Negotiating the Modern: Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory) [1 ed.] 0415978432, 9780415978439

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L C  C T

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A R S

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L C  C T W E. C, General Editor B  A   C Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison Danielle Russell

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M  M The Ethics of Language in American Realism Jennifer Carol Cook “K U H G” Women’s Writing and Geocultural Space in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture Tanya Ann Kennedy C M Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray Nalin Jayasena U N The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London David Farrier T S  R  A S F Sharon DeGraw P  C Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy’s London as Language Heather C. Easterling N  M Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World Amit Ray

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N  M Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World

Amit Ray

Routledge New York & London

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Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97843-2 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97843-9 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ray, Amit, 1968Negotiating the modern Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone world / Amit Ray. p. cm. -- (Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97843-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. India--Study and teaching--Great Britain--History. 2. India--Study and teaching--India--History. 3. Orientalism--Great Britain--History. I. Title. DS435.8.R38 2006 303.48’241054--dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

2006032123

For Jessica Catherine and Lucy Mala, of course.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter One After Empire: British Orientalism In Decline

1

Chapter Two Orientalism, Antiquity and the Beginnings of British Colonial Rule in India: The Textual Basis of Early Orientalism—Hastings, Jones, Mill

29

Chapter Three Orientalism, Vedanta and Indian Modernity: Raja Rammohan Ray on Sanskritic Antiquity

55

Chapter Four Colonial Divides and Shared Orientalisms: Kipling and Tagore in the World

81

Chapter Five Modernist Orientalism and Empathetic Subjectivity: Mrs. Dalloway and the Discontents of Modernity

105

Epilogue

131

Notes

135

Bibliography

153

Index

173 vii

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Acknowledgments

To Simon Gikandi, who inspired me to explore the past; Aamir Mufti, who challenged me to think about the future; and Lemuel Johnson, who always reminded me to remember those whom history had ignored. We miss you dear Lem. Thanks also to Sarita See and Sonya Rose, who came to my rescue after Lem’s passing. I want to thank the Horace Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, which generously provided an atmosphere of intellectual breadth and rigor, and the Department of English Language and Literature, which sustained the spirit of interdisciplinarity that characterized my experience at Michigan. I want to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Department, Graduate School and, particularly, the Mellon Foundation. During my studies at Michigan, I had the opportunity to learn from a wide range of talented, bleeding edge scholars. Whether they remember me or not, their work and influence has had a lasting impact. Thanks to Ann Stoler, Fred Cooper and Nick Dirks for putting together a remarkable yearlong seminar at the International Institute. The topic of the Sawyer Seminar, 1996–97, “Aftermaths of Empire,” brought together scholars and students from around the globe. Thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Bruce Robbins, Tvetan Todorov and many others who came and lectured in Ann Arbor for entertaining the naive questions of a young graduate student. Thanks also to my teachers in English and Comparative Literature: Michael Awkward, Timothy Bahti, Anne Hermann, John Kucich, Marjorie Levinson, Stuart McDougal, Anita Norich, Marlon Ross, Steve Sumida, John Whittier-Ferguson and Patsy Yaeger to name just a few. To my peers, particularly the members of our reading group, Monopus (inside joke), thank you: Colin Jager, Jessica Lieberman, Sondra Smith and Jeremy Wells. A special thanks goes to Michael J. Franklin at the University of Wales, Swansea, who provided a thorough and encouraging review of my manuscript. ix

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My stay at RIT has taken me in directions I would never have anticipated. I have been blessed to have many supportive and intellectually stimulating colleagues: Babak Elahi, Timothy Engström, Lisa Hermsen, Rahul Mehta, Sandra Saari, Richard Santana, Evan Selinger, Mary Sullivan and Janet Zandy. Thanks also to the College of Liberal Arts and the Dean’s Office for their financial support. And finally, thanks to Paul and Francena Miller for their generous fellowship, which helped me to complete this long gestating project.

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Chapter One

After Empire: British Orientalism in Decline

INTRODUCTION: ORIENTALISM AND SOUTH ASIA The systematic study of India by Europeans commenced during the eighteenth century, paralleling a steady rise in European influence on the Asian subcontinent. Orientalism, in its earliest South Asian incarnation, was a scholarly enterprise, reflecting the assumptions of the Enlightenment-era textualists who assumed that human beings “civilized” enough to write would codify those traits, rituals, and laws that defined their societies. This textually based codification of the Orient would come to supplement the body of travelers’ accounts, illustrations and items brought back from Asia that, collectively then, began to comprise a European “understanding” of the East. In studying the texts that were, at least to certain indigenous social groups, a compendium of Indian antiquity, the Orientalists would embark on an era of comparatist “discovery” and “debate.” Yet, the very same texts that were bringing knowledge of various non-European pasts were also increasingly being used to describe an Oriental that was counter-posed to the modernizing European. Comparison provided contrast, delineating the provenance of the European “mind” versus its Oriental counterpart. Adding to such essentialist characterizations, derived mostly from such textually-oriented scholarship, was the concrete technological and scientific advancements that had been rapidly transforming Western Europe. The dramatic rise of the concept of reason in the eighteenth century brought with it a presentist re-orientation of cosmology, theology and humanism facilitated by the beginnings of the scientific revolution. Concurrent with this major realignment in the society and thought of Western Europe came much of the justifying rationale for European expansion and colonization. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists provided Europe’s access to the Orient. As such, their work would do quite a bit to affect how 1

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Europe engaged with that distant Orient and, conversely, how various indigenous populations could respond to their European colonial rulers. Edward Said’s Orientalism examines Europe’s colonization of the Middle East and Asia from the standpoint of a primarily British and French “high” cultural tradition. Concerned mostly with the texts and ideas of “experts” on the “Orient” during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Said examines a host of prominent British and French scholars, writers, and artists whose relationships to the Orient were, he argues, part of a systemic arrangement of power; an arrangement that had a profound impact on knowledge, representation, and the arts in ways which continued through to the time of the book’s writing and publication. Said’s entire oeuvre would support the case for Orientalism’s continuing impact upon European and, primarily, American perceptions of the Orient. Said’s work has fostered a tremendous amount of debate that has continued relatively unabated since his work came out in 1978. For many of the projects that have since examined something called “colonial discourse,” including this one, Orientalism has been seen as providing a point of departure. As Ali Behdad points out in Belated Travellers, “departure” in this case is polysemic, indicating both a starting point and a point of divergence. While Orientalism has regularly been criticized for certain inconsistencies and oversights, scholars have continued to make it a sounding board for their own work. In this sense, Orientalism has had a monumental impact on work in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Anglo-American academy and elsewhere. In this chapter, I will begin with the end, so to speak. The phenomenon of Orientalism as it relates to South Asia begins with the work of eighteenthcentury scholars (as I will detail in the chapter that follows this one). Nearly two hundred years later, as an academic set of disciplines, Orientalism virtually disappeared in the Anglo-European Academy. I will chart the decline of academic Orientalism in the years following World War II. In beginning with the end, then, my aim is twofold. First, to ponder why Edward Said’s scathing criticism of Orientalism occurs at a time when academic Orientalism has seen a precipitous decline. Said’s use of Orientalism is, of course, not limited only to the scholarship of Orientalists (and I will discuss this matter further in the following pages). That being said, what is gained by exhuming a dying academic and textualist tradition by arguing for its systematic and influential distortions of an Asia imagined for Western consumption? And secondly, in asking this question of the “academic tradition” that is a key component of Said’s use of “Orientalism,” I seek to provide a rationale for my own project. How is the presence of the East in Europe, through the lenses of Orientalists

