811): 487–517. 29. George Campbell, The Four Gospels, Translated from the Greek: With Preliminary Dissertations, and Notes Critical and Explanatory (Boston: Wells and Wait, 1811), 1:62. 30. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. This imagining takes on a powerful valence in the work of Gauri Viswanathan, whose work on British educational reform in Masks of Conquest reveals the extent to which nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain were dependent on the colonial construction of India as “England writ small.” 31. See for example Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “Thick Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2004), 331–43. Appiah argues that the contextually rich translation of oral subaltern literatures will repudiate assumptions of Western superiority. 32. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2. 33. See especially Niranjana’s second chapter, “Representing Texts and Cultures: Translation Studies and Ethnography,” in Siting Translation, 47–86. 34. Ibid., 52–54, for Niranjana’s analysis of Chapman. 35. Neoclassical principles of translation include an emphasis on fidelity of meaning, mimesis, and the “essential meaning” of a particular text. 36. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 316. 37. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2.

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38. Two books that consider seriously acts of native translation as resistance during imperialism are Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, 1st ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); and Maria Tymoczko’s Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: Saint Jerome, 1999). But the identification of colonial translation as always hegemonic persists: while usefully demonstrating the role of translation in Irish nationalism, Tymoczko defines the English cultural translation of Irish as “tangible, physical oppression.” Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context, 19. 39. For a few examples, see Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson, eds., Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 40. Jeffrey Cass and Diane Long Hoeveler trace the critical reception of Said’s Orientalism in “Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices, ed. Diane Long Hoevelar and Jeffrey Cass (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 26–45. 41. Eutropius, Eutropii historiæ Romanæ breviarium: With Notes Critical, Geographical, & Explanatory, in English. . . . , trans. Dacier, Thomas, Clarke, and others (Cork: Edwards, 1800), ix. 42. Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers (London: Taylor and Walton, 1848) 324, emphasis mine. 43. Kateryna Olijynk Longley refers to the “double game” of the exotic in “Fabricating Otherness: Demidenko and Exoticism,” in “New” Exoticisms: Changing Patterns in the Construction of Otherness, ed. Isabel Santaolalla (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 21–40. 44. Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonialism from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 112. 45. Ibid., 36. 46. Ibid., xxvi. 47. See Sara Suleri’s work in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). This is not to suggest that the “oriental sublime” becomes a source of empowerment for the Orient itself: Suleri parses Edmund Burke’s discourse of the Indian sublime and notes, “When Burke invokes the sublimity of India . . . he seeks less to contain the irrational within a rational structure than to construct inventories of obscurity through which the potential empowerment of the sublime is equally on the verge of emptying into negation” (28). However, this vacuity in Burke’s discourse is equally applicable to the adolescence of the colonial enterprise in

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the face of India’s antiquity. See Suleri’s chapter “Burke and the Oriental Sublime” in Rhetoric of English India, 24–48. 48. Karlheinze Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in The Translatability of Culture: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55–67. 49. Ibid., 64. 50. Charles Wilkins, trans., The Bhagavat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon; in Eighteen Lectures, ed. Rev. John Garrett (Bangalore: Wesleyan Mission Press, 1849), x. 51. Siraj Ahmed, The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 166–67. 52. Sir William Jones, “A Discourse on the Institution of a Society,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. Anna Maria (Shipley) Jones (London: Stockdale, 1807), 3:3. 53. Asiatic Society of Bengal, introduction to Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal. . . , (Calcutta: Company Printing Office, 1788), 1:22 54. Ahmed, Stillbirth of Capital, 169. 55. Gerard Genette, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. 56. Thomas Trautmann cites several early orientalists who scornfully dismiss travelogues as superficial compared to the “truth” of linguistic study. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 32–33. 57. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (Chicago: Donohue, Henneberry, 1901), 11, emphasis mine. 58. James Mill, The History of British India. . . .  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1:xv. 59. Johannes Fabian, “The Other Revisited: Critical Afterthoughts,” Anthropological Theory 6, no. 2 (2006): 146. 60. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan; Translated from the Persian, 2nd ed. (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1770), xx. 61. Brian A. Hatcher and Rosane Rocher have both discussed the complex relationships between colonial scholars and native pandits. Brian A. Hatcher, “What’s Become of the Pandit? Rethinking the History of Sanskrit Scholars in Colonial Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 683–723; and Rosane Rocher, “Weaving Knowledge: Sir William Jones and Indian Pandits,” in Objects of Inquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746–1794), ed. Kevin Brine and Garland Cannon (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 51–82. 62. See the first chapter, “The Written World,” in Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1–26. 63. Cálidás, Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring; an Indian Drama, trans. Sir William Jones (Calcutta: Cooper, 1789), iii, Jones’s emphasis.

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64. For the most comprehensive examination of Sakuntala’s reception in the West, see Dorothy Matilda Figueira, Translating the Orient: The Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 65. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 90. 66. Kalidasa, Sakoontala; or, The Lost Ring, trans. Monier Monier-Williams (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2007), 4. 67. Ibid., 5, emphasis mine. 68. Sir William Jones, “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” in Works, 10:359. 69. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). For other books with useful meditations on the colonial archive, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 70. Richards, Imperial Archive, 15. 71. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 10. 72. Richards uses Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “state nomadology,” which employs the figure of the nomad to symbolically conceptualize that which runs counter to the state. Among those nomadic things Richards lists, “knowledges that resist bureaucratic codification . . . peoples that defy national concentration . . . armies that evade defeat.” Richards, Imperial Archive, 20. 73. Ruth Evans, “Vulgar Eloquence? Cultural Models and Practices of Translation in Late Medieval Europe,” in Translating Others, vol. 2, ed. Theo Hermans (Manchester: Saint Jerome, 2006), 296–313, http://www. soas.ac.uk/literatures/satranslations/Evans.pdf. 74. With only a few notable exceptions, the literature I am talking about is not that of those Anglo-Indian poets who wrote about the administrative life of colonial India—such poems were often meant for circulation within the insular colonial communities. Significantly, most of the authors in my study never visited any of the places they so richly described. 75. I thank David Simpson for permission to use his unpublished article, “Local Heroes and Citizens of the World: The Prospect of Romantic Cosmopolitanism” (paper presented at the 19th-Century and Beyond Working Group, Berkeley, Calif., September 28, 2004). 76. Here again Joseph’s work is invaluable: she argues that late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century literature had an ambivalent relationship to “fact,” suggesting that we understand annotated orientalist literature as both a “textual staging of the colonial archive” and a creative filling in of

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archival silences through the activation of often-silenced voices: women and natives. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 13. 77. Ibid., 13.

2. pseudotr anslations: exoticism and the oriental tale 1. Warren Hastings, The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal: Before the High Court of Parliament in Westminster-Hall. . . .  (London: Debrett, and Vernor and Hood, 1796), 4–5. http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/. 2. Edmund Burke, The Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke in the House of Commons and in Westminster Hall (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816), 4:424, http://books.google.com/books?id=P 3o9AAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1&dq=speeches+of+the+right+honorable+edmund +burke+IV&hl=en&ei=MuUNT_TcCojU2AWsh8moBw&sa=X&oi=book_ result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=6&ved=0CFQQ6wEwBQ#v=onepage &q&f=false. 3. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 180. 4. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 6, 17. 5. In his analysis of translative production between 1660 and 1790, Stuart Gillespie observes that “[b]y the close of th[e] period, the efforts of English translators had also begun to take in poetic classics well beyond the limits of Europe.” Stuart Gillespie, “Developing Corpus of Literary Translation,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129. Gillespie later cites Jones’s 1773 translation of the Mu ‘allaqat as a “huge step forward in the study of ancient Arabic poetry,” and he notes that the first direct translation of an important piece of Chinese literature, Hau Kion Choaan, or The Pleasing History, is in 1761 (142). 6. Martha Pike Conant coined the term “pseudo-translation” in her formative The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 31. I have adopted the term but changed its usage. Pike refers to “pseudo-translations” as a subgenre under the “imaginative” (as opposed to satiric or moralistic) group of oriental tales, and she refers specifically to tales that tried to pass themselves off as oriental originals. Conant, Oriental Tale in England, 1–72. 7. In the “Preliminary Dissertation” to Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, Hamilton mistakenly refers to Jones’s “Hymn to Narayena” as an original composition. Elizabeth Hamilton, The Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Sharon Russell (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999), 62. 8. George Campbell, The Four Gospels, Translated from the Greek: With Preliminary Dissertations, and Notes Critical and Explanatory (Boston: Wells, and Wait, 1811), 1:xv.

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9. Richard Macksey outlines Gerard Genette’s theories of transtexuality, noting that for Genette paratext “mediate[s] the book to the reader.” Richard Macksey, foreword to Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, by Gerard Genette (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xviii. Paul Magnuson defines paratext as “an esthetic boarder to be crossed and re-crossed” in Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4. Anthony Grafton details the importance of Gibbon’s footnotes in The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. 10. Nigel Leask, “Wandering through Eblis: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism,” in Romanticism and Colonialism, Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 185. 11. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance: And the History of Charoba, Queen of Aegypt. . . . (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 2:59. 12. Ibid., 2:60. 13. Ibid., 1:xiii. 14. Walter Scott makes an intriguing reference to translation and The Arabian Nights in the dedicatory epistle to Ivanhoe. He says: “No fascination has ever been attached to Oriental literature equal to that produced by Mr. Galland’s translation of the Arabian tales; in which, retaining, on the one hand, the splendours of Eastern costume, and on the other, the wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much ordinary expression and feeling as rendered them interesting and intelligible, while he . . . rejected the repetitions of the Arabian original. The tales, therefore, though less purely Oriental . . . were better fitted to the European market.” Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Ward, 1877), 11–12. 15. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 15. Conversely, critics often draw distinctions between fiction that specifically tries to be taken seriously as authentic (hoax poems) and what David Simpson calls “historical-geographical epic,” where he locates many of the oriental tales I have cited. For Simpson, that many of these tales do not “declare themselves as translations but as variously free adaptations” is their distinguishing factor, although he later notes that reading these texts is like “reading an annotated translation, even though it is the primary poetic narrative that is invented.” Thanks to David Simpson, “Local Heroes and Citizens of the World: The Prospect of Romantic Cosmopolitanism” (paper presented at the 19th-Century and Beyond Working Group, University of California, Berkeley, September 28, 2004), 13–15. To my mind, determining which texts were actually thought to be genuine Sanskrit translations and which were not is less interesting than the fact that both epic and pseudo-authentic tales promise a “true” version of the foreign culture. Anne Janowitz argues that fragment poems like Byron’s The Giaour are “dehistoricized” because the narrator is clearly a nineteenth-century Englishman, which distinguishes these self-conscious fragment poems from historical hoaxes like James Macpherson’s Ossian. Anne Janowitz, “The Romantic Fragment,” in A Companion to Romanticism, ed.

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Duncan Wu (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 444. However, The Giaour was also commonly thought to refer to an incident from Byron’s own travels. Thus, I would argue that the dehistoricization and assumed inauthenticity of orientalist fragments cannot be presumed so easily. 16. Genette defines hypertext as the superimposition of a later text on earlier ones, including pastiche, imitation, and parody. Genette, Paratexts, xix. 17. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). See especially chapter 2, “Backgrounds,”34–36. 18. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India: From Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–1825. . . . (London: Murray, 1828) 3:224, http://books.google.com/books?id=FERCAAA AcA AJ&pg=PA224&dq=heber+padalon&hl=en&ei=KukN T4TsC4– I2gWZ7fzOBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=7& ved=0CFcQ6wEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false. 19. For a more detailed discussion of the relation of the work of forgotten poets like Southey to canonical Romantic authors, see Marilyn Butler, Literature as a Heritage: Or Reading Other Ways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 20. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol.1, History, Geography, Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 336–62. 21. For more on the increasing “realism” of the East, see Diego Saglia, “William Beckford’s ‘Sparks of Orientalism’ and the Material-Discursive Orient of British Romanticism,” Textual Practice 16, no. 1 (2002): 75–92. 22. Rousseau and Porter, Exoticism in the Enlightenment, 13. 23. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 57. 24. The concept of the panorama of the exotic is discussed at length in Leask, “Wandering through Eblis,” 169–88. 25. Foucault’s lecture notes on heterotopia have been gathered into a single coherent essay. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 26. 26. One of Foucault’s most helpful examples is a graveyard, which functions as a gateway between living and dead, corporeal and metaphysical, individual and collective. Ibid., 25. 27. For an explication of various critical responses to Said’s Orientalism, see Jeffrey Cass and Diane Long Hoeveler, “Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices,” in Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 25–45. 28. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 116. 29. For Dorothy Figuiera, “exoticism” is a useful term precisely because it has been neglected by contemporary critical discourse. She argues that terms like “Orientalism” are too inflected by implications of hegemony to be useful. Dorothy Figuiera, introduction to The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1–18.

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30. Tim Fulford uses the term “colonization-in-reverse” to describe the orientalism of Sir William Jones. Of Jones, Fulford says, “If Jones’s scholarship did assist imperial aims by rendering Oriental history and literature open to scrutiny, it nevertheless also asserted their value as traditions from which Europeans could learn the aesthetic and moral values they prided themselves upon and had formerly thought the exclusive legacy of Europe.” Tim Fulford, “Plants, Pagodas, and Penises: Southey’s Oriental Imports,” in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 192. 31. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 3. 32. Rousseau and Porter, Exoticism in the Enlightenment, 5, 9. This chapter clearly redefines the term “exoticism,” but I use “exotic” as it is generally used in critical nomenclature. This is because the exotic, as Roger Celestin explains, is a “practice of classification . . . ruled by and contained within a taxonomy elaborated by one’s own culture and institutions.” Roger Celestin, From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2. “Exotic,” in other words, as a descriptor, lacks the potential for redefinition that exoticism as praxis does. My definition of exoticism as episteme relies on Foucault’s definition of the episteme as “knowledge . . . [which] manifests a history . . . of its conditions of possibility” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002), xxiii. 33. This is the definition of exoticism in Celestin, From Cannibals to Radicals, 7–8. 34. For the occlusionary nature of spectacle, see Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, introduction to Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 3; and Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 14. For complications of the spectacle, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 1–26. 35. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 1–28. 36. Ovidi Cortés, “There Was, There Was Not: Newness, Exoticism, Translation, and Our Need for Other Words” (lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2002), 5, http://www.soas.ac.uk/ literatures/satranslations/Carbon.pdf. 37. As Celestin argues, “‘Exoticism’ requires the presence of (individual) identities.” Celestin, From Cannibals to Radicals, 2. 38. For a reading of Victorian exoticism and nostalgia, see Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siecle (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 5–10. 39. Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 16–17. 40. For a discussion of the dangers of the silent native, see Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman, introduction to introduction to Exoticism and the Age of Exploration, spec. issue of Eighteenth-Century Life 26, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin and Christa Knellwolf (2002): 2. Eric Meyer observes, “As

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imitation is appropriation, so identification is a form of the cultural imperialism that it seems to occult in the duplicitous gestures of Orientalist discourse.” Eric Meyer, “‘I Know Thee Not, I Loathe Thy Race’: Romantic Orientalism in the Eye of the Other,” ELH 58, no. 3 (1991): 666. 41. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5. 42. See William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Penguin, 2004). For an excellent consideration of earlier representations of British converts to Islam, see Daniel J. Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 43. The work of Michael Franklin, Makdisi, Daniel White, and Fulford, among others, attests to the indivisibility of Romanticism and the colonial experience. 44. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England, xv. 45. Srinivas Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 33, no. 1 (1999): 10. 46. Figuiera, The Exotic, 11–12. 47. Figuiera, who makes the most sustained argument for the parallels between exoticism and bildung, does not deny exoticism’s decline, reading it as part of its inherently subversive nature. In her argument, exoticism does not vanish, but incorporates into domestic literature like the bildungsroman, destabilizing national and generic boundaries. Ibid. Bongie argues opposingly that exoticism eschews the trajectory of bildung—exoticism is about the escape from modernity, not reconciliation. But his situating of exoticism in antimodern, determinedly antibildungsroman novels of adventure invokes a genre known for its “imperializing” rather than “exoticizing” exoticism. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 21. 48. Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel,” 11. 49. Brian Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), 41. 50. Many of the details of Beckford’s life are taken from Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: John Murray, 1998). 51. Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill, 129. 52. A New Guide to Fonthill Abbey. . . . (London: Whittaker and Whittaker; Essex: Youngman, Witham and Malon, 1822), xii, http://beckford. c18.net/newguideindex.html. 53. Beckford pushes the boundaries of Aravamudan’s assertion that the oriental tale’s performativity and rejection of mimesis poses a challenge to domestic realism. This is not to say that Beckford does not challenge domestic realism, which he certainly does, but that he actualizes a kind of reverse mimesis: taking the fantastic and turning it into reality. This is reminiscent of Edward Said’s argument that the Orient is itself a fantasy brought to life. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 12–21. Aravamudan discusses oriental performativity and its impact on realism at length in “In the Wake of the Novel,” 5–31. 54. Beckford initially planned Vathek within a larger narrative and accompanied by tales by the caliph’s fellow sufferers in Eblis. Samuel Henley’s early

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publication ruined Beckford’s plans and the “Episodes of Vathek” were never published with the main tale during his lifetime. Even after the “Episodes” were finally published, a carefully edited version of the “Alasi and Firouz” story replaced the central homosexual relationship with a heterosexual one. In the introduction to Vathek, Kenneth Graham argues that Vathek is incomplete without the additional tales, but I have chosen to focus only on the main story, as that was the version most widely available and read by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers like Lord Byron. Kenneth W. Graham, introduction to Vathek with the Episodes of Vathek, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001), 17–20. 55. Quoted in ibid., 19. 56. See Kenneth Graham, “‘Painting the Eyes of the Circassians’: Samuel Henley’s Mistranslations in Vathek,” Textus 18, no. 1 (2005): 179–80. 57. William Beckford, An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript: With Notes Critical and Explanatory (London: Johnson, 1786), iii, http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/. 58. Dick Claésson observes that Vathek’s categorizations of sense pleasure are similar to Locke’s understanding of sense perception. Dick Claésson, “‘Lost in Dreams and Magic Slumbers’: An Outline of Beckford’s Aesthetic Dichotomy of Fancy and Reason,” in William Beckford and the New Millennium, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS, 2004), 54–72. 59. For example, in the introductory poem “Hegira” the speaker longs for the “pure East” (reinen Osten) because there the Word is important (Wie das Wort so wichtig dort war). Walter Veit observes that “Hegira” reveals Goethe’s interest in “the unmediated presence of the divine and the divine word prior to any intellectual analysis.” Walter Veit, “Goethe’s Fantasies about the Orient,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 170, emphasis mine. 60. Johann Goethe, “Translations,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61. 61. The phrase “impossibly transcendental signifier” comes from a very useful article on translation and Vathek, Adam Roberts and Eric Robertson, “The Giaour’s Sabre: A Reading of Beckford’s Vathek,” Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 2 (1996): 208. 62. Goethe, “Translations,” 61. 63. See, for example, John Benyon, “‘Mr. Beckford’s Favorite Propensity’: The Erotics of Boyhood and the Emergence of a Sexual Self in LateEighteenth-Century England,” in Graham, William Beckford and the New Millennium, 29. 64. Randall Craig reads in Beckford’s narrative a tension between moral guilt and sensual enjoyment in “Vathek: The Inversion of Romance,” Vathek and the Escape from Time, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS, 1990), 113. 65. Knellwolf and McCalman, introduction to Exoticism and the Age of Exploration, 4. 66. J. E. Svilpis argues that the notes help “establish an oriental reality that is distinct from but equal in authority to the occidental.” J. E. Svilpis,

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“Orientalism, Fantasy, and Vathek,” in Graham, Vathek and the Escape from Time, 60. 67. William Haig Miller, “The Man of Wealth,” in The Mirage of Life (London: Religious Tract Society, 1850), 24–34, http://beckford.c18.net/ wbmirage1850.html. 68. The French word “mirage” was first used by Napoleon’s armies to describe the visions they saw during their marches through Egyptian deserts. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mirage,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 119067?rskey=9ioMDQ&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid. 69. Svilpis “Orientalism, Fantasy, and Vathek,” 67. 70. George Gordon Byron, The Giaour, in Three Oriental Tales: The History of Nourjahad, Vathek, and The Giaour, ed. Alan Richardson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 226. 71. For a discussion of changing attitudes toward translation during the late eighteenth century, see Ruriko Suzuki, “Translation in the 1790’s: A Means of Creating a Like Existence and/or Restoring the Original,” Romanticism on the Net 2 (May 1996): no pag. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/005718ar. 72. S.W., letter to the editor, Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1787, 55. 73. William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey, 1774–1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), 255. 74. Robert Southey, “The Curse of Kehama” in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself (New York: Applegate, 1839), 566. 75. Robert Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. . . .  ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, vol. 3 (London: Longman, Brown, Greene, and Longmans, 1849–50), 18. 76. Herbert Tucker refers to Kehama as “too nearly a swollen reprise of Thalaba to detain us.” Herbert Tucker, “Southey the Epic-Headed,” Romanticism on the Net 32–33 (November 2003– February 2004): 15, www.erudit.org/revue/ ron/2003/v/n32–33/009263ar.html. For reviews of Kehama, see Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972); in particular see John Foster’s review of Kehama for the Eclectic Review (133–45) and an unsigned review in the Monthly Mirror (132–34). 77. Balachandra Rajan makes a compelling argument for this theory in “Monstrous Mythologies: Southey and The Curse of Kehama,” European Romantic Review 9, no. 2 (1998): 212. 78. Southey, Life and Correspondence, 3:268. 79. For Kehama’s sales figures, see Rajan, “Monstrous Mythologies,” 203. Lynda Pratt, however, argues that Kehama fared better than Thalaba. Lynda Pratt, “‘Where Success . . . [Is ] Certain’: Southey the Literary East Indiaman,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 131–53; and George Gordon Byron, Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others, ed. Leslie Marchand (London: Murray, 1974), 3:101. 80. Southey, Poetical Works, 566. 81. Several orientalists were eager to characterize “Brahminical” Hinduism as wanting merely “the holy impress of revelation, to stamp it as divine.”

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Sydney Owenson, The Missionary: An Indian Tale, ed. Julia M. Wright (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 89. 82. In Madden, Robert Southey, 134. 83. Southey, Life and Correspondence, 3:145. 84. See Leask’s argument about transcription versus translation in Kehama. Leask, “Wandering through Eblis,” 183. 85. Tucker, “Southey the Epic-Headed,” 15. 86. Southey, The Curse of Kehama, in Poetical Works, 567. 87. Disavowal is defined psychoanalytically as the defense mechanism of the ego refusing to admit a traumatic perception of an external reality. Leo Ching, The Disavowal and the Obsessional: Colonial Discourse East and West (Durham, N.C.: Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, Duke University Press, 1995). 88. Southey, Poetical Works, 644. 89. Southey, Life and Correspondence, 3:281. 90. Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, in Poetical Works, 266. 91. For an account of Southey’s relationship to the Annual and Quarterly Reviews and to the Baptist missionary movement, see Daniel White’s “Idolatry, Evangelicalism, and the Intense Objectivism of Robert Southey,” Romanticism 17, no. 1 (2011): 39–45. 92. Southey, Life and Correspondence, 3:77. 93. See in particular D. S. Neff’s “Hostages to Empire: The Anglo-Indian Problem in Frankenstein, The Curse of Kehama, and The Missionary,” European Romantic Review 8, no. 4 (1997): 386–408; and Marilyn Butler, “The Orientalism of Byron’s The Giaour,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 83. 94. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 52, lines 1, 11–12. Coleridge’s idea of the Oversoul was inspired by Jones’s “Hymn to Narayena.” 96. White, “Idolatry, Evangelicalism,” 45–46. 96. In Madden, Robert Southey, 143. 97. Southey, Poetical Works, 567. 98. Punya is the Sanskrit word for “moral merit.” There are many puranic stories in which the acquisition of punya results in magic powers and seeming control over gods. Southey misreads the purpose behind many of these stories, all of which demonstrate the uselessness of misdirected punya and never truly allow humans the upper hand. 99. For a discussion of Southey’s conflicted desire to pursue wealth in India, see Pratt, “Where . . . Success [Is] Certain,” 139–40. 100. Southey, Life and Correspondence, 2:96–97. 101. Southey, Poetical Works, 618 102. For a discussion of panoramic enargia, see Leask, “Wandering through Eblis,” 178. 103. Conant lists authors of the “moral” school, who include Sheridan and Samuel Johnson. Conant, Oriental Tale, 97. 104. Javed Majeed argues that Southey’s epic poems exhibit a newfound awareness of cultural artifactuality that merges with his ongoing quest to

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define national culture in a fragmented England. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s “The History of British India” and Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 47. However, this does not mean that Kehama serves as an allegorical signifier for Britain; rather, it indicates Southey’s awareness of the manipulability that so-called national genres like the epic had on the general public. 105. Edward Dowden, Southey (London: Macmillan, 1879), 15. 106. After attacking Southey’s portrayal of Hindu gods, Foster concludes that “[i]t is possible our author may have in his own mind some mode of explaining or justifying his conduct. . . . But the very least that a Christian critic can say is, that no man, rightly impressed with the transcendent idea of a Supreme Being . . . could have written this work.” In Madden, Robert Southey, 144. 107. Diego Saglia, “Words and Things: Southey’s East and the Materiality of Oriental Discourse,” in Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, ed. Lynda Pratt (Burlington, Vt.: Aldershot, 2006), 184. 108. Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 525–26. 109. Two critical articles that take seriously the relationship between The Giaour’s style and its exotic content are Joseph Lew’s “The Necessary Orientalist? ‘The Giaour’ and Nineteenth-Century Imperialist Misogyny,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 173– 202; and Butler’s “Orientalism of Byron’s The Giaour.” 110. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952, trans. Ruth Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 139. 111. Beckford, Vathek, 144. 112. For the folkloric element of Kehama’s curse, see Butler, “Orientalism of Byron’s The Giaour,” 82. 113. Anne Janowitz’s article “The Romantic Fragment” is very helpful, although I would add to her contextualization of the fragment. Janowitz refers to the Schlegels’ theory of the romantic fragment as both the textual representation of the poetic process and the harbinger of modernity. It is worth noting, however, that the Schlegels’ theories of modernity were inspired by non-Western antiquity. For example, Friedrich Schlegel was enamored with Kalidasa’s Sakuntala because it presented a structural alternative to Aristotelian unities. Janowitz, “Romantic Fragment,” 444. 114. Francis Jeffrey, review, Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 21 (February–July 1813): 299. 115. Soon after the poem’s publication, Byron had a companion from his Cambridge days, Lord Sligo, confirm that he, Byron, was an eyewitness to and intercessor in the would-be execution of an unknown Turkish girl. In a later conversation with Thomas Medwin, an older Byron also claimed a greater autobiographical stake in the story; in his version, the so-called giaour— himself—succeeded in saving his cheating lover from her death at the hands of Turkish authorities (though she conveniently kills herself after). Meyer, “I Know