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and Orientalism, a productive force for certain indigenous groups? And how do such groups utilize Orientalist tropes, concepts (not to mention publications and “art”), to engage with colonialism’s modernizing impetus upon the colonized: politically, economically, socially, and culturally? And, conversely, what do dominant cultures internalize and reproduce out of Orientalist knowledge that provides a means for analysis and critique of their rapidly modernizing societies? How do various “Orients” become internalized by a dominant culture? Since much recent scholarship on British India has been impacted by the Orientalism debate, I focus upon a standard criticism of Saidean Orientalism in order to show how it relates to representations of India, and of South Asian studies, in the Anglo-American academic and cultural worlds. In his “Introduction” Said lays out three distinct definitions of Orientalism: first as an academic tradition; secondly as a “style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological differences between” Orient and Occident; thirdly, in noting the steady movement between the academic and imaginative spheres, as a “discourse” (2, 3). It is this last usage, then, that allows Said to connect Orientalism as a scholarly practice with a rather powerful and broad-ranging critique of the intimate relationship between knowledge and imperialist power: “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormous systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (3). In making such sizable and functional claims, then, Said has provoked numerous responses. Critics of Orientalism have commented upon these varied definitions for “Orientalism.” Even Said concedes that the term is less preferred than it once was. He explains this lack of currency is a result of the term’s vagueness and generality, as well as its connotation of a “highhanded executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century colonialism” (2). In using a term that already has pejorative connotations, Said reconstitutes the concept of Orientalism to provide a genealogy of a phenomenon that, as a form of academic study, is dying out. Yet, in the tradition of Foucauldian genealogical analysis, the retrieval of the past is meant to intervene in the present. As an intervention that bears on the present, the range in definitions allows for Said to bridge his analysis of this dying academic tradition to intrude upon a present political moment within the academic’s own present. By examining Orientalism as a discourse, Said links the systematic distortions of the Orient during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an imperialist set of representations of the Orient, as still functioning in a contemporary American context. Yet, in bringing to bear an

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analysis of far-reaching and long-standing traditions of scholarship and art into perspective, how does Saidean Orientalism span so many varied circumstances East and West? It is the sheer scale of Said’s claims that has drawn the most criticism. Both admirers and detractors of the work have cited its failure to differentiate between variant cultural circumstances and historical moments. In covering some 250 years of history, and a host of distinct languages and cultures in Europe, Asia, and North America the Saidean concept of Orientalism seems to move through history and geography unscathed. Thus, in this now-standard criticism, Orientalism becomes a monolithic, ahistorical essentialism that serves to re-enforce the very divisions between East and West of which it is so critical. Recent influential criticisms of Orientalism, such as those of anthropologist James Clifford, historian John MacKenzie, and literary theorists Lisa Lowe and Ali Behdad have all addressed this particular aspect of Said’s work. While acknowledging the masterful sweep of Orientalism, with its easy familiarity of English and French “high” culture, all concur that the very scale of Said’s project weakens it. In addition, they all see a certain incompatibility between the theoretical framework of Orientalism and the types of claims being put forth. For Clifford, Said’s reliance on Foucault’s concept of discourse in order to assert the systematicity of Orientalism is methodologically inconsistent. In a rather scathing critique, Clifford notes the incommensurability of Foucault’s theoretical methods when applied to what is essentially an argument for a structure of Orientalism, of its “sheer knitted-together strength” (quoting Said, Clifford 257). While Clifford notes that Said’s use of Foucault’s concept of “discourse” to extend into cultural constructions of the exotic is “promising” (since Foucault’s development of this term is “scrupulously ethnocentric”), Said’s application must wrest this concept from its derivations (Clifford 264). Foucault, especially in his later works, very much resists articulating a totalistic, structuralist basis for knowledge production and representation as it relates to power. Thus, while freely utilizing a method that adheres to the poststructuralist eschewal of stable “meaning” (and thus, of prediction based upon certainty), Said maintains a link to the practical task of rectifying oppressive formation(s) of the past.1 His analysis of Orientalism describes a force that is a structurally consistent and cohesive feature of European interactions with Asia; so much so as to still affect a present that continues to rely on such (de) formations of a represented non-West. My own project arises out of my assessment of academic Orientalism and Orientalists during the period following World War II. The tenor of

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certain prominent Orientalists seemed so defensive and challenged as to undercut Said’s account of Orientalism after World War II. The scholarly avenues by which Orientalism had validated itself as a source of knowledge about the “other” were clearly in decline. ORIENTALISM THEN AND NOW Orientalism in India began with the notion that a better understanding of native culture and tradition would provide the soundest basis for administering to the necessities of British power. As such, the project was inherently couched in terms of its “benefit to the native.” However, even at such an early stage in colonial history, this was precisely where the binary of East and West could no longer be claimed as separate spheres. William Jones’s recognition of linguistic overlap between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin implicitly connected Europe to Asia. But, paradoxically, this was precisely the moment that East and West became systematically defined in opposition to one another. As a practice of study, as a quest for knowledge, Orientalism signaled the beginnings of the cultural management of colonial domination, thereby forcing self and other together in a much more intertwined and subtle way than military subjugation. As a number of historians such as Peter Marshall have noted, much of the impetus for England’s management of policy in India (and particularly Bengal) from the last quarter of the eighteenth century and moving through the first quarter of the nineteenth was about restoring the “civility” of the British state—Britain’s image of itself was tarnished by the profiteering and wide-scale famine that was occurring as part of its mercantile ventures, as fields devoted to food production were used for cash crops such as indigo. This domestic awareness was both idealistic and narcissistic. The British state needed to justify its own economic imperatives. However, the benefits of colonial expansion could not come at the cost of power’s excesses: if liberalism was becoming a principle tenet of rule at home, then rape, murder and theft could not occur in the colonies and concurrently be ignored by British authorities. Far too many competing interests in Great Britain and in Europe—religious, mercantile and governmental—were willing to capitalize on such inconsistencies in order to further their own interests and influence: thereby threatening the principles that were coming to structure and define English Civil Society. As a study which attempts to look at how Orientalist discourse becomes “performed” for its Western audience, I hope to, paradoxically, reflect upon the severity of the critiques of Orientalism which Said and others have instituted.

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I will address the early decline of Orientalism in relation to other forms of direct colonial rule in Chapter Two. As we shall see, with the British in East India, Orientalism becomes an overburdened force very quickly, producing a variety of contradictory and competing effects over which Orientalists often have little or no control. This may seem to contradict Said’s narrative of Orientalism—especially when considering nineteenth-century forms of Orientalism and particularly with regard to the Bengal region of India, the seat of British power on the subcontinent. My efforts arise out of what has become a steady stream of meta-Orientalist studies that have provided the sorts of scholarship and criticism which Said himself calls for in Orientalism and later, much more systematically and forcefully in works such as Culture and Imperialism and in “Afterwords” to later editions of Orientalism. Many of the works within and in response to postcolonial studies have heeded this call for a more sustained investigation of how the periphery has both been excluded from and managed to enter into the dominant cultures of the metropole.2 British administrators and linguists arriving in India during the 1700s immediately made their main focus the study of “representative” texts of Hindu and Muslim “traditions”—as such, British agents of company and crown were almost completely at the mercy of their native intermediaries. And as a result, the pre-existing structures that contributed to various “scholarly” classes, as well as the interests of these classes, played an important role from the start of formal British administration. Warren Hastings’ administration of Bengal in the 1780s initiated local mediation as a basis for policy. The imperative for colonial administration became “knowing” the native so that such knowledge would provide the grounds for dispensing “local” justice. As such, Hastings’ administration had to define British interest in the region (which was, to varying degrees, in competition with other Imperial powers) in relation to local power structures. This interaction necessarily enforced a static conception of self and other. Of course, as Orientalism became institutionalized as an academic and administrative practice, it became the source of conflict for political interests in England. When William Jones went to India, he went both as a scholar and a Judge. As such, he fit into Warren Hastings’ localized approach to governing the colony. Hastings did not want to impose alien English and Anglican culture upon the inhabitants of Bengal. Rather, he wanted to administer power through local traditions. He would go on to institute what is now broadly considered to be Indian Orientalism and Indology. For Hastings and Jones, India could only be deciphered by its traditions and this entailed unearthing