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Thee Not,” 674. There are several precedents for Leila’s drowning: in “The History of Three Apples” (Arabian Nights) a husband rashly kills his wife for an imagined crime and throws the pieces of her body into a river. Byron relies not only on the familiar trope of the sacrificial oriental woman—a phenomenon observable in literature by Owenson, Southey, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—but a more general theme of the sacrificial female that Lew has observed in popular British culture as far back as the 1780s. Lew, “Necessary Orientalist,” 177. 116. Jeffrey, review, 308. 117. David Seed, “‘Disjointed Fragments’: Concealment and Revelation in The Giaour,” Byron Journal 18 (1990): 22. 118. Byron, The Giaour, 188. 119. Meyer, “I Know Thee Not,” 666. 120. Byron, The Giaour, 225. 121. The Giaour and Hassan are physically compared in the moment in the poem after the Giaour has slain his rival: “Fall’n Hassan lies . . . And o’er him bends that foe with brow as dark as his that bled below” (ibid., 201, lines 669, 673–74). 122. Byron, The Giaour, 266. 123. Jacques Derrida, “Tours de Babel,” in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, 226. 124. Meyer argues that The Giaour reproduces imperial narratological structures: “By providing a total, global master narrative in which to insert the diversity of nations . . . the imperial narrative provides an all-inclusive ‘strategy of containment’ that renders world history intelligible by circumscribing it within the purview of the panoptic gaze of the sovereign European subject.” Meyer, “I Know Thee Not,” 681. 125. William H. Marshall, “The Accretive Structure of Byron’s The Giaour,” Modern Language Notes 76, no. 6 (1961): 502–9; Byron, The Giaour, 346–47. 126. Many critics, such as Seed and Meyer, are quick to point out that Byron’s fragmented style is a deliberate structure controlled by an overarching narrational voice (reinforced by Byron’s claim in the notes that he heard the tale from a single storyteller). Seed, “‘Disjointed Fragments,’” and Meyer, “I Know Thee Not,” 127. Janowitz characterizes the Romantic fragment as, among other things, “a remnant of something once complete and now broken and decayed.” Janowitz, “Romantic Fragment,” 442. 128. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260. 129. In a journal entry from 1813, Byron writes: “Men never advance beyond a certain point; and here we are, retrograding to the dull, stupid old system,—the balance of Europe—poising straws upon kings’ noses instead of wringing them off! Give me a republic, or a despotism of one, rather than the mixed government of one, two, three. . . . The Asiatics are not qualified to be republicans, but they have the liberty of demolishing despots, which is the next thing to it.” George Gordon Byron, Life,

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Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore (London: Murray, 1839), 205. 130. Several critics have argued Leila’s allegorical resonance with Greece; see, for example, Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: Tauris, 1994), 234. Nigel Leask asserts that Byron was deeply distrustful of imperialism and highly aware of his participation in it via the commercially profitable oriental tales. Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16–17. 131. For an analysis of serialization and reproductivity in Byron’s oriental tales, see Jerome Christensen, “Perversion, Parody, and Cultural Hegemony: The Moment of Change in the Oriental Tales,” in Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 88–141. Leask argues that in fact subsequent tales like The Bride of Abydos were significantly politically different from The Giaour. Leask, British Romantic Writers, 38. 132. Working numbers would seem to indicate an overall decline in Eastern titles into the nineteenth century. Working with Robert Mayo’s The English Novel in the Magazines, Tony Jarrells has noted a decline in Eastern titles from forty between 1780 and 1800 to twenty between 1800 and 1815. Using Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770 –1829 for roughly the same years, I count forty-two publications with Eastern titles between 1780 and 1799, fifteen between 1800 and 1815, and then twenty between 1816 and 1829. Of course, “Eastern titles” is quite vague. Jarrells has informed me that his count includes titles with the words “Eastern Tale” or “Oriental Tale” plus any titles alluding to The Arabian Nights, but not travel fiction or fiction that nods to the East. Peter Garside, ed., The English Novel, 1770 –1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction in the British Isles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). My count includes anything with an obviously Eastern title, titles with attached reviews that confirmed an Eastern setting, and titles of texts that I knew to have Eastern materials. Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales, for example, was counted because of “Murad the Unlucky.” My thanks to Tony Jarrells for allowing me to use his findings. Another, albeit anecdotal, indication of the oriental tale’s has-been status is an anonymous 1826 article that consistently and disparagingly refers to Eastern tales in the past tense: “On the Tales Denominated ‘Oriental,’” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependents 22 (July– December 1826): 284–86. 133. Seed quoting Wolfgang Iser in “Disjointed Fragments,” 17. 134. Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, 89. 135. Svilpis, “Orientalism, Fantasy, and Vathek,” 55.

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3. romantic metanoia: conversion and cultur al tr anslation in india 1. Elizabeth Hamilton, The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Sharon Russell (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999), 72. 2. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macauley (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 123. 3. Although Hamilton’s novel is defined as an oriental novel, I’ve chosen to discuss its cultural import elsewhere, in Chapter 4, because, unlike Owenson’s and Gibbes’s novels, it lacks the female protagonist who is so central to the work of this chapter. 4. “Colonizing aesthetics” is Pramod K. Nayar’s phrase for an aesthetics that homogenized colonial spaces (Nayar specifically invokes India) to create a “colonial topography” that is easily comprehended and controlled. Pramod K. Nayar, English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2–5. 5. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals (n.p., 1813), 77, http://books.google.com/books?id=vYVSAAAAcAAJ&vq=cultivated&s ource=gbs_navlinks_s. 6. The most famous use of the word metanoia, rendered as “repentance” in the King James Bible, is likely Jesus saying to his disciples, “I am not come to call the righteous, but the sinners, to repentance.” Luke 5:32. 7. Treadwell Walden, The Great Meaning of Metanoia: An Undeveloped Chapter in the Life and Teaching of Christ (New York: Whittaker, 1896), ix, http://books.google.com/books?id=8ZQsAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA7 1&lpg=PA71&dq=walden+metanoia&source=bl&ots=DZbYZILKWY&s ig=aWaeOu0m9_DQfa824–ioCWiWDRY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aPgNT5GL NuyA2QWV8uifBw&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=walden%20 metanoia&f=false. 8. Ibid., x. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Ibid., 33. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 1:317. 13. The importance of language to conversion is evident in Walden’s reference to Schleiermacher’s insistence on the “language-molding power of Christianity.” Walden, Great Meaning of Metanoia, 12. Isabel Hofmeyr emphasizes missionaries’ belief in the “magical” power of language for conversion in The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5. 14. For another example of the use of metanoia in a literary context, see Gracia Fay Ellwood, “‘Such a Dead Silence:’ Cultural Evil, Challenge, Deliberate Evil, and Metanoia in Mansfield Park,” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 24 (2003): n. pag.

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15. See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), 4. 16. See, for example, descriptions of sympathy in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, 384–89; and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Thanks to Rae Greiner for her invaluable insight into the philosophy of sympathy. For a discussion of the importance of strangeness, see Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18. 17. William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (Whitefish, Mo.: Kessinger, 2004), 5. 18. This is essentially Lynn Festa’s argument in Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 19. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 16; and Robert Eric Frykenberg, introduction to Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg and Alaine Low (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19. 20. Ferris makes this valuable distinction between traveling and settling strangers. Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 57. 21. Jeffrey Cox stresses the uncertain role of missionaries within the colonial power structure and the active participation of Indians in the evangelical process. Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 196–200. 22. See Geoffrey A. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2006); and Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004). 23. Porter’s maps of Protestant missionary activity show a dearth of Baptist missions in South India. In the 1830s the major city in the region, Madras, had no Baptist mission. Bengal, in contrast, had several. Porter, Religion versus Empire?, map 2, xii. 24. D. Dennis Hudson notes that “[o]utside the basic discipline required by baptism into the Danish Lutheran Church, the Pietist German Lutheran missionaries made no effort, as did later German and British ‘Calvinists,’ to legislate an ideal social relationship between believers in the New Jerusalem Church. In particular, they did not employ external authority or force to erase caste distinctions in the matter of ‘sitting together separately’ during worship.” D. Dennis Hudson, Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706–1835 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 37. 25. Ibid., 141. 26. Conflicts between missionaries and colonial administrators were not limited to the British. Eugene Irschick details the power struggle between the Dutch missionary Bartholomäus Zieganbalg and the administrator of the

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colonial port Tranquebar. Eugene F. Irschick, “Conversations in Tarangambadi: Caring for the Self in Early Eighteenth Century South India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia 23, no. 1 (2003): 254–70. 27. Arthur Mayhew, Christianity and the Government of India. . . . (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1929), 23; and H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 132. 28. Although the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge was already operating in India, it took over extant missions run by the Danish mission in South India. Carey’s move to Bengal shifted the center of British evangelical operations. Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India, 1793–1833: An Account of the Work of Christian Missionaries on Behalf of Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2–3. 29. William Carey, Serampore Letters: Being the Unpublished Correspondence of William Carey and Others with John Williams, ed. Leighton Williams and Mornay Williams (London: Putnam’s, 1892), 7, http://books. google.com/books?id=T0kMAAAAYAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s. 30. Carey often refers to editing translations with a “moonshi” who was also Carey’s companion and public translator. For a long time Carey was unsure of the munshi’s willingness to convert to Christianity, and then after his conversion, Carey dismissed the munshi for improprieties he does not specify. He also mentions a Pundit to whom he submitted his translations for editing. Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey, D.D. (London: Jackson and Walford, 1836), 308. 31. British and Foreign Bible Society, The First Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Philanthropic Society, 1805), 31. 32. See “The Work of Empire in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 198–265. 33. George Smith, The Life of William Carey, D.D. (London: Murray, 1885), 243–44, http://books.google.com/books?id=_m5CAAA A I A AJ&pg= PA 235& dq=w i l l ia m+ c a rey+b enga l i+bible& h l= en& ei =5ye 0Tt i nG 4bM g Qf moa2 k BA& sa=X&oi=book _ re su lt& c t=bookthumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CDgQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q=william%20 carey%20bengali%20bible&f=false. 34. Geoffrey Oddie, “Constructing ‘Hinduism’: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding,” in Frykenberg and Low, Christians and Missionaries, 156. Oddie credits Charles Grant for normalizing the term “Hindu.” Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 71. Interestingly enough, the word “Hinduism” was first used by Rammohun Roy, founder of the Hindu reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj. Oddie is careful to point out that the idea of a unified Hinduism was debated even as it was being formed. In his chapter “Hinduism as Represented by Protestant Friends of Mission,” he notes that Jesuit missionaries were the first to develop a Brahminical model of Hinduism, but that such a model was developed more or less independently by later-arriving Baptist missionaries. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 54–55.

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35. Frykenberg, introduction to Christians and Missionaries, 3. 36. Acts 2:7–11 (King James Version). 37. Gary Kelly, introduction to Varieties of Female Gothic, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), 6:xxxiv. 38. In his journal, Carey describes the process of learning Bengali and his delight on discovering that Bengali was a “copious” language that “abound[ed] with beauties.” E. Carey, Memoir of William Carey, 160. Alexander Duff, arguably the next most influential missionary after Carey, did not share his appreciation of Indian vernaculars, describing Bengali “as rude, as unreduced to method or rule, as the most barbarous of common of the vernacular dialects of Europe during the middle ages.” D. H. Emmott, “Alexander Duff and the Foundation of Modern Education in India,” British Journal of Educational Studies 13, no. 2 (1965): 161. 39. James Mill, The History of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215. 40. See the chapters “Vedanayagam Pillai, the Sastri” and “‘New Missionaries’ and the Tanjore Congregation,” in Hudson, Protestant Origins in India. Sastri has also been written about extensively by Indira Viswanathan Peterson in “Tanjore, Tranquebar, and Halle: European Science and German Missionary Education in the Lives of Two India Intellectuals in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Fryckenberg and Low, Christians and Missionaries, 93–126, and “Bethlehem Kuravanci of Vedanayak Sastri of Tanjore: The Cultural Discourse of an Early-Nineteenth-Century Tamil Christian Poem,” in Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions, ed. Judith Brown, Robert Eric Frykenberg, and Alaine Low (Grand Rapids Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 9–36. I am grateful to Aparna Balachandran for introducing me to Sastri via her paper “Negotiating Christianity, Caste and Colonialism: Vedanayaka Sastriar’s Critique of the Christian Mission in Tamil Nadu” (paper presented at the South East Asia Conference, University of California, Berkeley, February 13, 2005). 41. Hudson, Protestant Origins in India, 172. 42. Anonymous article, “Effects of Circulating the Holy Scripture,” Baptist Magazine for 1818 10 (London: Barfield,1819), 114. 43. Ibid., 115. 44. Festa observes that the “luxury of sympathy” and the division between sentimental subjects and objects of sympathy in sentimental literature often create a difference in which one group of people feels for rather than with another group. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 3–4. 45. Sue Zemka, “The Holy Books of Empire: Translations of the British and Foreign Bible Society,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 104–5. 46. Rammohun Roy to Lord William Amherst, December 11, 1823, quoted in Syed Mahmood, A History of English Education in India (Aligarh: M. A.-O. College, 1895), 29. 47. Raja Rammohun Roy, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, ed. Sophia Dobson Collet (Calcutta: n.p., 1914), 106.