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texts that were somehow representative of these traditions. Jones became the catalyst for this technique of codifying “native” tradition. Rooted in the production of knowledge, early Orientalism was a profoundly “liberal” endeavor in that it recognizes the cultures of the “other” and, in effect, manages them.3 The problem behind the Orientalist binary is the very ease by which the binary comes together and falls apart—the constant paradox of the one producing the other as a reflection of self. Inexorably, the shuttling between poles changes both categories. As Said points out, the basis for Orientalism is producing the East for Western consumption. And while this is initially an activity that excludes the “object” of study from the discourse (recall that the native is never intended as an audience for Orientalist scholarship), it eventually contributes to the production of unintended and sometimes generative contradictions Said’s study achieves much of its success by reinforcing the binary of East and West, by establishing it for the basis of a sustained critique. Said recognizes in Orientalism a pervasive and perverse logic of continual re-inscription of the West as the source of knowledge. In Orientalism, he evokes the notion of a “Western” tradition in order to produce its counter-weight of Orientalism. This is a tricky maneuver and Said has been accused of reproducing the very sort of essentializations that he is critiquing.4 However, as a rhetorical strategy that underpins Orientalism, Said consistently calls attention to these shortcomings. In fact, the very nature of negotiating ideological construction is inherently contradictory in this manner. As the object of critique is negotiated, the object is given new cultural value and new explanatory purpose. Orientalism, as a scholarly practice, bespeaks perhaps the worst kind of domination—an “enlightened” one. Thus, even as a myth of associations (geographical, racial, linguistic, cultural, economic), “Western” tradition recoups itself as a site of epistemological and material power. But, as a power that begins to produce a history of itself, of its own triumphs and legacies, it fails to engage a sustained examination of its own histories of domination. What anyone seeking to introduce a progressive and radical reading of “culture” must acknowledge is a far less binary and more polyvalent history—perhaps a lesson waiting to be learned, of possible self-recognition waiting to happen (and, for the unrepentant nihilist, a future fiction to go along with previous ones). And perhaps the recent institutionalization of such inquiry in many Western academies guides us towards future knowledge, whose relationships with power create smaller inequities than the earlier forms of thought and knowledge built and maintained in service to colonialist and imperialist aims. As stated previously, one of Said’s three definitions of Orientalism is as an “academic tradition” (2). In Orientalism, he describes the beginnings

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of colonial Orientalism as initially a practice of textual excavation. Eventually, these textual strategies of identification and explication move into a far reaching cultural, political and commercial system of tactical representations, “which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (7). Orientalism, in Said’s broadest definition, “is the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). This broad definition proceeds from epistemological foundations—Orientalism begins as an effort to produce knowledge of the cultures of the East. As such, it becomes important to recognize how academic institutions in the West produced the East. In the second chapter of Orientalism, “Orientalist Structures and Restructures,” Said goes about doing just that. He notes that the number of scholars working on Orientalism steadily increases during the colonial endeavor: the study of the culture of the Orient becomes part of university curricula, scholarly and literary discourse, as well as various “scientific” societies—Orientalism contributes to a body of knowledge about the nonEuropean world which then moves into steady circulation. Of course, this knowledge always has the pretense of being universal and cosmopolitan. Said points out a general set of criteria which governs Orientalism and which he defines as “academic tradition.” By the mid-nineteenth century, virtually every European and American university had some division devoted to the study of the Orient—this meant travel grants, publications, courses, textbooks, primers, etc. Essentially, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Orient began to circulate within Europe as a certain brand of knowledge. As a guild of scholars, this meant that Orientalists had the machinery to institute the basis for steady categorization, explication and publication. Orientalism was, above all else, about “humanistic” knowledge. However, as I will detail in Chapter Two, from its very beginnings Orientalism’s growth was predicated on instrumentality: administering colonial rule. While the objects of study may lie outside of Europe, the consciousness that is able to consider these things as “study” is always inherently Eurocentric. Said correctly points out that the Orientalist of the nineteenth century does not produce anything with an Oriental audience in mind. Thus, Orientalism constructs an East for Europe’s (and North America’s) consumption. That most Orientalists are studying textual culture reflects the virtual nature of their engagement. The scientific “distance” and “objectivity” that the Orientalist displays toward his subject is never allowed to speak to that

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subject, it is only allowed to speak for her. However, a silence in Said’s study is the fact that he does not expand his study of Orientalism beyond Europe. As I will highlight in Chapter Three, by the 1820s non-Europeans began to readily consume Orientalist scholarship also. Orientalism fueled nationalist sentiment and helped to empower certain constituents of colonial society. By the end of the nineteenth century, these native subjects were consuming European Orientalism and engaged in steady academic exchange. And while such actions could be conceived of as a self-colonization, they presented a new set of interactions that were no longer as self-contained and self-fulfilling as earlier nineteenth-century Orientalist practice had proven to be. CONTRAPUNTAL ORIENTALISMS In order to examine Orientalism in a different light, I intend to read academic Orientalism contrapuntally, engaging with some of the best known “Eastern” intellectuals of the time (indeed, well known because of their circulation in the West) to see how Orientalism became a more diverse discourse. As a means for transmitting “culture,” Orientalism allowed for the beginnings of a multi-culturalism that included (albeit very irregularly and often quite incorrectly), the “other.” What I aim to do is resituate Orientalism as a phenomenon that was engaged much more dialectically with its object of study than Said originally acknowledged in Orientalism. I would also like to suggest that such dialectical engagement actually increased as Orientalism became a more systematic and authoritative epistemological practice. In fact, the increasing presence of the “Oriental” within the “Orientalist” suggests that academic Orientalism, as an institutional practice, was doomed to extinction. Thus, the sheer epistemological force that Said ascribes to Orientalism during the latter part of the twentieth century cannot be fairly linked to academic Orientalism; certainly not in England, and perhaps in much of Europe and North America. In fact, as I will soon show, following World War II, British Orientalists face a serious crisis of identity and purpose. As mentioned earlier, Orientalist studies become a fixture of universities throughout Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century and remain well represented throughout the twentieth. The categorical division between Occident and Orient is the basis for the existence of various departments of study—this division is assumed as a foundation from which Orientalist knowledge is produced, even if much of that production is geared toward bringing the two “halves” together as a vital “whole.” If anything, twentieth-century academic Orientalism is more concerned with a much further reaching initiative—of bringing Eastern and

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Western knowledge into fruitful contact with one another, thereby bringing together (supposedly) radically different entities. This formulation seeks to reunite the globe through knowledge rather than domination. The general logic goes like this: instead of rendering the “other” through material and political domination, the goal is to understand them better since we are now going to have to deal with a less submissive “East.” This turn is both progressive and protective. It requires a recognition that old dominations have failed. As an outcome of that failure, Orientalists are well positioned for a new form of negotiation—with an “other” which was once dominated, but now has corporate modes for self-representation. The Orientalist is poised to act as an emissary of this East / West negotiation. But, in order to do so, the Orientalist needs to strategically shape this dialogue—something that academic Orientalists find increasingly difficult to do. Thus, while academics question the “nature” of East and West, the debate slowly shifts out of older academic structures and into newer areas. I am not suggesting that Orientalism, as Said describes it, is any less of a hegemonic force during the latter half of the twentieth century. His work, as well as that of others, has been far too persuasive in making the connections between the colonial past and the politics of the present. What I am pointing out is that the very scholars who had devoted their entire lives to the study of the Orient found themselves incapable of convincing more instrumental institutions—government and enterprise—that the study of non-Western culture was necessary for future interaction. In fact, it is quite clear that by the time Said writes Orientalism in the late 70s, many Western and nonWestern trained Orientalists are based in the former colonies. What explains this shift and why does it seem to come about so suddenly? If Orientalism is such an entrenched academic practice, why does the label of “Orientalist” get discarded so easily, as has clearly been the case in the twenty-five years since Said published his study? As I have mentioned earlier, the largely undifferentiated character of Saidean Orientalism as a systemic feature of East-West relations tends to collapse useful distinctions that indicate the often varied dynamic of colonial power relations. My project tracks a particular brand of Orientalism, rooted in eighteenth-century textualism, as it moved between Europe and South Asia—and in particular between Bengal and England. This branch of Orientalism is, by most scholarly accounts, the basis for what would become Indology—the scholarly project that sought to explain India through its ancient texts. Such a textualist project would soon fall out of favor as a means for directly managing the colonies, but would continue to circulate in European cultural discourse, as well as serving a prominent role

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in the identity formation of certain elite “modernizing” indigenous groups in British India, and eventually, the postcolonial nation-state. While the instrumental function of academic Orientalism (in the sense of being used for ascertaining the best means of ruling the native) was soon discarded, the evidence of textual “civilization” (so to speak) would continue to influence the thinking of scholars and artists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, as I will detail in this chapter, the Orientalism that gained its authority through the study of textuality gives way to an almost wholly instrumentalist approach soon after the end of World War II. I am charting a certain kind of displacement of knowledge that occurs following World War II: Academic Orientalism (once again) cedes some of the explanatory authority it had previously held. BRITISH ORIENTALISM IN DECLINEACADEMIC ORIENTALISM AFTER WORLD WAR II In 1960, A.J. Arberry, the Sir Thomas Adams Chair of Arabic at Cambridge (the oldest academic endowment devoted to non-Western study in England) and a prominent historian of British Orientalism, produces a series of monographs entitled Oriental Essays. The final section deals with Arberry’s own life and work. The title of this section, “The Disciple,” suggests that the author is a man who implicitly recognizes the greatness of the men who have come before: Ockham the “Pioneer,” Jones the “Founder,” and Lane the “Lexicographer,” amongst others. Indeed, this chapter, as well as those before it, bears this out. Each monograph treats its subject with great deference; each chronicles the greatness of the tradition. Yet this humility, displayed when faced with the task of upholding a tradition of British Orientalism, is tempered by another concern. In 1960 Arberry is lamenting the decline of this very same Orientalist tradition. Not surprisingly, it is also the idea of “tradition” that is prescriptively offered as a solution to a similar problem, though thirteen years earlier. In 1947 the British Foreign Office publishes the findings of a wide-reaching commission chaired by Lord Scarbrough, a “Report of the Interdepartmental Commission of Enquiry on Oriental, Slavonic and Eastern European and African Studies.” Commissioned in December of 1944, precisely as the war in Europe is coming to a close, by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, the Scarbrough report is an attempt to gauge the future of these areas of inquiry. This is the very same Anthony Eden, a Cambridgetrained Orientalist, who will later become Prime Minister and preside over the Suez debacle. The document details a thorough and multi-disciplinary

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approach to what has broadly been construed as “Orientalist studies”—the various approaches to the study of textual, linguistic and material cultures of the non-Western world. Arberry, a contributing member of the commission, refers to the Scarbrough report as “the Charter of Modern Orientalism” (241). In looking at the thirteen years that passed between the release of the report and Arberry’s concern over the bleak prospects of Orientalist studies, we can recognize a historical period that is characterized by numerous upheavals. A significant portion of this turbulence is caused by the massive shift away from colonially administered governments and into various forms of national consolidation and political sovereignty: in essence this is the broad starting point of the post-colonial period. The decline of Orientalist tradition in such a context is no coincidence. Orientalist scholarship seems unable to maintain the value that it held prior to decolonization. Some twenty years before Edward Said’s Orientalism, the practices of Orientalist discourse in academia seemed to be dying out within the imperial center. What accounts for A.J. Arberry’s bleak sense of the future, and is this prospect at odds with Said’s characterization? These questions will forefront my exploration of “Orientalism” as a much more heterogeneous and multifaceted discourse than Said’s work seems to acknowledge. As I have pointed out earlier in the chapter, Said has been soundly criticized for failing to note the specificity and contingency of the myriad practices that have been characterized as Orientalist. I want to reiterate that one of my aims is to place Said’s study at an important critical juncture; one which considers how intimately and inextricably the categories of East and West are bound, as well as what it means to begin deconstructing the often arbitrary geographical distinctions which regularly spill over into many of our categories for organizing society and culture—in essence I want to scrutinize the epistemological categories upon which Orientalism rests. Part of this process will be to read “Orientalism” from a contrapuntal perspective, a tactic that Said himself has prescribed. By looking at the tradition of Orientalist studies as a function of Indian and English negotiations of East and West, we may be able to gather a better understanding of this long-standing phenomenon. 1947: DECOLONIZATION AND THE CRISIS OF ORIENTALISM IN GREAT BRITAIN I have chosen a confluence of sources that lie at or near the center of discussions surrounding institutional forms of Orientalism at the end of the World War II. The texts that are analyzed are not intended to be some kind

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of structural or deep analysis on the manner or logic of the underlying motivations of Orientalist discourse. Rather, I want to point out how my reading brings together three key interests. For one, the Orientalist Arberry gets caught within the tug and pull of new alignments in geo-political power, forcing him to sustain his argument by referring to Orientalism as a key site for promoting national interests: in an effort to take stock of the national interest, the Scarbrough report surveys virtually every seat of British institutional power. As such, it brings together the agents of academic, governmental, and mercantile interests. Secondly, Arberry is a prominent scholar and his biographical treatise, at the end of what can only be called a powerfully nationalistic history of British Orientalism—and thus, characteristically self-referential and hermetic—is public scholarship and is geared to arouse political passions that can justify British foreign policy as a missionary affair. In his work we can once again identify a staid feature from the Orientalism of previous centuries: the object of study stays silent. My third point is to register the interesting change in Arberry’s own self-preservation tactics— when faced with the lack of funds for Orientalism in his own country, he utilizes a UNESCO document to make the case for Orientalism as the foundation for cultural understanding and world peace. His academic interests end up located firmly within the assimilationist telos of “culture” put forth within the UNESCO pamphlet (Kalidasa to join Shakespeare, and Hokusai with Van Gogh as a foundation for international understanding and mutual appreciation). The Scarbrough report begins with a reference to the source of Britain’s recent and cataclysmic history—fascist aggression in Europe. But the discussion quickly shifts to a different part of the globe. By the end of 1944, British forces were active not only in Europe, but in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as well. These mobilizations had called for “an understanding and knowledge of the peoples of the world which we were ill equipped to supply” (Great Britain 3). In essence, the report is trying to get at how and why there are so few British subjects who have any “detailed acquaintance” with the cultures of these non-Western regions, particularly when the European struggle entails “saving the world from the dark ages” (3). The issue at hand is world peace: “Western and Eastern civilizations have been brought together by a revolution in communications and must not remain separated by superstition and ignorance” (3). Of course this last phrase is particularly indicative of the kind of mentality that is generating the desire for a more inclusive and universal view of the world. Superstition and ignorance are the oft critiqued, and characteristically primitive, modes of understanding that have been under attack in

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Europe since the Enlightenment. Thus the call for equity and egalitarianism can be seen as part of a long standing tradition in international relations—a move toward notions of universality and equality, as well as an attitude that though there are individual attributes which distinguish various peoples and various nations, such attributes can be celebrated as part of a universal humanism (see Chapter Four). The report calls for bridging cultural and geographical divides, of bringing together East and West and, thus, engendering new brands of cosmopolitan knowledge. In fact, during the first half of the century, as various nationalist movements within the former colonies are gaining considerable strength, the sheer volume of literature produced which takes the unification of East and West as a basic tenet is incredible: not only is this a policy concern for many European and North American nations, it is a major thematic in various academic studies on religion, literature, philosophy and social science. The idea that Eastern and Western cultures need to come together is most certainly catalyzed by the dictates of nationalism in the former colonies—language and culture are being mapped, chronologically historicized, consolidated and essentialized. To a great extent, the late nationalisms of the former colonies produce a remarkable revitalization of the binary categories of East and West. Obviously, the effort to bring these two massive categories together is part of an effort to rectify some of the differences and disparities generated by colonialism. That this is a negotiation taken up by both ex-colonizer and ex-colonized makes it even more compelling. What were Orientalists from both Orient and Occident trying to accomplish and, more importantly, were they trying to accomplish similar things? The Scarbrough commission writes: “The East makes great efforts to know and understand the West and our interests and our traditions require that among the Western powers we of all people should reciprocate” (3). What, in the years following the war, accounts for the failures of this project in Great Britain? Clearly, the Commission recognizes, even in the devastated state of a blitzed and battered Britain, where power lies. And the effort to recognize “peripheral” voices is an effort to seek a dialogue of some sort. Yet, what is the basis for having such a dialogue? The Asian sub-continent, the jewel in the crown, is on the verge of political autonomy in 1947. Other colonies are clamoring for independence. In such a historical moment, why is it that a consortium of British governmental officials, scholars and businessmen want to revive the Orientalist tradition? What can academic humanism achieve that political domination was unable to sustain? Is this shift toward humanism, toward recognizing the indigenous languages, cultures and traditions of “non-Western powers,” a remedy for centuries of colonial presence? In