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48. Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest provides an illuminating study of the debates over English and “literature” in India. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 49. Alexander Duff, for example, was one of the few people to blame the 1857 Mutiny on the government’s secular principles (ibid., 52–53). 50. The variety and importance of Indian claims in the education debates has been documented in The Great Indian Education Debate. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir contrast conservative Bengali elites’ desires for English-language instruction with Rammohun Roy’s and the more radical Henry Derozio’s push for various amounts of cultural incorporation and assimilation. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond: Routledge, 1999). 51. Stephen Evans cites John Leonard Clive’s Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian to make this argument. Stephen Evans, “Macaulay’s Minute Revisited: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth-Century India,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23, no. 4 (2002): 267. 52. Trevelyan includes a letter written by Rammohun Roy detailing the uselessness of learning an archaic language like Sanskrit. Charles Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1838), 65–71. 53. Trevelyan’s objections to native translations are worth considering alongside native efforts to translate European science into indigenous languages. For studies on Indian scientific translations, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50–52. 54. Trevelyan, On the Education, 21. For an examination of political and ideological debates over “classical” versus “vernacular” languages in India’s early colonial history, see Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329. 55. Trevelyan, On the Education, 25. 56. “Our duty is not to teach, but to un-teach them.” Ibid., 85. 57. Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 64. Arjun Appadurai details the East India Company’s centralization and overseeing of temple monies in Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South India Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 58. Trevelyan, On the Education, 117, 119. 59. Ibid., 124. 60. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. John Dryden (Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), book 12, 394. Not only was Virgil standard reading for any educated gentleman, Latin was the translative medium through which Europeans made sense of Sanskrit. William Jones, as noted earlier, translated Sakuntala from Sanskrit into Latin, and then into English. “The Works of Vergil” appears numerous times on the lists of books in Anglo-Indian libraries and homes. For a sample of some book lists, see appendix B in Percival

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Spear’s The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1971). 61. D. S. Neff points out that, starting in the late 1780s, Anglo-Indians began to be banned from a variety of military positions. D. S. Neff, “Hostages to Empire,” European Romantic Review 8, no. 4 (1999): 386. 62. Viswanathan observes that the 1813 Charter Act was at its core a response to the perceived degradation of the English in India and not Indians themselves. It was meant to raise standards of conduct for Englishmen as well as compensate the natives for indignities suffered. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 24. 63. At one point, Sophia notes that the East India Company’s “prudent” philosophy means that “[g]overnors . . . interfere as little as possible in the domestic or national quarrels of the country powers; peace and tranquility best promoting their commercial interests.” Phebe Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, ed. Michael Franklin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19. Michael Franklin notes that the subtitle A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings was added to the 1908 edition edited by John Macfarlane (ix). All quotations from Gibbes, Hartly House, are from the Franklin edition. 64. As of August 2005 “Sophia Goldborne” was listed as the novel’s author in the University of California at Berkeley library catalogues. 65. G. F. Barwick, introduction to Hartly House, A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings (Calcutta: Stamp Digest, 1984). A. L. Basham notes Barwick’s reversal on the author’s gender in “Sophia and the ‘Bramin,’” East India Company Studies: Papers Presented to Professor Sir Cyril Philips, ed. Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison (Hong Kong: Asian Research Service, 1986), 15. 66. William Foster decides that the author is most likely a “London literary hack” with access to a private collection of letters and argues that the dissertations on Indian history and the interest in East India Company affairs rule out a female author. William Foster, “Who Wrote Hartly House?,” Bengal, Past and Present 15, pt. 2, no. 30 (1917): 28–29. 67. The argument for Gibbes’s authorship is based on Gibbes’s acknowledgment to the Royal Literary Fund in 1804 that she was in fact the author of Hartly House. Isobel Grundy, “‘The Barbarous Characters We Give Them’: White Women Travellers Report on Other Races,” Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 22 (1993): 73–86. 68. Franklin has discovered that The New Annual Register plagiarized Gibbes’s description of a nawab’s retinue. Franklin, introduction to Gibbes, Hartly House, xviii–xix). Monica Clough also points out that Hartly House was used extensively by H. E. Busteed in his influential Echoes from Old Calcutta, although Busteed mistakenly attributed his references to Eliza Fay. Monica Clough, introduction to Hartly House, Calcutta: A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings by Phebe Gibbes, ed. Monica Clough (London: Pluto Press, 1989), xvi. 69. Franklin traces Gibbes’s interest in gender politics and education through many of her novels. Franklin, introduction to Gibbes, Hartly House, xv–xvi.

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70. Betty Joseph observes that women who went to India looking for husbands frequently became objects of social scorn. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80–81. 71. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 181. 72. Joseph refers to Sophia as a “moral barometer.” Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 80. 73. Kate Teltscher uses the term “temporal polyvalence.”’ Kate Teltscher, “Writing Home and Crossing Cultures: George Bogle in Bengal and Tibet, 1770–1775,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 287–88. 74. Gibbes, Hartly House, 8. 75. Ibid., 17. 76. Critics like Basham, in “Sophia and the Brahmin,” praise Hartly House’s lack of racial prejudice. 77. Gibbes, Hartly House, 132. 78. Ibid., 76. 79. Ibid., 36. 80. Ibid., 157–58. 81. Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 63. 82. Joseph points out the resonance between Sophia’s language and the accusations made against Hastings. See the section “Shuddering to Name It: The Reiteration of Violence” in chapter 2, “Archival Fictions,” in Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 78–88. 83. Nicole Reynolds, “Phebe Gibbes, Edmund Burke, and the Trials of Empire,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 2 (2007): 25–27. 84. Franklin observes wryly that Sophia’s language exclusivity is “not, perhaps, in the Jonesian spirit.” Gibbes, Hartly House, 175. 85. Basham comments that after abandoning the interpreter, the Brahmin “must have studied English intensively!” Basham, “Sophia and the Brahmin,” 21. 86. Gibbes, Hartly House, 105. 87. Ibid., 111. 88. Ibid., 51. 89. Ibid., 151. 90. Ibid., 155. 91. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 181. 92. Joseph Lew, “The Necessary Orientalist? The Giaour and Nineteenth-Century Imperialist Misogyny,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1843, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 173–202. 93. For excerpts of John Wilson Croker’s attacks on Owenson, see John William Fitzpatrick’s Lady Morgan: Her Career, Literary, and Personal (London: Skeet, 1860), 116–18.

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94. Julie Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, and the Politics of Style (Palo Alto, Calif.: Academia Press, 2009), 37. 95. Balachandra Rajan, quoted in Julia Wright, introduction to The Missionary: An Indian Tale, by Sydney Owenson, ed. Julia Wright (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), 19. 96. Owenson wrote three other novels besides The Missionary that deal with global colonial politics: Ida; or, A Woman of Athens, Italy, and The Life of Salvator Rosa. 97. Owenson uses Hilarion’s travel down the Indus as an occasion to reflect on “those climes which have since been so intimately connected with the interests of Europe, and so obviously influenced the manners and habits of western nations.” Owenson, The Missionary, 85. 98. For a detailed history of the national tale, see Katie Trumpener’s definitive study, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 99. In The Wild Irish Girl this moment comes when Horatio hears Glorvina’s voice, falls, and is injured. Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 53. 100. Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 47–48. 101. According to the prince, Ossian has pilfered Irish legend, incorrectly identified Irish landmarks as Scottish, historically mangled the histories of various Gaelic heroes, and mistranslated Gaelic phrases. Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl, 108–9. 102. For a description of the trajectory of the national tale, see Ferris, Romantic National Tale, 5. 103. For Viswanathan’s analysis of The Missionary, see Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, 27–31. 104. Kelly, Varieties of Female Gothic, 6:x. 105. Owenson, The Missionary, 257 (emphasis mine). 106. For an analysis of Luxima’s gendering, see the chapter “Feminizing the Femine” in Rajan, Under Western Eyes, 129–30. 107. Owenson, The Missionary, 249–50. Francis Botkin, Trumpener, and Siraj Ahmed all refer to the merging of Catholic and Hindu rituals. Francis Botkin, “Burning Down the Big House: Sati in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary,” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique 15 (2008): 37–51; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 146; and Siraj Ahmed, “‘An Unlimited Intercourse’: Historical Contradictions and Imperial Romance in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Containment and Redeployment of English India: Romantic Praxis Circle Series (November 2000), 27, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ containment/ahmed/ahmed.html. 108. Owenson, The Missionary, 72. 109. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Containing Material Never Before Collected, ed. Roger Ingpen (London: Pitman, 1912), 103–4. 110. Son of the archbishop of Dublin, Sir John Craddock attempted to regulate the varied headdress of Indian troops, an act seen as instrumental in fomenting fears of conversion, and after the riot started the British in Vellore

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were rescued by the commander of the Ninth Battalion, Sir Rollo Gillespie, from County Down. 111. Katheryn Freeman argues that Hilarion is “conflicted in particularly late Enlightenment British ways.” In particular, he evinces a “hypochondriaism” brought about by the juxtaposition of sensibility and rationalism. Katheryn Freeman, “‘Eternally Disunited’: Gender, Empire, and Epistemology in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary,” Wordsworth Circle 36, no. 1. (2005): 21–28, quotation on 21. 112. Owenson, The Missionary, 100–101, emphasis mine. 113. It is possible that Owenson modeled Hilarion after Roberto de Nobili, a seventeenth-century Italian nobleman who acquired Brahmin converts by declaring himself equal to any Brahmin in purity (a dvija, or twice born), and lived among Brahmins for many years. Frykenberg discusses Nobili’s career in “Christians in India: An Historical Overview of Their Complex Origins,” in Frykenberg and Low, Christians and Missionaries, 44–45. 114. Owenson, The Missionary, 116. 115. Michel de Certeau describes the ethnological encounter as “ravishment,” during which meaning is suspended and which opens a rift in time. Michel de Certeau, “Ethno-graphy,” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 213. 116. Ferris and Trumpener argue that the historical tale at large becomes more and more suspicious of matrimony as the solution to colonial trauma, moving away from cultural amalgamation to nationalist separatism. In the case of Owenson, Ferris observes in Romantic National Tale, “Morgan’s [Sydney Owenson’s] later tales bypass the family and the rule of the couple as at once the affective and theoretical basis of national order” (74). See also Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 146. 117. For distinctions between the historical novel and the national tale, see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 150–51. 118. Ahmed argues that The Missionary represents a fundamental shift in colonial consciousness: eschewing the eighteenth-century understanding of imperialism as a clash between imperial and national visions, the nineteenthcentury vision of imperial encounter sees it as a clash between tradition and modernity. Ahmed, “An Unlimited Intercourse,” 5. Trumpener argues that The Missionary is an interstitial work, poised between the emotional and cultural telos of the national tale and the larger historical processes that inform the historical novel. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 167. 119. See Wright, introduction to Owenson, The Missionary, 12. 120. See Cóilín Parsons, “‘Greatly Altered’: The Life of Sydney Owenson’s Indian Novel,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 2 (2010): 1–13. 121. Gibbes, Hartly House, 136. 122. Jeffrey Wallen discusses memorials and hypomnesis in “Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no. 2 (2009): 261–78. 123. For a discussion of the awkwardness of imperialism’s prolepsis, see Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21.

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4. “paths too long obscure”: the tr anslations of jones and müller 1. David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 15–18. 2. Thomas Trautmann describes “segmentary lineage” as “a genealogical figure in which . . . relations among the living are understood and calibrated for nearness by reference to common ancestry, with the result that everyone within the structure . . . is related to everyone else” (10). For Trautmann, the segmentary lineage of the tree image in linguistics is crucial because it was also the dominant structure in ethnology from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Trautmann also usefully points out that this segmentary structure characterized Mosaic accounts of descent. And as Trautmann argues, “Not only is segmentary lineage an object of ethnological thought, it also has been an important structure for ethnological thought.” Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 10. 3. For an enthusiastic defense of Jones, see Michael Franklin, preface to Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, by Sir William Jones, ed. Michael Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995). 4. For a discussion of Jones’s friendship with Franklin, see Kevin Brine, introduction to Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones, 1746–1794, ed. Garland Hampton Cannon and Kevin R. Brine (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 7, 10. 5. Rosane Rocher, “Weaving Knowledge: Sir William Jones and Indian Pandits,” in Cannon and Brine, Objects of Enquiry, 52. 6. Fred Hoerner suggests that one method of tempering Jones scholarship is to read him using Eastern tropes, thus disrupting Jones’s own analysis of the East through Western tropes. Fred Hoerner, “‘A Tiger in a Brake’: The Stealth of Reason in the Scholarship of Sir William Jones in India,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37, no. 2 (1995): 216. 7. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 107. 8. Sir William Jones, The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 2:643. 9. For an analysis of Jones’s dislike of common law, see Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 62. 10. Jones seemed incapable of understanding or accepting that, as with the flexible interpretation central to English common law, Indian legal treatises were considered guidelines for a vast canvas of legal interpretation. See Bernard S. Cohn’s chapter “Law and the Colonial State in India” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 57–75. 11. Jones, Letters, 2:699.

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12. For a useful analysis of Jones’s relationship with native pundits, see Rosane Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 215–49. 13. Hoerner, “Tiger in the Brake,” 217. 14. Garland Cannon, “Sir William Jones and the New Pluralism over Languages and Cultures,” Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 133. 15. Quoted from Jones’s Speech of Isaeus, cited in Cannon, “Sir William Jones and the New Pluralism,” 138. 16. My thanks to Ian Duncan for pointing out the similarities between Jones’s theory of elocution and physiognomy manuals. 17. Sir William Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, ed. Satya Sheel Pachori (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135. 18. In a letter to Samuel Davis in 1786, Jones refers to poetry as a “relief to my mind after its severer employment in the discharge of my publick duty.” He also refers to one of his poems—“Hymn to Ganga”—as a “feebler colouring” of Davis’s pictorial renderings. Cannon, “Sir William Jones and the New Pluralism,” 133. 19. Javed Majeed notes that in the preface to Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, Jones insists that his poems are “genuine compositions of Arabia and Persia,” which is important to clarify because “so many productions, invented in France, have been offered to the publick as genuine translations from the languages of Asia.” Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s “The History of British India” and Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 51. 20. Zak Sitter, “William Jones, ‘Eastern’ Poetry, and the Problem of Imitation,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 4 (2008): 385–407. 21. Ibid., 395. 22. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 41. 23. Ibid., 35. 24. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 204. 25. Mastery of the “other” language being one of the classical requirements for the translator. Dryden, for example, argues that “he [the translator] must perfectly understand his author’s tongue, and absolutely command his own.” John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24. 26. For more on Halhed’s poetry, see Michael Franklin, “Cultural Possession, Imperial Control, and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed,” Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002): 1–18. 27. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 58. 28. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 62, emphasis mine.

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29. For a more detailed analysis of Halhed’s and Jones’s poems, see Franklin, “Cultural Possession.” 30. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 69. 31. Charles Wilkins, trans., The Bhagvat-geeta, or Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon; in Eighteen Lectures, ed. Rev. John Garrett (Bangalore: Wesleyan Mission Press, 1849), 10. 32. Jones, Sir William Jones: A Reader, 70. 33. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 208. 34. Sitter argues that Jones “draws attention to oriental difference in order to dramatize its successful assimilation within the field of English letters.” Sitter, “William Jones,” 395. 35. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 43. 36. For details on the controversy over the European presence (and East India Company sponsorship) of the Durga puja and Halhed’s poetic lamenting of the worship of the goddess with the “hideous visage,” see Franklin, “Cultural Possession,” 15–16. 37. For an analysis of Jones and the Hymns, see Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 22–24. 38. David Kopf, “The Historiography of British Orientalism, 1772–1992: Warren Hastings, William Jones, and the Birth of British Orientalism in Bengal,” in Cannon and Brine, Objects of Enquiry, 142. 39. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms, 71. 40. For a discussion of the eighteenth century’s inherent literariness, see Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 33–35. 41. Cohn defines the “investigational modality” as including “the definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which . . . it is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into useful forms.” Cohn identifies several such modalities, including history, travel, and the survey. Translation, he argues, is such a modality only in the late eighteenth century. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms, 4–8, quote on 5. 42. Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 43. 43. H. H. Wilson notes: “It may be thought inconsistent with the unfavourable opinions thus avowed of the History of British India . . . to have engaged in preparing a new edition of it for the public; but, nonwithstanding the imputations which have been urged to its disadvantage, the editor regards the history of Mr. Mill as the most valuable work upon the subject which has yet been published. It is a composition of great industry . . . even where the reader may not feel disposed to adopt the views it advocates, he will rarely fail to reap advantage from the contemplation of them, as they are advanced to illustrate the relations between India and Great Britain.” James Mill, History of British India. . . . , ed. Horace Hayman Wilson, vol.1 (London: Madden, 1848), ix. 44. Majeed argues that unlike Mill, who only ambiguously supported imperialism, Wilson was an enthusiastic believer in the moral mission of empire. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 128–29.

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45. Vinay Darwadker, “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literature,” in Breckenbridge and Van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, 162–76. 46. Sir William Jones, “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India,” in Sir William Jones: A Reader, 179–80. 47. Müller had to give his lectures twice to satisfy the demands for tickets. Lourens van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 109. 48. Of course, Aryanism is closely associated with some of the most nefarious historical tragedies of the twentieth century. It is crucial, however, to point out that the understanding of Aryanism as the absolute racial difference between a small group of northern Europeans and the rest of the world runs directly counter to Müller’s Aryanism. For a discussion of the difference, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 13–15. 49. For an example of a recent attempt to comprehensively consider Müller’s wide-ranging work, see Van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller. 50. Friedrich Max Müller, The Life and Letters of the Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller, ed. Georgina Adelaide Müller, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 1:61. 51. In a letter to Trevelyan in 1854, Müller warns him that “[i]n the Academy of St. Petersburg there is a Chair for every branch of Oriental literature. The French government has founded a school, ‘L’ecole pour les langues orientales vivantes.’ At Vienna there is an Oriental seminary. Prussia finds it expedient to give encouragement to young Orientalist scholars, employed afterwards with advantage as consuls and interpreters. In England alone, where the most vital interests are involved in free intercourse with the East, hardly anything is done to foster Oriental studies.” Müller, Life and Letters, 1:162. 52. Müller quoted in Ronald Neufeldt, F. Max Müller and the Rg-Veda: A Study of Its Role in His Work and Thought (Calcutta: Minerva, 1980), 3. 53. For an analysis of the increasing abstraction of nineteenth-century linguistics—language for language’s sake—see Linda Dowling, “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,” PMLA 97, no. 2 (1982): 160–78. 54. Ibid., 161. 55. Friedrich Max Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us? A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), viii; 32–33. 56. Müller, India, 31. 57. Friedrich Max Müller, introduction to The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Max Müller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), xlii. 58. Müller, India, 14. 59. Ibid., 6. 60. Although Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta had all existed in some form prior to the British arrival in India, they were all clusters of small villages and communities, not extant cities like Varanasi or Madurai. 61. Müller, Life and Letters, 2:50–51. 62. Ibid., 1:520.

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63. For a discussion of Sir William Jones and native scholarship, see Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms, 71. 64. Müller, Sacred Books of the East, 1:lxxx. 65. Müller, Life and Letters, 1:392. 66. Ibid., 1:346. 67. Roy is commonly considered the founder of the Samaj. David Kopf, however, distinguishes between Roy’s establishment of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828 and Debendranath Tagore’s “institutionalization” of Roy’s philosophy with the creation of the Samaj in 1843. David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 68. Friedrich Max Müller, Biographical Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1884), 6. 69. Muller, Sacred Books of the East, 1:lxiii. 70. Friedrich Max Müller, letter, The Liberal and the New Dispensation 12 (1882): 264. 71. This division of ethnology and philology is usefully recounted in chapter 6, “Race Science versus Sanskrit,” in Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 186–87. 72. Vivekananda quoted by K. S. Ramaswami Sastri, “Life and Teachings of Swami Vivekananda,” Brahmavâdin 11, no. 2 (1906): 88. 73. For a reading of Hindu nationalism’s multivocalism, see Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 8. Although their validity is difficult to verify, accounts of Vivekananda’s tutor’s role in his meeting Ramakrishna are found in both Rajagopal Chattopadhyaya’s Swami Vivekananda in India: A Corrective Biography (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 29; and Jaiboy Joseph’s “Master Visionary,” Hindu Magazine, June 23, 2002, http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2002/06/23/stories/2002062300310400.htm. 74. Quoted in Neufeldt, F. Max Müller and the Rg-Veda, 13. 75. For an argument that criticisms of FitzGerald’s text are directed as much, if not more, at the book’s fans, see Eric Gray, “FitzGerald and the ‘Rubáiyát,’ in and out of Time,” Victorian Poetry 46, no. 1 (2008): 4. 76. Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 61. Other important postcolonial considerations of FitzGerald include Harish Trivedi, “Orientalism Translated: Omar Khayyam Through Persian, English, and Hindi,” in Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 29–52; Iran B. Hassani Jewett, “The Rubàiyàt of Omar Khayyam,” in Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubàiyàt of Omar Khayyam, ed. Harold Bloom and Janyce Marson (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004), 21–58; and Annmarie Drury, “Accident, Orientalism, and Edward FitzGerald as Translator,” Victorian Poetry 46, no. 1 (2008): 37–53. 77. Drury, “Accident, Orientalism.” 78. FitzGerald cited in Andre Lefevre, ed., Translation/ History/ Culture: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1992), 80.

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79. Charles Eliot Norton wrote that “[i]t is very striking to see, and much more to feel, how close the thought and the sentiment of the Persian poet often are to the thought and sentiment of our own day. So that in its English dress it reads like the latest and freshest expression of the perplexity and the doubt of the generation to which we ourselves belong. There is probably nothing in the mass of English translations or reproductions of the poetry of the East to be compared with this little volume in point of value as English poetry.” Charles Eliot Norton, review in The North American Review (1869) in Omar Khayyam, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104. 80. For the argument that the story of the poem’s rise from obscurity to fame has been greatly exaggerated (although its meteoric rise to international fame has not been), see Gray, “FitzGerald and the ‘Rubáiyát,’” 4. 81. Karlin, Rubáiyát, xli. 82. Christopher Decker, introduction to Edward FitzGerald: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, ed. Christopher Decker (Charlottseville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), xli. 83. Norton, review, 103. 84. See in particular Thomas W. Hinchcliff’s anonymous review of 1870 in Fraser’s and H. Schütz Wilson’s of 1876 in Contemporary Review, both included in appendix 1 in Karlin, Rubáiyát, 104–18. 85. For comments on the poem’s hoax effects and concomitant fears, see Gray, “FitzGerald and the ‘Rubáiyát,’” 7. 86. Jesse Cadell, review, in Karlin, Rubáiyát,118, emphasis mine. 87. For comments on FitzGerald’s redaction of homoerotic ruba’i, see Black, On Exhibit, 55–56. 88. FitzGerald quoted in Karlin, introduction to Rubáiyát, xli. 89. Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longmans, Green, 1861), 73. 90. Ibid., 75. 91. J. Jeffrey Franklin, “The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England,” ELH 72, no. 4 (2005): 943. 92. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (London: Trübner, 1879), 7. 93. For Arnold’s incorporation of biblical and Tennysonian phrases into the poem, see Colin Graham, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 133–37. 94. Christopher Clausen, “Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia and Its Reception,” Literature East and West 17 (1973): 175. Clausen also notes the similarities between Gautama’s harem and Moore’s poem. 95. Ibid., 176. 96. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 225. 97. Sir Edwin Arnold, India Revisited (London: Trübner, 1886), 274–275. Müller’s Letters record a similarly enthusiastic commendation from the king of Burma for his translation of the Dhammapada. Müller, Life and Letters, 426. 98. Mark Osteen, introduction to The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2. 99. Graham, Ideologies of Epic, 124–25.

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100. Taylor notes that Fernando Ortiz’s original definition of the stages of transculturation involved disculturation, or the loss of the preceding culture. Diana Taylor, “Transculturating Transculturation,” Performing Arts Journal 13, no. 2 (1991): 92. Other useful readings of transculturation include Abril Trigo, “Shifting Paradigms: From Transculturation to Hybridity: A Theoretical Critique,” in Critical Studies: Unforseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity, ed. Rita De Grandis and Zilà Bernd (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 85–111; and Mark Millington, “Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 265–68. 101. Transculturation’s theoretical emergence in Latin America, moreover, locates it in the sphere of postcoloniality, and to apply the term to all acts of cultural borrowing would be to dilute its importance in the epistemology of subaltern resistance. We might say that the intellectual heritage of the East is transposed to Britain and then transculturated back, but this divides the process into two distinct stages, instead of, as this chapter has demonstrated, recognizing its more fluid and indeterminate process. 102. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 103. Drury’s article outlines what she terms FitzGerald’s theory of “accidental imitation” (“Accident, Orientalism,” 38–40). 104. See my analysis of Steiner’s theory of translative parity in Chapter 1.

5. tr anslation’s bastards: mimicry and linguistic hybridit y 1. Thomas de Quincey, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), 63. 2. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 129. 3. For an examination of both inoculation and de Quincey’s fears of crocodiles, see Thomas H. Schmid, “Crocodiles and ‘Inoculation’ Reconsidered: De Quincey, Opium, and the Dream Object,” Wordsworth Circle 39, nos. 1–2 (2008): 35–38. For a discussion of the impact of imperial material culture on British culture, see Diego Saglia, “William Beckford’s ‘Sparks of Orientalism’ and the Material-Discursive Orient of British Romanticism,” Textual Practice 16, no. 1 (2002): 75–92. 4. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 5. James Mill, The History of British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 214. 6. Sakuntala is often referred to as karaboru, or “round thighed maiden,” an appellation that Jones in at least one instance changes to “charming maiden.” 7. William Macintosh, Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, Describing Characters . . . , vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1782), 251. 8. Nechtman, Nabobs, 238. 9. R. Radhakrishnan, “Adjudicating Hybridity, Co-ordinating Betweenness,” Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 4–6.

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10. P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 86. 11. See “Of Mimicry and Man” in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. Nechtman similarly questions Bhabha when he observes that the nabob presents the possibility of a “second hybridity” at the heart of the empire. Nechtman, Nabobs, 175. 12. Parama Roy offers a compelling reinterpretation of mimicry in her book Indian Traffic when she considers “not so much the volatile effects of the mimicry that generates the ‘not quite/not white’ subject of colonialism . . . but the range of other, relatively untheorized prospects and identity formations beyond the bounds of male Anglicization.” Roy identifies one of these undertheorized prospects as the “English (male) fascination with going native,” but her work focuses on the Victorian adventurer Richard Burton. Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 6. 13. Nechtman, Nabobs, 111–12. 14. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52. 15. For the difficulty of translating humor, see Jeroen Vandaele, “Humor in Translation.” Handbook of Translation Studies 1 (2010): 147–52. 16. William Owen Sheppard Sutherland, The Art of the Satirist: Essays on the Satire of Augustan England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 10–11. 17. “I describe not Men but Manners . . . [to] hold the Glass to thousands in their Closets, that they may contemplate their Deformity, and endeavour to reduce it, and thus by suffering private Mortification may avoid Public Shame. This places the Boundary between and distinguishes the Satirist from the Libeller.” Henry Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 168–69. 18. Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton. . . . , Elizabeth Benger, ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 1:128, http://books.google.com/books?id=PqUEAAAA YAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=benger+memoirs+of+the+late+elizabeth +hamilton&hl=en&ei=0xAOT8qFBJS_2QWopun2Bw&sa=X&oi=book_ result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CDkQ6wEwAA#v=onepag e&q&f= false. Melancholia wasn’t a very good excuse. Hamilton clashed with her good friend and fellow author Mary Hays over the novel’s portrait of William Godwin. Hays had told Hamilton about her conversations with Godwin, and she felt betrayed by Hamilton’s witty satire of his philosophies. Undaunted, Hamilton would go on to cruelly satirize Hays herself in a later novel. Gary Kelly compares Hamilton and Hays in Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 143. 19. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 157. 20. For the relationship between history and satire, see Dustin H. Griffin, Satire: A Critical Retrospective (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994).