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other words, is the return to Orientalist tradition an effort to engage with the former colonies on a more equitable level, or does it suggest new modes of domination? These are all concerns that I will attempt to address in the course of this study. However, I will first provide a thorough account of what the report suggests as a remedy to the West’s lack of knowledge of the East. It is necessary to keep in mind the genre of this report. It is a broad and ambitious attempt to survey the discourse (the combination of textual and material practice) in a variety of different areas. However, the goal of any such report is to present a unified set of solutions based on the problem at hand. This entails, first and foremost, establishing what, precisely, that problem is. The Scarbrough report approaches the problem through a critique of “Western” knowledge. The commission notes that “[o]ur culture is at present provincial in the sense that it is purely Western” (31, my emphasis) . This is, of course, a classic Orientalist position. The notion that there is such a thing as a pure Western tradition as opposed to “other” traditions is a consistent aspect of Orientalism. Such a position is based on the assimilative quality of the Western tradition. For example, though most Orientalists are aware that the Ancient Greek and Hellenic traditions of scholarship have been mediated by the medieval Islamic revival of key Greek texts (such as the work of Aristotle), it is the Western “tradition” which adopts and co-opts such knowledge. Even Orientalists who specialize in Arabic seem to spend little time in considering the complexity of how the “tradition” of Ancient Greece has been passed along. Thus, the idea of a “pure” Western tradition is virtually naturalized, even amongst scholars who examine the conduits and cross-fertilizations through which various forms of knowledge have appeared in Europe and the West. As a result, some of the foundational claims of the report are critically flawed in their assumptions—assumptions that hold together the very premise of the report. Like any study that is commissioned in order to assess and ascertain policy, the commission’s report is highly prescriptive. Its primary goal is to consider the current institutional (governmental, mercantile and scholarly) status of non-European subjects of study, recognize future policy goals, and then prescribe a series of possible solutions. The timing of such a study—and the implicit recognition of crisis—is referred to on numerous occasions. Since the empire does not have the control it once had, the British people need to recognize new modes of maintaining a presence throughout the globe. The establishment of a less provincial and more cosmopolitan approach to knowledge is primarily catalyzed by decolonization—though a corollary threat is the recapitulation that other Western powers (primarily the United States) will capitalize on the destabilization caused by the loss of empire. Like

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the anxieties of empire, the anxieties of its aftermath seem to follow a similar trend; namely, that the effort to broaden communication to be more inclusive and equitable to the former colonies is a race amongst Western powers. This anxiety begins to fracture the notion of a cohesive Western epistemology precisely as it is suggesting that such an epistemology exists. If the power of knowledge is uniform, what does it matter who mediates such knowledge? The cosmopolitan rhetoric of a “Western epistemology” that needs to interact with “Eastern” modes of knowledge betrays the overwhelming power of national interest. Apart from the rhetoric of knowledge lies a new form of domination that is being suggested. It is this shift that I would like to excavate. In Great Britain’s cursory shift from imperial negotiations to negotiations amongst sovereign nations, the effort to maintain discrete bodies of national learning is by no means trivial. The kind of cosmopolitanism which Orientalism entails has a long history of trying to present culture on a supranational level—knowledge as being within some unique and stable national entity, which has even greater currency when negotiated amongst the icons of various other national “cultures”—in a sense, this is where the idea of a “Western” knowledge gets so much of its discursive force. Greek, Roman, Italian, French, German, English, etc., all constitute the body of “Western” knowledge—the Middle East, as a crucial seat for Biblical tradition, gets coopted as part of a pre-Islamic seat of civilization. The basis for such cosmopolitanism hinges on the desire to globalize knowledge—since domination and assimilation have illiberally achieved some success, it is for men of “culture” to present the best national traditions for a transnational consumption. This is essentially what is being called for by Ernest Renan, one of the most renowned Orientalists of the nineteenth century, echoing Herder, in his famous quote of 1882: “Through their various and often opposed powers, nations participate in the common work of civilization; each sounds a note in the great concert of humanity” (Renan 20). Renan’s characterization may be misleading in that it presents all national cultures as available for a transnational comparison and cross-fertilization. The conceptual framework of Renan’s “symphony of nations” is indebted to the very same ideas that have allowed for Arberry to conceive of a provincial quality to the “Western” tradition—even as such a tradition is being slowly dismantled by Orientalist scholarship. Surely, what Arberry is considering as “Western” is the selectively historical, linear, evolutionary progression of reason and science according to most European cultural histories of the time. This is precisely what Said is critiquing when he characterizes the hegemonic relationship of the categories

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of “West” and “East” in European knowledge, with one body of knowledge authorizing the other. As such, Orientalist scholarship, by its very subject area, is crucial to the steady historicization of an ancient and ongoing process of cultural miscegenation. Yet, paradoxically, the very nature of this recognition, that knowledge has crossed geographical boundaries, allows for an Orientalist re-inscription of division. Thus, by the twentieth century, with an encroaching imperial doubt due to nationalist assertions of autonomy and imminent post-colonial sovereignty, Orientalism tries to recoup itself through yet another assertion of a binary division that is conceived as two complementary parts of a whole. Not surprisingly, as an academic discourse, Orientalism can no longer do this. As political domination escapes its late imperial grasp, academic Orientalism in Great Britain is no longer able to assert this old binary. In fact, the reassertion of this binary becomes an endeavor which gains currency within the former colonies—where efforts to enfranchise the nation as a historical reality, with autonomy that long precedes colonialism, go into high gear. The force of Orientalist scholarship is transferred to the “non-West.” As scholarly tradition goes, Orientalism begins to die within the metropolis. This is not to say that Orientalism, as broadly defined by Said, is disappearing. Rather, as the Scarbrough report suggests, the divide between East and West becomes a topic that belies the actualities of East / West negotiation, of the post-colonial entry of “new” nations. This entails coping with non-Western nationalisms and the post-colonial desire for autonomy; dealing with imperatives of a post-war system in which many more nations become participants; and finally, recognizing that British commerce must adapt since its colonial markets are no longer guaranteed (25–6). With these crucial imperatives, Orientalism, as a primarily textual and cultural practice, can no longer fulfill a role of “authorizing” the East. Part of the schism between the academic practices of Orientalism and actualities of a post-colonial international situation is manifest in the Scarbrough report. As I have mentioned earlier, the very genre of the report tends to minimize difference for the sake of a more homogenous and prescriptive approach. Though dissension is minimized, it seems to be most evident where academic and mercantile interests overlap. Academics are pushing for a greater awareness of Eastern “culture”: this entails knowledge of languages, social practices, religious and literary texts, etc. The various businesses that are surveyed for the report find this type of education to be at odds with business practice. While universities in England have long assisted in the training of civil servants, most businesses express the need for on-the-spot training. In the section on “Trade, Industry and Finance” the commission