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21. Pamela Perkins and Sharon Russell, introduction to Elizabeth Hamilton, The Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Sharon Russell (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999), 7–46, on 31. 22. See Perkins and Russell’s introduction to Hamilton, Translation, for a brief biography of Hamilton. 23. Hamilton, Translation, 157. 24. Ibid., 247. 25. See Suleri’s analysis of the guilt in the Hastings trial in the chapter “Reading the Trial of Warren Hastings” in Rhetoric of English India, 49–74. 26. Edmund Burke, “On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings” (1788), in Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, ed. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 37, emphasis mine. 27. See M. O. Grenby’s The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 28. Hamilton, Translation, 180. “Shaster” is a common eighteenth-century spelling for sastra, or “spiritual treatise.” 29. Ibid., 256. 30. For more on the divided historiographies of domestic and imperial Britain, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002). 31. Hamilton, Translation, 58. See Anne Mellor’s invaluable assessment of Hamilton’s feminism in “Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in Romanticism 44, no. 2 (2005): 151–64. 32. Perkins and Russell, introduction to Hamilton, Translation, 17, emphasis mine. Without ridiculously overreading Hamilton as a revolutionary precursor of subaltern studies, we can say that her invocation of the future anterior does parallel Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of revolutionary time in “You Only Die Twice,” a chapter in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 131–49. Žižek argues, “In contrast to the triumphal procession of victors exhibited by official historiography, the oppressed class appropriates the past to itself . . . in so far as the past already contains—in the form of what has failed of what was extirpated—the dimension of the future” (138). 33. Claire Grogan, “Crossing Genre, Gender, and Race in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in the Novel 34, no. 1 (2002): 35. 34. Hamilton, Memoirs, 1:110. 35. Ibid., 1:127. 36. Hamilton, Translation, 303. 37. Grogan’s article begins with an anecdote about finding Hamilton’s novel catalogued in the library under nonfiction. See Grogan, “Crossing Genre.”

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38. Mona Narain, “Colonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 4 (2006): 588. 39. David Parker, “Diaspora, Dissidence, and the Dangers of Cosmopolitanism,” Asian Studies Review 27, no. 2 (2003): 156. 40. Reginald Heber, review, in Mirza Abu Talib Khan, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, ed. Daniel O’Quinn (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2009), 386–87. 41. Khan, Travels, 61. 42. Both Nigel Leask and O’Quinn comment on Stewart’s omission of Abu Talib’s more poetic textual gestures. Nigel Leask, “‘Travelling the Other Way’: The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810) and Romantic Orientalism,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin (New York: Routledge, 2006), 222; and O’ Quinn, introduction to Khan, Travels, 12–13. 43. Unsigned review in Khan, Travels, 401. 44. O’Quinn, introduction to Khan, Travels, 20. 45. Leask, “Travelling,” 223–24. 46. The failure of Macaulay’s vision has been documented by Gauri Viswanathan, who tracks the emergence of an English-educated Indian bourgeoisie that did almost the opposite of what Macaulay had envisioned. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 16–17. 47. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Penguin, 1994), 288. 48. The publication history of Kipling’s short stories is a messy one. All the stories were published individually in British and American magazines before being collated into the two Jungle Books in 1894 and 1895. “In the Rukh,” the story that finishes Mowgli’s history after leaving the jungle, was actually published in 1893 but not in the original 1894–95 editions. However, the “Outward Bound” edition includes “In the Rukh” and puts all the Mowgli stories together chronologically. This information comes from Daniel Karlin’s notes on the text to The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, ed. Daniel Karlin (New York: Penguin Books; 1987), 28–29. 49. Ibid., 59. 50. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press; 1990), 91, emphasis mine. 51. The reference to Bengalis has been well documented by several scholars, such as Nirad Chauduri in Thy Hand! Great Anarch: India, 1921–1952 (New York: Addison Wesley, 1988), 671–72. 52. Kipling, Jungle Books, 341. 53. Don Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 74–75. 54. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 335. 55. Whether or not to include “In the Rukh” with the other Mowgli stories has been the subject of some critical contention. For a discussion of the controversy, see Sue Walsh, Kipling’s Imperial Children: Language,

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Identity, and Constructions of Childhood (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 3–4. 56. Satya P. Mohanty, “Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick La Capra (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 315. This fictive epitome of the spectacular/invisible colonizer is perhaps best realized by George Orwell in his short story “Shooting the Elephant.” 57. Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786– 1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 141. 58. For more on Kipling’s delineation of acceptable and unacceptable myth-making, see ibid., 127–29. 59. Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002), 99. 60. For the “controversy” over the role of Anglicized Indians, see the chapter “The Failure of English” in Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 142–65. 61. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Warren Hastings,” in The Works of Lord Macaulay, Complete, ed. Lady Trevelyan, volume 6 (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), 555. 62. The opium-using, sinister lascar famously appears in The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” A different example of the lascar’s inability to assimilate is a sympathetic poem by Mary Darby Robinson, “The Lascar” (1800), which narrates the struggles of a poor lascar in England who longs for India and eventually dies from lack of shelter. In Robinson’s poem the lascar is a victim of mischance and the stubborn prejudices of the people who refuse to shelter him. Lascars’ lack of education denied them the same mobility as educated middle- and upper-class Indians, and thus they often remained irredeemably on the periphery of British society. 63. Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounter, Race, and Identity, 1880–1930 (London: Cass, 2000), 91. 64. F. Anstey, A Long Retrospect (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 3. 65. Ibid., 19. 66. The Ilbert Bill a records a meeting of Anglo-Indians in St. James’s Hall to push for a repeal of the bill. In one popular speech, Sir Alexander Arbuthnot argued that “the evils of proceeding with the Bill . . . would establish a permanent cause of antagonism between our countrymen and the native subjects. (Cheers.).” The Ilbert Bill . . . Collection of Letters, Speeches, Memorials, Articles, &c., Stating the Objections to the Bill (London: Allen, 1883), 15, http://www.archive.org/details/ilbertbillcollec00lond. 67. The paucity of reliable numbers on this subject makes exact statistics tricky, but see Lahiri’s findings in Indians in Britain, 5. 68. Anstey, Long Retrospect, 232. 69. Lahiri, Indians in Britain, 82. 70. R. G. G. Price, A History of Punch (London: Clark, 1957), 154.

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71. William Congreve, “Mr. Congreve to Mr. Dennis concerning Humour in Comedy,” in English Literary Criticism: Restoration and 18th Century, ed. Samuel Hynes (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 87. 72. There is an astonishing continuity of narratives describing natives who lack the ability to be funny. One has only to think about the series of popular books and movies featuring overly serious Native Americans, Asians, and Indians. In films like Aladdin, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gunga Din, the gravity of the exaggeratedly Eastern characters in contrast to heroes with a keen sense of the comic indicates an unsympathetic nature as well as evil intent. Lawrence Levine notes the phenomenon of “excessive Negro humor” in Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See the chapter “Black Laughter,” especially page 13. 73. Oliver Goldsmith, The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham (New York: Harper, 1900), 3:92. 74. F. Anstey, Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. (New York: Appletown, 1898), xv. 75. Roy notes that critics who associate mimicry with resistance overlook its “retrogressive” tendencies. Roy, Indian Traffic, 5–6. 76. Edward Said emphasizes language’s mimetic function in order to explain the gap between orientalism’s claims to truth and the Orient as lived reality: “I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth.’ But representations. . . . In any instance of written language there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 21. Babha, Location of Culture, 87. 77. See Bhabha’s study of mimicry in the essay “On Mimicry and Man” in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 85–92. 78. James F. English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1994), 8. 79. Suleri analyzes the colonizer-colonized relationship in Rhetoric of English India, 6–11. 80. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Government of India: A Speech Delivered in the House of Commons on the 10th of July, 1833,” in Works, 8:141, emphasis mine. 81. Anstey, Baboo Hurry, 121. 82. Ibid., 185. 83. Nicholas B. Dirks, Casts of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 47. Dirks argues that M. A. Sherring’s 1872 study, Hindu Tribes and Castes, is an important and obvious precursor to the first all-India census and reflects the transition from orientalist to more ethnographic scholarship. 84. Anstey, Baboo Hurry, 266. 85. Ibid., 241.

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86. Michael Fisher discusses relations between Indian men and British women in “Asians in Britain: Negotiations of Identity,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–96. 87. The OED defines “funky” as “[i]n a state of funk; frightened, nervous, timid.” 88. ‘Happy England’ is a phrase first used by John Roebuck and then by W. E. Gladstone to champion the imperial cause. Gladstone argues that imperialism is beneficial not only because it brings about new lines of trade but also because it fosters the reproduction of England abroad, or “many happy Englands.” For Gladstone, cultural exchange can only be one-way. W. E. Gladstone, “Our Colonies,” in Harlow and Carter, Imperialism and Orientalism, 369. 89. For studies of Indian political and literary responses to British influence, see Rosinka Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2002); Anindita Gosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Mary Ellis Gibson, ed., Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India: A Critical Anthology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 90. Traci Nagle, “‘There Is Much, Very Much, in the Name of a Book,’ or, the Famous Title of Hobson-Jobson and How It Got That Way,” in “Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors”: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography, ed. Michael Adams (Monza, Italy: Palimetrico, 2010), 119, 124. 91. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (Ware, England: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), xvii. 92. P. Singarapelavanderam Pillay, A Tamil -Mecum, or Guide to Ungrammatical Expressions. . . . (Vepary, India: SPCK Press, 1859), 1–2. 93. Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2006), 128. 94. Stuart Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 30. 95. Ibid., 27. 96. Pillay, Tamil Vade-Mecum, 12 97. Ibid., 57. David Washbrook argues that colonial economic policies, besides changing the meaning and flow of labor, also resulted in a stagnation and agriculturization of a previously vibrant South Indian economy. See David Washbrook, “South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004). 98. Pillay, Tamil Vade-Mecum, 78–79. 99. Ibid., 64–65. 100. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism, 122.

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conclusion 1. The first person to complete a translation into English was Kishari Mohan Ganguli, who after thirteen years of translating finished his manuscript in 1896. His sponsor, Pratap Chandra Roy, died before the translation was completed. 2. Christian Lassan published a series of article on the Mahabharata in the 1830s and was convinced that the epic’s ruling family was descended from a “white race” that had migrated to India. Lassen also suggested that the Bhagavad Gita was a later interpolation to what was essentially an allegorical, folkloric text. Alfred Hitelbeitel provides a useful time line of Mahabharata interpretation and analyzes Lassen in “Krnsa and the Mahabharata (A Biographical Essay),” Annals BORI 60 (1979): 66–68. 3. C. Rajagopalachari, first preface to The Mahabharata (Bombay: Barathiya Vidya Bhavan, 2004), vii. 4. J. P. Waghorne, Images of Dharma:The Epic World of C.Rajagopalachari (Delhi: Chanakya, 1985), 45–46. 5. See Waghorne’s chapter on Rajaji’s wrestling with the kaalakshepam tradition, “Rajaji, the Kathakar,” in Images of Dharma, 84–104. 6. Sometimes the Tamil tradition asserts itself with surprising inclusions. In his translation of the Ramayana, Rajaji includes a translation of Kampan’s adaptation of the Surpanakha episode as yet another way of appreciating the story. 7. Fanon warns against the kind of internal orientalizing that accompanies the intellectual’s quest for national culture, the moment when “the sari becomes sacred and shoes from Paris or Italy are left off for pampooties.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth trans. Constance Ferrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 220. 8. Rajaji, The Mahabharata, vii–viii. 9. Waghorne, Images of Dharma, 12. 10. See Rita Kothari’s analysis of class and the contemporary translation scene in Translating India: The Cultural Politics of English (Manchester: Saint Jerome, 2003). 11. For Jacques Derrida, translation embodies linguistic, cultural multiplicity and the absence of any universal system of meaning. Jacques Derrida, “Tours de Babel,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 218–27. 12. Kothari, Translating India, 6. 13. See Mark Bellos’s comments on Google Translate in Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011), 253–58. 14. Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 50.

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index

A Bayard from Bengal (Anstey), 156 A Dictionary of the Tamil and English Languages, 165 A History of Punch (Price), 156 “A Hymn to Lacshmi” (Jones), 108 A Long Retrospect (Anstey), 155 A Tamil Vade-Mecum (Pillay), 165–8 A Treatise on Human Nature (Hume), 64 Aarsleff, Hans: British orientalism, 5–6; The Study of Language in England, 3 Abrams, M.H., 6–7 After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Steiner), 2 Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), 63 ambivalent mimic, nabob, 135 An Account of a Journey to Madras, and the Southern Provinces, 1826 (Heber), 28–9 An Account of the Jains (Boria, trans.), vii–viii An Enquiry into the Obligations of christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (Carey), 65 “An Essay on Imitation” (Jones), 6–7 “An Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations” (Jones), 6–7 anachronistic concepts, 9 Anglicized Indian, 132, 146–7. See also babu Anstey, F.: Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A., 133–4, 154–5; baboo’s cultural spectrality, 160–1; Babu English, 155; Babu Hurree Bungsho Jaberjee, B.A., xiii; A Bayard from Bengal, 156; A Long Retrospect, 155; Vice Versa, 155; Voces Populi, 155 anthropological translation, 10–11

Aravamudan, Srinivas: Englightenment Orientalism, 25; orientalism, 32 archives: Joseph, Betty, 22–3; orientalists and, 22–3 Arnold, Edwin: India Revisted, 128; Indian Idylls, 127; The Light of Asia, xiii, 99, 121–2, 126–7; transcultural nature of poems, 129 Aryan race, Sanskrit and, 118 Aryan terminology change, 120 Aryanism, 205n48 Asad, Talal, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” 10–11 Asiatic Society, Royal Society comparison, 16 assimilation, versus translation, 166–7 Auld Lang Syne (Müller), 114 Autobiographical Sketches (de Quincey), 63–4 Babel story, 68–9 baboo. See also babu: cultural spectrality, 160–1; definition’s expansion, 164–5; stereotype, 157– 8; A Tamil Vade-Mecum, 165–6; Visram, Rozina, 154 Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A. (Anstey), 133–4, 154–64 babu, 132. See also Anglicized Indian; baboo; Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, 154; presentation in British press, 146–7; stereotypes, 154 Babu English, 155 Babu Huree Chunder Mookerjee, 146–7 Babu Hurree Bungsho Jaberjee, B.A. (Anstey), xiii Barathiya Vidya Bhavan (Institute for Indian Knowledge), 169

244 Barrell, John, on de Quincey, 131–2 Bassnett, Susan, 13 Beckford, William: author’s life in Vathek, 36–7; cultural difference, 40–1; early interests, 36–7; final days, 41; hell in literature, 51–2; publication history, 37–8; Vathek, xii, 35–6, 38–41 belles infidèles, 4 Bermann, Sandra, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, 12–13 Bethlahem Kuravañci (Sastri), 70 Bhabha, Homi: mimicry, 135; mimicry as second-order mimesis, 159; nonsense, 159–60 Bhagavad-Gita, 170 Bhagvad-Geeta (Wilkins, trans.), 15 Bible translation: Carey, William, 67–8; conversion and, 69–71; Hare, 14 biblical scholarship, contextualization, 9 bildungsroman, exoticism and, 35, 186n47 Biographical Essays (Müller), 118–19 black foreigners, 154 Boden Chair of Sanskrit, 113 Bopp, Franz, 117 Borges, Jorge Luis, Other Inquisitions, 51–2 Borriah, Kaveli Venkata, vii Borriah, Lakshmaiah, vii Brahmo Samaj, Müller, and, 118–19 Buddhism, The Light of Asia (Arnold, trans.), 126–8 Burke, Edmund, Hastings impeachment trial, 24–5 Burnell, A.C., Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases, 164 Byron: The Giaour, xii, 36, 52–8; Vathek reference in The Giaour, 42 Calcutta school of orientalism, versus Madras school, 175n2 Campbell, George, The Four Gospels, 9, 63 Carey, William: An Enquiry into the Obligations of christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, 65; Bengali language, 196n38; Bible translation in India, 67–8; missionary work, 67–8; moonshi, 195n30 Charter Act, 67, 72; English-language education, 73–7

Index Cheyfitz, Eric, The Poetics of Imperialism, 14–15 Christian Gospels, vernacular languages, 69 Christianity: Babel story, 68–9; in India, 66–7; missionary schools, 71–3; Müller, Max, 113–14 Citizen of the World (Goldsmith), 137; satire, 157 Code of Gentoo Laws (Halhed, trans.), 16–17 Colebrooke, H.T., viii Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Aids to Reflection, 63 colonial praxis, poesis and, 110 colonial translation, Tejaswini Niranjana, 11–12 colonization-in-reverse, 185n30 colonized subjects, speaking for versus speaking in the voice of, 134 comedy, English humor, 156–7 common-source language, 5 comparative linguistics: foreignizing translations, 133; imperialism and, 6 “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” (Asad), 10–11 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (de Quincey), 1 contextualization, biblical scholarship, 9 conversion: Bible translation and, 69–71; English language and, 63, 73–4, 193n13; metanoia and, 63; missionary schools, 71–3; orientalist missionaries, 68; passive, 118–19; political significance, 65–6; Sastri, Vedanayaka, 69–71; Sepoy Mutiny, 72; translation and, 68–9; Vellore Massacre, 72 Cornwallis, Charles, 100 cultural comingling, The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton), 137 cultural difference: Beckford, 40–1; supremacy challenges, 128 cultural heteroglossia, 15 cultural history, language and, 3–4 cultural pollution, 132 cultural regifting, 128–9 cultural translation: Americas and, 14–15; exoticism as, 33; Harley House and, 62–3; The Missionary and, 62–3 The Curse of Kehama (Southey), xii, 28–9, 31, 36, 43–9

Index de Quincey, Thomas, vii; Autobiographical Sketches, 63–4; Barrell on, 131–2; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1; metanoia, 63–4 Derrida, Jacques, on translation, 56 Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (Wilkins, trans.), 15 dictionaries: A Dictionary of the Tamil and English Languages, 165; Grammar of the Hindoostanie Language (Hassan), 166; HobsonJobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, 154, 164–6 The Diversions of Purley (Tooke), 2, 5 Dow, Alexander, 19 Drury, Annmarie, on FitzGerald, 122 Eastern poetry, William Jones, 7 education: English language, 71–7, 161– 2; missionary schools, 71–3; native vernaculars, 74–6 empire, linguistic transfer and, 14–15 The Enchanged Fruit; or, The Hindu Wife: An Antediluvian Tale Written in the Province of Bihar (Jones), 103 Englightenment Orientalism (Aravamudan), 25 English humor, 156–7 English language: Bible, 69; conversion and, 63, 193n13; education, 71–7; evangelicalism and, 63; linguistic imperialism and, 75–6; missionary schools, 71–3; Sastri’s work, 70; twelve defects, 166; vernacular languages, integration, 75–6 Enlightenment Orientalism, 32 European missionaries, in India, 66. See also missionaries Evangelicalism. See also conversion: An Enquiry into the Obligations of christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, 65; Bible translation, 67–8; Christian missionaries in India, 66–7; English knowledge and, 63; India, 62–3; Tanjore Evangelical Congregation, 69–71; translation and conversion, 68–9 exotic escapism, 58 exotic versus exoticism, 185n32 exoticism, 13; Bible translation and, 14; bildungsroman and, 35, 186n47; British literature and, 34–5; Byron, 58; as cultural

245 translation, 33; description, 32–3; destabilizing potential, 50; versus exotic, 185n32; Guesses at Truth (Hare), 13–14; Hare, 13–14; Home and, 32–3; imitative, 34–5; ineffability, 33; versus orientalism, 184n29; plasticity, 33; Romantic Imperialism (Makdisi) and, 34; versus Saidian Orientalism, 33; Saidian orientalism and, 32; “The Life of Eutropius,” 13 exoticizing translation, 33 Fielding Henry, 136 FitzGerald, Edward: Grammar of the Persion Language (Jones) usage, 122; Khayyam and, 123–4; “Omar,” 123–4; Persian culture and, 125–6; Persian translationsimitations, 124–5; The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, xiii, 99, 121–2; translation style, 122 flaming heart trope, 51–2 Foote, Samuel, The Nabob, 134 footnotes in oriental tales, 26–7 foreignizing of translations, 4, 133 formidable art, Eastern poetry, 7 Foucault, Michel, heterotopia, 30 The Four Gospels (Campbell), 9; metanoia and, 63 fragments, 50–3, 56–7 Gallagher, Catherine, on fiction’s emergence, 29 Galland, Antoine, Mille en une nuits, 25 “Ganga” (Jones), 107 gender politics, Phebe Gibbes, 78–9 The Giaour (Byron), xii, 36, 52–7; autobiographical stakes, 190n115; dehistoricization, 183n15; Vathek reference, 42 Gibbes, Phebe: gender politics, 78–9; Hartly House, Calcutta, xii, 61, 77–84 globalization, 12–13; intimacy between cultures, 172 Goethe: interlinear translation, 8; notes to West-östlicher Divan, 38–9; on translation, 39 Goldsmith, Oliver: Citizen of the World, 137; satire, 157 Google Translate, 173 Gospels (Christian), vernacular languages, 69 Grammar of the Bengal Language (Halhed), 68

246 Grammar of the Hindoostanie Language (Hassan), 166 Grammar of the Persian Language (Jones), 100; FitzGerald’s usage, 122 Grant, Charles: Hindu terminology, 195n34; Observations of the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals, 63 Gray, Thomas, William Jones and, 106 “The Great Meaning of Metanoia” (Walden), 63 Guesses at Truth (Hare), 13–14 Guthrie, T.A., 154–5 Guy Mannering (Scott), 135 Halhed, Nathanael Brassey: Code of Gentoo Laws, 16–17; Grammar of the Bengal Language, 68; Jones, William, and, 105 Hamilton, Alexander, on Grammar of the Hindoostanie Language (Hassan), 166 Hamilton, Elizabeth: Hastings, Warren, and, 137–40; Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton, 141–2; The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, xiii, 61, 133–4, 136, 137–44 Hare, Julius Charles: Bible translation, 14; Guesses at Truth, 13–14 Hartly House, Calcutta (Gibbes), xii, 61, 77–84; memorialization and, 95; A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings, 77 Hassan, Ali, Grammar of the Hindoostanie Language, 166 Hastings, Warren, 15; Hamilton, Elizabeth and, 137–40 Hastings trial: governance in the subcontinent, 63; nabobs and, 134– 6; quotes, 24–5; Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and, 136 heart in flames trope, 51–2 Heber, Reginald, An Account of a Journey to Madras, and the Southern Provinces, 1826, 28–9 Heetopades of Veeshnoo-Sarma (Wilkins, trans.), 16–17 hell in literature, 51–2 Henley, Samuel, 37–8; Vathek notes, 42 Herder, Johann, 3–5 heterotopic time, 30 Hibbert Lectures, 112–13 Hindoo Hymns (Jones), xii, 100, 103–9

Index Hindu, terminology, 195n34 Hindu nationalism, 120 Hinduism: Müller, Max, 114; Sanskrit and, 69; Southey, 43, 45–8 historical-geographical epic versus hoax poems, 183n15 history. See cultural history History of British India (Mill), 111 The History of British India (Mill), 18–19, 69 The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt (Reeve), 27 hoax poems: versus historicalgeographical epic, 183n15; scandals, 102 Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, 154, 164–6; baboo definition, 164 Hume, David, 64 humor: English, 156–7; native depictions, 213n72 hybridity, 132 hybridized Indian, 132. See also Anglicized Indian; babu hypertext, 184n16 hypomnesis, 96–7 Ilbert Bill, 155–6 The Iliad, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (de Quincey), 1 imitative exoticism, 34–5 Imperial Archive (Richards), 22 imperialism: benefits, 214n88; comparative linguistics and, 6; linguistic, English and, 75–6; The Rubáiyát and, 122–3; translation and, 10 India, What Can It Teach Us? (Müller), 114–15 India Revisted (Arnold, trans.), 128 Indian Idylls (Arnold, trans.), 127 Indian Ink (Ogborn), 19–20 Indian sublime, 179n47 Instructive and entertaining Fables of Pilpay, and ancient Indian Philosopher (Wilkins, trans.), 18 interlinear translation, 8 Internet, translation and, 173 investigational modality, translation and, 204n41 Islam, Southey, 43 itihasas, 169; nationalist interest, 171; purpose, 172 Ivanhoe (Scott), 183n17 Jeffrey, Francis, The Giaour review, 52–4

Index Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 137 Jones, William, xii, 98–9; “A Hymn to Lacshmi,” 108; “An Essay on Imitation,” 6–7; “An Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations,” 6–7; colonization-in-reverse, 185n30; cultural beliefs, 109–10; Eastern poetry, 6–7; The Enchanged Fruit; or, The Hindu Wife: An Antediluvian Tale Written in the Province of Bihar, 103; “Ganga,” 107; Grammar of the Persian Language, 100; Gray, Thomas, and, 106; Halhed, Nathanial Brassey, and, 105; Hindoo Hymns, xii, 100, 103–9; Hindu practices, 109–10; Moallak’at, 104; “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India,” 112; Permanent Settlement Act and, 101; Persian Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, 101–2; poems on Hindu divinities, 25–6; poesis and colonial praxis, 110; poetry, 100; On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, 75; Sacontalá, 20–2, 102– 3; Sakuntala, 133; Sanskrit, 105; self-rule of natives, 101; sovereign British power in India, 100–1; Third Anniversary Discourse, 5; translation rules, 102 Jonesian comparatism, Tookian empiricism and, 6 Joseph, Betty, Reading the East India Company, 22–3 The Jungle Books (Kipling), xiii, 147–8; ambiguity, 151; language as a tool, 153; metaphorical language, 148–9; orientalism, 148; politicohistorical reading, 150; Victorian tropes, 147 Keats, John, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 7–9 Khayyam, Omar, FitzGerald and, 123–4 Kim (Kipling), 149–50; Babu Huree Chunder Mookerjee, 146–7 Kipling, Rudyard: Babu Huree Chunder Mookerjee, 146–7; The Jungle Books, xiii, 134, 147–53; Kim, 146–7, 149–50; language as a tool, 153; Mohanty on, 152–3; publication history, 211n48; Victorian tropes, 147 Kipling’s Imperial Boy (Randall), 150–1 Lalla Rookh (Moore), 18–19, 58–9