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writes: “Amongst the reasons why few firms made use of facilities in this country was some apprehension lest too profound a study of foreign countries should produce so distracting to their employees as to produce a bad effect on their capacity for business” (54). The report recognizes that companies are more interested in the technical prowess of their employees than their cultural fluency. Firms tend to prefer “an introduction to the ‘atmosphere’ of a country rather than instruction in languages” (55). However, the commission’s suggestions to industry are in marked contrast to standard commercial practice. Once again citing the decline of British political influence, the commission insists upon a “fresh consideration of the problem” (55). The committee argues that nationalism, indigenous industrial growth, and an insistence on the employment of nationals and use of national language all call attention to the need for new business practices: We do not doubt that the integrity of the firm and the excellence of the problem will continue, as always, to be the foundation of British trade abroad and we recognize that technical knowledge must be of first importance, but changes of the kind we have mentioned demand in addition greater knowledge of languages, greater understanding of the people with whom business is sought and respect for their culture. (55)

They suggest short introductions to modern language, socio-economic background, religion, political and legal institutions, and modern history. Such suggestions are remarkably progressive (and perhaps quite humbling) for the commercial representatives of the former empire. Yet, this section of the report is prefaced with the notion that similar past suggestions have not been heeded. The authors refer to a previously commissioned study, the “Reay Report” of 1909, which had made similar entreaties to the business community. And while “representatives of large firms expressed strong views in favour of [these] provision[s] . . . few firms have made any attempt to obtain this training for their employees” (Britain 54). It seems that Orientalist discourse and business practice have long been at odds with one another. And while the historical phenomenon of decolonization forefronts the need for greater cultural sensitivity, academic institutions seem ill equipped to implement such changes. In terms of serving the needs of governmental administration, academic Orientalism is in a similarly precarious position. The prescriptions of the report are sparse when it comes to government agencies which deal with the non-Western world: The Foreign Service, The Colonial Service, The Royal

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Navy, The Army, The Royal Air Force, The Services of India and Burma, and The Sudan Government Service are all surveyed and assessed. The authors of the report examine the past history of training these civil, diplomatic, and military servants of the crown. The report tries to reign in these “official services” into the sphere of academic Orientalism. While many of the services require courses in the university system, the report concedes that in a number of instances there are no systematic mechanisms for training. The Foreign Office, for example, has “[n]o uniform system of language allowances” (48). The India Office, by contrast, requires a year’s probationary course at Oxford, Cambridge, or London, followed by a Civil Service Examination. The Colonial Service trains recruits in London, though the duration varies from a few months to two years. The various military branches construct their own courses as well as making use of the university courses. From their survey of the official services, the report notes that no great use was made of existing facilities during the inter-war period. They attribute this as “primarily due to the widespread lack of attention to these subjects in Government circles and elsewhere” (50). However, the report also notes that “preliminary indications” suggest that the government is beginning to attach much greater importance to training in language and culture (51). The report concludes that, “[t]he provision of adequate teaching staffs for the Universities and the maintenance of close liaison between the Universities and Government Departments are in our view the essential conditions for meeting the practical needs of the official services” (51). So, once again, the remedy for imperial loss seems to be an academic approach to the study of “culture”—by better understanding other people, Britain will be in more competitive position within the post-war international scheme. The broad remedies to all of these various problems of national interest is a call for more interaction between British subjects and the cultural environment of the various nations with which these subjects will be engaged. As such, the report defines its objectives as: 1) Building up an academic tradition 2) Appropriate training for careers in foreign countries 3) Satisfaction and development of growing interest in these regions among the general public (52).

The first objective becomes the primary focus for a prescriptive solution. Academic tradition is repeatedly invoked as a basis for a long-term approach

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to the problems of international negotiations. As such, the definition of academic tradition relies heavily on succession and history to validate itself as tradition: the report calls for continuity through “successors to carry on work;” an end to “isolated chairs” as an impediment to a broader view of the subject matter; strong departments regardless of undergraduate demand; more balance between languages and related subjects (history, philosophy, economics); and, finally, a greater balance between classical and modern studies. These last two suggestions are particularly cogent because, in effect, they signal the end of a more classical approach to the study of the Orient. Orientalism, as an academic tradition, was primarily concerned with ancient texts. The role of Orientalists throughout the nineteenth century was to unearth the glory of the Oriental past; the present was the domain of civil servants and administrators. The last two suggestions of the committee signal the turn towards a more instrumental use of knowledge. Not knowledge as a key to cultural understanding but knowledge as instrumental necessity—this move from textual to technical imperative in academic Orientalism is very telling. This is precisely where a schism seems to occur in the academic institutions of Orientalism, as universities make a decisive break away from the philological traditions that had once dominated the field. The Scarbrough report is a harbinger of a shifting away from academic Orientalism as a primary site for authorizing the way the East is viewed. Instead, in the latter half of the century, area studies and policy intellectuals will take up that work. The result of this shift will be precisely the kind of decline that Arberry will lament thirteen years later. In the years following the war, the British Parliament begins to approve funds in order to implement the suggestions of Lord Scarbrough’s commission. Arberry notes that, “at last the prayers and pleas of their great predecessors had been heard” (246). Money was being funneled into the various centers of Orientalist studies with the “lion’s share” being assigned to the School of Oriental and African Studies. However, the financial crisis of the early fifties depleted government coffers, and in 1951 the planned growth of Oriental Studies in Britain is halted. By 1959, “university establishments in Oriental Studies, . . . stand frozen in the tracks which they had made in 1951” (247). Arberry sees no prospects for a thaw. Thus, he is resigned to the fact that the various imperatives that have been drawn up by the Scarbrough commission have ground to a halt. How does Arberry account for this failure? He only seems to have one explanation: the weakness of Orientalists against the “solid and disciplined battalions” of science and technology (246). Aside from this,

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he seems incapable of explaining the lack of governmental and public interest in Orientalism. However, Arberry’s own biography suggests another explanation. During World War II, when Arberry is employed by the Civil Service, his skills as an Orientalist are enlisted, first by the War Office, then the Ministry of Information. During this time his fluency in Arabic and Persian is utilized for the production of leaflets, pamphlets, brochures, newsletters, radio broadcasts, and films. As a propagandist, Arberry arrives at an important revelation: “Before the war I had to the best of my abilities served pure scholarship; now I realized how pure scholarship, even in studies so humane as those of Orientalism, had become progressively more remote and specialized, out of touch almost completely with the realities of everyday life” (239). This recognition holds no explanatory power for Arberry in 1960. But clearly, the changing needs of the state seem to indicate what Arberry is incapable of admitting to himself. The archaic and arcane knowledge that Orientalism often unearths is no longer instrumental to the function of government. Whereas William Jones came to India one hundred fifty years earlier with the dual mission to understand and apply the knowledge he excavated, modern state systems require a far different type of knowledge from their foreign emissaries. The desire to bring East and West together becomes an idealistic cultural pursuit that has little instrumental benefit to the nation itself. The role of the Orientalist in asserting greater trans-cultural awareness becomes greatly diminished. Instead, the negotiation across cultures will become increasingly tied to the apparatus of modern states systems. The shift, which Orientalists such as Arberry fail to negotiate, is from intercultural attentiveness to transnational competition. As such, the classical Orientalist finds his role to be negated. Instead, the future of administering to the former colonies becomes the exclusive provenance of a much more instrumental and theory- driven mind-set—the area specialists and the policy intellectuals, the architects and officers of foreign policy. I am not suggesting that this shift occurs simultaneously with the moment of de-colonization. After all, scholars and statesmen have had a long, often tumultuous, dialectical relationship during colonialism. However, as the very existence of the Scarbrough report suggests, the strength of Orientalism, as an academic tradition that can be of service to the state, is still considered to be a part of general discourse following the war. However, as Arberry’s own biography points out, the force of this academic tradition declines rapidly during the fifties. Academic Orientalism is not dead in 1959, but it is no longer of much use to the state. During these years, with the heightening Cold War, instrumentality and unilateralism become defining elements in American and