247 language: Christian past, A Tamil Vade-Mecum and, 167–8; cultural history and, 3–4; death of, 172; families, 117–18; humanity versus animals, 112; mixed, Müller on, 125; Müller, Max, 113–15; native culture rejection and, 69; religion and, Hibbert Lectures, 112; as a tool, 153 lascar in literature, 212n62 Latin, Sanskrit and, 197n60 Lectures on the Science of Language (Müller), 125 L’Espion Turc (Marana), 136–7 Life and Letters (Müller), 116–17 “The Life of Eutropius,” 13 The Light of Asia (Arnold, trans.), xiii, 99, 121–2; biblical language in, 127; Buddhism in, 126–8; responses to early publication, 126; subcultures, 121–2 linguistic imperialism, English and, 75–6 linguistic studies, eighteenth century, 2–3 linguistic transfer: empire and, 14–15; Herder, 5 linguistics: comparative, 6; as ethnological tool, 4; language families, 117–18; religion and, 117– 18; versus travelogues, 180n56 literary footnoes, 26–7 Love Among the Chickens (Wodehouse), 156 Luxima the Prophetess (Owenson), 85–95 Macaulay, T.B.: “Minute on Indian Education,” 71–2; Warren Hastings, 154 Macintosh, William, Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, 134 Mackenzie, Colin, vii Madoc (Southey), 43 Madras school of orientalism versus Calcutta school, 175n2 The Mahabharata, 169–71 Majeed, Javed, Ungoverned Imaginings, 109 Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism, 34 Marana, Giovanni Paolo, L’Espion Turc, 136–7 Mardan, Basim, viii McMurran, Mary Helen, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Centure, 2

248 Meghaduta (Wilson, trans.), 111 Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton (Hamilton), 141–2 memorialization: Hartley House, Calcutta (Gibbes), 95; hypomnesis, 96–7; The Missionary, 95–6 metamorphosis, 64 metanoia: Aids to Reflection (Coleridge), 63; Autobiographical Sketches (de Quincey), 63–4; de Quincey, Thomas, 63–4; Evangelicalism and, 64–5; The Four Gospels, 63; Humean sympathy and, 64; Romantic, xii, 64–5; sentimental literature and, 64–5; “The Great Meaning of Metanoia” (Walden), 63; Walden, Treadwell, 64 metaphorical language in The Jungle Books, 148–9 micropractices, 13 Mill, James: History of British India, 111; The History of British India, 69; Sanskrit, 6 Mille en une nuits (Galland), 25 mimicry, 209n12; Baboo Hurry, 158–9; as second-order mimesis, 159 “Minute on Indian Education” (Macaulay), 71–2 missionaries, 66–7, 194n23–6; Carey, William, 67–8; Charter Act and, 67, 72; East India Company, 67; European in India, 66; missionary schools, 71–3; orientalism and conversion, 68 The Missionary (Owenson), xii, 61, 85–95; memorialization and, 95–6 Moallak’at (Jones, trans.), 104 Mohamet, Dean, The Travels of Dean Mohamet (Mohamet), 175n3 Mohanty, Satya P., on Kipling’s characters, 152–3 Monier-Williams, Monier, 20–2 monophonism of translation, 11–12 Montesquieu, Charles, Persian Letters, 137 Moore, Thomas, Lalla Rookh, 58–9 Müller, Georgina, Life and Letters, 116–17 Müller, Max, xii–xiii, 98–9; Aryan people, 118; Auld Lang Syne, 114; Bell’s phonograph demostration, 116–17; Biographical Essays, 118–19; Boden Chair of Sanskrit, 113; Brahmo Samaj, 118–19; Christian historiography, 113–14; contemporary India, 116; Hindu

Index nationalism, 120; Hinduism, 114; India, What Can It Teach Us?, 114–15; as India’s apologist, 114–15; Lectures on the Science of Language, 125; legitimization of imperial conquest, 119–20; Life and Letters (Georgina Müller), 116–17; linguistics and religion, 117–18; The Mahabharata, 169; mixed languages, 125; monotheism and, 118; native interpretation of texts, 117; passive conversion theory, 118–19; philology, 112–13; Ramakrishna, 118–19; on Rammohun Roy, 118–19; recent reputation in India, 120; Rg Veda recitation, 117; Rg Veda translation, 113–14; The Sacred Books of the East, 117; Sanskrit, 116; science of language, 115; Vivekananda on, 120 The Nabob (Foote), 134 nabobs, 134–6 natak (Sanskrit), 20 Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Bermann), 12–13 native mimic, 146–7 native translation, as resistance, 179n38 Nechtman, Tillman, 132 The Newcomes, Thackeray, W.M., 135 Niranjana, Tejaswini: colonial translation, 11–12; Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism, and the Colonial Context, 10–12; on Steiner, 12 nomad, 181n72 Observations of the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals (Grant), 63 Ogborn, Miles, Indian Ink, 19–20 “Omar” (FitzGerald), 123–4 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats), 7–9 On the Education of the People of India (Trevelyan), 74 “On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India” (Jones), 112 On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations (Jones), 75 oriental fiction: oriental studies and, 61–2; women and, 61–2 oriental novel, 62; women-authored, 61–2 Oriental Renaissance, 11–12, 111

Index oriental sublime, 15, 179n47 oriental tales: British exoticism and, 27–8; Conant, 35; critical discourse and, 30; critical response, 26–7; decline, 58–9; domestic realism and, 186n53; European emergence, 25; evolution, 35–6; footnotes, 25; Hastings trial, 25; The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt (Reeve), 27; L’Espion Turc (Marana), 136–7; oriental studies and, 61; paratext, 26; popularity, 23; radicalism, 23; social critique and, 142–3; as subversive genre, 59–60 oriental travelogues, 136–7 orientalism: Aarsleff, Hans, 5–6; Aravamudan, 32; archives, 22–3; Eastern knowledge, conquest of, 18–19; Enlightenment Orientalism, 32; evolution of, 17–18; versus exoticism, 184n29; exoticism and, 13; fiction, 23; The Jungle Books (Kipling), 148; missionaries and conversion, 68; polyvocalism, 55; rootedness in British culture, 177n14; Said, Edward, 32; saturation, 144–5; textuality and, 18–19 orientalist satire, 136–7 orientalist studies: The Mahabharata, 169–70; orientalist fiction and, 61 Other Inquisitions (Borges), 51–2 Owenson, Sydney: Luxima the Prophetess, 85–95; The Missionary, xii, 61, 85–95; The Wild Irish Girl, 84–95 paratext: Jones’s poems on Hindu divinities, 25–6; oriental tales, 26 passive conversion, 118–19 perfect translation, Goethe, 39 Permanent Settlement Act, Jones, William, and, 101 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 137 Persian Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (Jones), 101–2 philology, 111; Jones, William, 112; Müller, Max, 112–13 philosopheme, translation as, 10–11 Pillay, P. Singarapelavanderam, A Tamil Vade-Mecum, 165–9 poesis: colonial praxis and, 110; translation and, 99–110 The Poetics of Imperialism (Cheyfitz), 14–15

249 politics of translation, Siting Translation and, 11 polyvocalism, 55 postcolonial theory, translation, 10–14 Price, R.G.G., A History of Punch, 156 The Progress of Romance (Reeve), 26–7 pseudotranslations, 25–30, 182n6 Punch, Anstey and, 155–6 punya, 189n98 Quaritch, Bernard, The Rubáiyát publication, 122–3 radical difference, Johann Herder, 3–4 Rajagopalachari, C. See Rajaji Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari), The Mahabharata, 169–71 Rajan, Balachandra, women-authored oriental novels, 61–2 Ramakrishna, Müller, and, 118–19 The Ramayana, 169 Randall, Don, Kipling’s Imperial Boy, 150–1 Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (Johnson), 137 Reading the East India Company (Joseph), 22–3 Reeve, Clara: The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt, 27; The Progress of Romance, 26–7 religion: Hibbert Lectures, 112–13; linguistics and, 117–18 reverse transculturation, 129 revolution in language, Tooke and, 5 Rg Veda, Max Müller, 113–14, 117 Richards, Thomas, Imperial Archive, 22 romantic fragment, 190n113 Romantic Imperialism (Makdisi), 34 Romantic metanoia, xii, 64–5 Romantics, translation and, 8–9 Rottler, John Peter, A Dictionary of the Tamil and English Language, 165 Roy, Rammohun, 71–2; Müller on, 118–19 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (FitzGerald, trans.), xiii, 99, 121–4 Sacontalá (Jones, trans.). See Sakuntala (Jones, trans.) The Sacred Books of the East (Müller), 117 Said, Edward, orientalism, 32 Sakuntala (Jones, trans.), 20–2, 133; publication, 102–3; sexual descriptions, 133 Sanskrit: Asiatick Society translations, 16–17; Dow, Alexander, 19;

250 Hinduism and, 69; Jones, William, 105; Latin and, 197n60; Mill, James, 6; Monier-Williams, Monier, 20–2; Müller, Max, 116; natak, 20; Rajaji, 170; Stewart, Dugald, 6; Trevelyan and, 75–6; West’s discovery, 117 Sanskrit English Dictionary (Wilson), 111 Sastri, Vedanayaka, 69–70; Bethlahem Kuravañci, 70 satire: characteristics, 136; Citizen of the World, 157; colonial paradox and, 160; Englis humor, 156–7; orientalist, 136–7; stereotypes, 157–8 Schlegel, Friedrich, romantic fragment, 190n113 scholia, 26 Schwab, Raymond, 11–12 Scott, Walter: Guy Mannering, 135; Ivanhoe, 183n14; Waverley, 50–1 second hearing, The Giaour, 56–7 segmentary lineage, 202n2 Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism, and the Colonial Context (Niranjana), 10–12 social communication, 18–19 social critique, oriental tales and, 142–3 Southey, Robert: cultural artifactuality, 189n104; The Curse of Kehama, xii, 28–9, 31, 36, 43; evangelism articles, 47; Hinduism, 43, 45–8; on imperialism, 46–7; Islam, 43; Madoc, 43; Thalaba the Destroyer, 43; Travels in England, 145 speaking for colonized subjects versus speaking in the voice of, 134 The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Centure (McMurran), 2 state nomadology, 181n72 Steiner, George: After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2, 172; translation description, 12 Stewart, Charles: on Grammar of the Hindoostanie Language (Hassan), 166; poetry and drama in oriental texts, 144; The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (trans.), 143–4 Stewart, Dugald, Sanskrit, 6 Stierle, Karlheinz, 15 The Study of Language in England (Aarsleff), 3 sublime India, 15, 179n47 Talib, Abu, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, 143–6

Index Tamil dictionaries, 165 Tanjore Evangelical Congregation, Vedanayaka Sastri, 69–71 textuality, orientalism and, 18–19 Thackeray, W.M.: The Newcomes, 135; Vanity Fair, 135 Thalaba the Destroyer (Southey), 43; differences from Kehama, 44–5; success, 44–5 Theosophy movement, 112–13 Third Anniversary Discourse (Jones), 5 Tooke, Horne: The Diversions of Purley, 2, 5; language revolution and, 5 Tookian empiricism, 3; Jonesian comparatism and, 6 Tower of Babel story, 68–9 transculturation, 208n100–1; Arnold’s poems, 129; cultural regifting, 128–9 translation. See also pseudotranslations: Anglo-American disinterest, 173; anthropological, 10–11; assimilation and, 166–7; codification, 2; as colonial praxis, ix; conversion and, 68–9; Derrida, Jacques, 56; eras, 2; exoticizing translation, 33; foreignizing, 4, 133; Goethe, 39; hermaneutic studies, reversion to, 2; ideological contestation and, 172; imperial oppression and, 10; interlinear, 8; Internet and, 173; investigational modality, 204n41; in Ivanhoe (Scott), 183n14; in literary history, 1–2; machine, 2; as mode of containment, 33; monophonism, 11–12; native, as resistance, 179n38; from native language to another, 166; oppression and, 174; perfect, 39; as philosopheme, 10–11; philosophizing, 2; poesis and, 99–110; politics of, 11; postcolonialism and, 10–14; recent activity in India, 172–3; Romantics and, 8–9; stages, 178n22; women and, 62 The Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton), xiii, 61, 133–4, 136–43 translative theory, eighteenth century, 2 translator: Herder and, 4–5; invisibility, viii travelogues versus linguistic study, 180n56 Travels in England (Southey), 145 Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (Macintosh), 134

Index The Travels of Dean Mohamet (Mohamet), 175n3 The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (Talib), 143–6 Treatise on the Principles of English Translation (Woodhouselee), 2 Trevelyan, Charles: On the Education of the People of India, 74; Englishbased education, 73–7 Trivedi, Harish, 13 twelve defects of English language, 166 Ungoverned Imaginings (Majeed), 109 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 135 Vathek (Beckford), xii, 35–41 Venuti, Lawrence, viii vernacular languages: Christian Gospels, 69; education and, 74–6; English introduction, 75–6 Vice Versa (Anstey), 155 Victorian Poetry (magazine), on The Rubáiyát, 121–2 Visram, Rozina, 154 Vivekananda on Müller, 120 von Schlegel, Friedrich, 117

251 Walden, Treadwell: metanoia, 64; “The Great Meaning of Metanoia,” 63 Warren Hastings (Macaulay), 154 Waverley (Scott), 50–1 West-östlicher Divan (Goethe), notes, 38–9 The Wild Irish Girl (Owenson), 84–95 Wilkins, Charles: Bhagvad-Geeta, 15; Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, 15; Heetopades of VeeshnooSarma, 16–17; Instructive and entertaining Fables of Pilpay, and ancient Indian Philosopher, 18 Wilson, Horace Hayman: Meghaduta, 111; Mill, James, and, 111; Sanskrit English Dictionary, 111 Wodehouse, P.G., Love Among the Chickens, 156 women: orientalist studies and, 61; translation and, 62 Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Treatise on the Principles of English Translation, 2 Yule, Henry, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases, 164