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European academies, particularly in the study of former or neo-colonies. In the United States, the Area Studies Model becomes the standard approach of study: a nationalized approach to international studies. In the late fifties the United States Department of Defense invests approximately three billion dollars into the restructuring of American higher education. Those funds essentially insured the decline of older, humanist approaches that had centered upon reading and interpreting “key” cultural texts. The new expert on China or India would not really interest him or herself with the study of ancient forms of textual discourse. Students would study modern languages: the vernaculars of the present as opposed to the literary languages of the past. This crisis does not go unexplained amongst Orientalists. In 1963 Anouar Abdel-Malek points out the way in which the end of colonialism has shifted Orientalist discourse away from “an ‘object’ of study, stamped with an otherness” and toward “ ‘men,’ until yesterday the ‘objects’ of study, and henceforth, sovereign ‘subjects’” (104). In fact, the critique of Orientalism as a tradition complicit with colonialism is gaining force as more non-Europeans enter into Orientalist discourse. By the mid-sixties, Western scholars are taking notice of the vast body of work produced by scholars in the former colonies but previously “passed over in silence.” Unfortunately, according to Abdel-Malek, this is the minority. His seminal article, “Orientalism in Crisis” surveys the various faces of “state” Orientalism in 1963. He points out the differences in approach between Eastern and Western Europe, Great Britain and France, as well as inquiring into the new social science formations in America. His observations, in hindsight, are remarkably astute. Abdel-Malek differentiates between various national approaches to Orientalism. He examines the wholly different avenues taken by the British and the French, both of whom have dealt with the turbulence of anti-colonial nationalisms in Africa during the fifties. The French Orientalists, he points out, have often tried to depict French national culture as the “hellenism” of the Arab, an ideal to be emulated for the newly formed post-colonial nations. He is wary of the paternal tone of many French Orientalists, who, in their attempts to give “brotherly advice” to their Arab brethren, insist upon assessing emerging nationalism as pathological. One such scholar, Jaques Berque, in his inaugural lecture at the College de France on the modern history of the Arabs, says these nationalist histories involve negotiations which are “frequently unskillful, summary, disfiguring, and sometimes insincere” (113). Once again, as Abdel-Malek makes amply clear, the “neo-Orientalism” of the post-war period seems to recapitulate the transcendental Western objectivity through which the East is authorized, or, in this case, de-authorized.

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However, Abdel-Malek argues that the neo-Orientalism of France is not the neo-Orientalism of Britain. In the latter case he notes an “undisguised criticism of ‘europecentrism’” (115). Unfortunately, he recognizes that this critique of “europecentrism” is unsustained on a broader front, due in part to the structural changes in British Orientalism. He mentions the Hayter report of 1961, which follows up on the Scarbrough report. The Hayter report, significantly based as it is on a study of work undertaken in the United States, re-affirms A.J. Arberry’s worst fears. It acknowledges that “cultural” avenues of understanding are of far less importance than those of the newer social sciences. In the section entitled, “The Needs of the Nation and the Role of the Universities,” the authors of the report make amply clear that the prerogative of a new international situation calls for a shift toward “modern and non-linguistic studies.” The report goes on to assert: The need at the present time is not for many more linguists. It is for more historians, lawyers, economists and other social scientists to specialise in these areas, to permeate the universities with their ideas, and to give more students in their departments an opportunity to learn about the non-Western world. (49)

In the very next section, the Hayter commission suggests various “Lessons from America.” The rapid growth of Area Studies in the American University system is considered to be a model for the British. These Area Studies Centers in the United States, though initially funded by various foundations, receive the bulk of their funding from the government, in particular the National Defense Education Act (N.D.E.A). In fact, of the one billion dollar budget allotted to the N.D.E.A. in 1961, “thirty percent is for these institutions of higher education and the students attending them” (54). Even today, some forty-five years later, this has to be considered a tremendous sum of money. The rush towards Area Studies in the United States clearly denotes a heightened sensitivity to the dictates of proper “knowledge” in conducting foreign policy. From these newly emergent structures Great Britain takes its cue, as the report fully recommends instituting the American model. Abdel-Malek recognizes the policy implications of Area Studies. The shift from older structures indicates, “the dialogue and the interests of the state must be assured” (116). And though Orientalist discourse has made significant gains in recognizing its own discursive exclusions, the neoOrientalism of Area Studies threatens to bypass these recognitions. It is through an enlargement of external discourse on the object, “not through a

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“‘penetration’ of the object studied” that these new structures perpetuate an East that is “not capable of being autonomous” (116). The interests of the developed states mimic their colonial incarnations, seemingly shifting the discourse out of the grasp of those critics who might address the dangers of such objectification. It is worth noting that in the appendix of the Hayter report, on the second to last page, is a reference to the anxiety that some Americans and Britons have over the politically motivated sources that fund Area Studies: There are those who consider that the freedom of the universities to choose their own lines of expansion is being unduly influenced by the funds provides by the Foundations and the Government. In the language of Britain, these funds are ‘earmarked,’ and such outside influences on university development are regarded with apprehension by those who are not the direct recipients. This is a familiar problem in Great Britain. (124)

This remarkable statement suggests, once again, the kinds of dissension that lurk at the fringe of “official” inquiry. For one, it indicates that there are populations both in the United States and Britain that view governmental inquiries such as these, and their subsequent appropriations of funds, to be detrimental to “scholarly” inquiry. Secondly, there is also the suggestion that the problem is not one that affects those scholars who, in fact, receive government funding. Rather the concern over the sources of funding comes from those who cannot obtain these funds—thus dissent is reduced to a simple case of jealousy. This caustic aside seems to veil the kinds of tensions that any such major structural shift is bound to elicit. Taken as a whole, the various governmental shifts which I trace out in this section lead to the kind of statement made by H.A.R Gibb—a prominent Orientalist turned policy advisor—in 1964: “The Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists” (Orientalism 6). BEGINNING WITH THE END My contention is that such a failure of older methods of Orientalist knowledge production occurs precisely as previous scholarly practices prove incapable of representing the “other” without including that “other” in intellectual and scholarly dialogue. In fact, Orientalism, as a category for examining the Orient, produces within itself a critique of how it has enacted an exclusion of its object of study. Unfortunately, Western industrialized nations find this

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new function within Orientalism, of self-reflexivity and self-assessment, to be incommensurate with the requirements of post- World War II scholarship in Europe and North America. Thus, colonial practices that had initiated the cultural comparison and “archaeology” of human civilizations become largely obsolescent with regard to the interests of Western states. Since pronouncements generated by Orientalist scholarship could no longer prove to be unequivocally “objective,” such older practices of cultural analysis become de-emphasized in favor of overt national interest and instrumental foreign policy aims. Said’s Orientalism does, in scathing fashion, highlight the types of distorted representations of the Middle East and Asia that continue to fashion present-day representations, particularly within the United States. In his final chapter, “Orientalism Now,” Said confronts the most recent manifestations of Orientalism, particularly in relationship to the overly generalized, non-contextual representations of Islam that still plague much of the popular and academic media in the US. He analyzes recent strains that have simply coopted the previous essentializations and assumptions long characterized by and within academic Orientalism—certainly amongst policy intellectuals, culture (in the Arnoldian sense) becomes a tacit characteristic of the “other” nation, and no longer a site for sustained inquiry and analysis. For Western universities, especially after the end of World War II, the onus of engaging with the “other” shifts from the auspices of culture to that of the human “social” sciences, from literature and art to national policy and foreign relations. At minimum, this shift entailed that the universalizing norms of “culture” were left behind for an embrace of national interest and global stability—areas whose instrumental biases were quite explicitly professed. So why did this shift come about? Part of my explanation lies in the facile and increasingly empty rhetoric of cultural internationalization that arose during the late fifties and early sixties—the old characterizations of Occident and Orient, though becoming more nuanced, still more or less adhered. In the face of a Cold War and a world system dominated by two competing ideological modes of operation, entire universities were redesigned to accommodate the realities of state interest. The Area Studies models put in place in the United States during the forties and fifties (and adopted by Great Britain in the fifties) had given up on the esoteric and erratic knowledge of cultural texts of the past in favor of immediacies on the ground. The idea of promoting understanding by accommodating the unique cultural achievements of various other nations would seem laughable to the policy experts of the fifties and sixties, much as it seems to such groups today. Rather, that humanist function characteristic of late academic Orientalism became much less prominent within university circles, instead finding

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other avenues (one such avenue was the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO) following World War II. Again, such rhetorical categorizations of “East” and “West” functioned within a primarily abstract framework—unengaged, as they were, with the material conditions that had and continued to produce “national” cultures, particularly within the recently decolonized regions of the world. For example, after 1947 the idea of a nation-state known as “India” would be crafted according to the various internal dictates of its new sovereignty. Thus, the imperative for an UNESCO-guided “mutual understanding” would come to rest upon old structures of civility as generated by an accommodating “Western” cultural tradition; a tradition that sought to become more inclusive and generous in trying to transform into a universal “International” cultural heritage. While Orientalism loses its academic status during the break-up of empire, its continuing influences in other venues cannot be discounted. While I leave aside consideration of Orientalism’s more recent history for the conclusion of my study, I must signal the relevance of Orientalism to contemporary culture and politics. Anyone who has witnessed the depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the U.S. media or the continued marketing of New Age mysticism in our consumerist culture (to name just two examples) cannot fail to take into account the continuing pervasiveness of Orientalist tropes. If Orientalism is no longer produced within the academy, it has clearly found avenues for broader distribution in the age of globalization and mass cultural production. While the details of such dissemination through the various avenues of contemporary cultural production are extensive and must provide grounds for future study, this particular exercise will return to the early period of British involvement in India to trace out a genealogy of British Orientalism and Indology. Thus, the following chapters will explore the advent of Orientalism in India. As we will see, Orientalism was a heterogeneous affair that involved a host of different players and motives on both sides of the colonial divide. In the chapter that follows, “Orientalism, Antiquity, and the Beginnings of British Colonial Rule in India,” I examine the rise of British Orientalism in India by placing Europe’s “discovery” of Sanskrit alongside the pragmatic function of administering a culture alien to its British and European colonizers. The emergence of a scholarly debate throughout Europe over the textual culture of the ancient “Hindoos” has immediate influence upon debates in Europe over religion, antiquity, modernity and civilization. After a brief “Oriental Renaissance,” the works and ideas of the Orientalists fall out of favor with India’s administrators. The Scottish Utilitarian, James Mill, provides an extensive and corrosive criticism of the Orientalists in his

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1817 History of British India, a work that goes on to influence future administrators in India such as Thomas Babington Macauley. However, this does not mean an end to Orientalism but merely a shift in favor of other sources in addition to textual antiquity. In the 1810s, as the influence of British Orientalists and their brand of Orientalism appear to be in decline, a Bengali provides the first attributable works in English on Indian antiquity from an Indian, thereby providing one of the first indigenous articulations composed in the language of the colonizer. Rammohan Ray’s interventions in a number of debates surrounding Indian antiquity and the Hindu religion form the basis for Chapter Three, “Orientalism, Vedanta, and Indian Modernity: Raja Rammohan Ray on Sanskritic Antiquity.” Ray provides an early instance of a transnational alliance whose influences would impact religious debate and reform in India, Great Britain and North America, thereby illustrating an instance of generative and polyvalent Orientalism that included some (albeit elite) engagement with the “other.” Chapter Four, “Colonial Divides and Shared Orientalisms: Kipling and Tagore in the World,” moves beyond the early colonial period and addresses colonial culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. India, as a subject of intellectual curiosity in the West, undergoes renewed enthusiasm and great acclaim, particularly by way of “literary” works, during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In exploring the works and lives of Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore, I consider how their diametrically opposed positions share a debt to Orientalist representations of the East. In my fifth and final chapter, “Orientalism and Empathetic Subjectivity: Mrs. Dalloway and Discontents of Modernity,” I examine a central narrative strategy in Virginia Woolf ’s high modernist classic, Mrs. Dalloway, that, as I argue, arises out of the milieu of ideas concerning India and the mystical East which I have charted in earlier chapters. This final chapter brings the pervasive trope of the mystical East arising out of Indian Orientalism and places it at the heart of a now canonical avant-garde novel that sought to do no less than critique and refashion post-World War I British modernity.

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Chapter Two

Orientalism, Antiquity, and The Beginnings of British Colonial Rule In India: The Textual Basis of Early Orientalism

INTRODUCTION: ANGLOINDIAN ORIENTALISM AND THE RISE OF BRITISH COLONIAL RULE IN BENGAL When the British East India Company received permission from the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, to establish a trading base in Bengal early in the eighteenth century, it had already functioned in the region for fifty years. During that period, as was the case in numerous settings of overseas contestation, various European powers competed against one another for access to increasingly vast territorial expanses. By the early part of the century, European expansion was already well underway in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In Bengal, this wrangling occurred for the better part of the first half of the eighteenth century—though the East India Company’s impending dominance in the area was signaled with an exemption from Mughal customs collection in 1718. With Robert Clive’s military victories consolidating British power, by 1765 the two other European nations present in the region, Holland and France, had all but ceded to British might, retreating to small encampments on the Hugli River just north of Calcutta. In 1765, the Mughal emperor, Shah Allam II granted the British East India Company “Diwani rights” for the provinces of Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, thus conferring upon the British the right to collect and appropriate land revenue, as well as the responsibility of administering to legal issues. In order to take advantage of an already substantial infrastructure, the company utilized the well-developed system of land and revenue assessment that the Mughals had instituted over the course of the prior two centuries. By assuming the mantle of power in Bengal, the British placed themselves on the road to securing and administering to the entire subcontinent. Their presence in India, and the resultant need to understand the foreign languages and alien cultures of

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South Asia led directly to the rise of Orientalism in Bengal and throughout British-controlled South Asia. As the British East India Company took over the rule of Bengal and other regions of South Asia, its officials began to circulate knowledge of a religious and literary body of considerable antiquity. Having spent the better part of the century consolidating power in India through a combination of mercantile and military prowess, the British sought to stabilize their political control by seeking what they considered to be indigenous sources of textual authority. Toward the latter part of the century, the beginning of formal British rule in India coincided with the inception of what can be called AngloIndian Orientalism, a systematic engagement by British East India Company employees to gather linguistic and textual knowledge of Sanskrit, a language previously unknown to them.1 As a methodical study of non-European culture, the particular brand of Orientalism that focused on Sanskritic antiquity (giving rise to the specialization of Indology) arose out of political and cultural contexts in both Europe and Asia. In fact, Orientalism became a key mechanism in the cultivation of European cultural interest in India, invigorating historical and linguistic conjecture on the links between Europe and Asia Major, and eventually giving rise to the institutional study of Sanskrit in most of Europe’s major universities. Debates over “civilization” had raged in Europe throughout the course of the eighteenth century.2 As a by-product of Enlightenment destabilizations of Catholic doctrinal hegemony, as well as of the growing body of information being accumulated through European expansionism, a European debate over the relevance of non-European traditions of language and culture was just taking shape.3 In South Asia, the promise of a textual body that would lay claim to antiquity provided company officials with immediate access to indigenous sources of social authority—or so they thought. The initial force behind the systematic elucidation of indigenous “culture” by company employees in Bengal was political: the knowledge acquired by the early Orientalists was meant to guide administrative tasks, particularly those of a legal nature. However, the work of the Orientalists had another dimension. Warren Hastings, as chief official of the British East India Company, hoped to influence public discourse in England in favor of his policies. At company expense, he prompted the translation and circulation of several Sanskrit writings, chief amongst them the Bhagavad Gita in 1784. These English-language translations by the early Orientalists would come to circulate throughout Europe, supplementing and supplanting previous theorization concerning the relationship between Europe and the rest of Asia. In so doing, the documents also catalyzed an intellectual fervor for the “new”

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Sanskritic antiquity. For Hastings and the company officials who undertook this linguistic work, the project served two crucial purposes: to provide English translations of authoritative indigenous texts and to provide evidence of Indian antiquity. These Orientalist labors were meant to gird Hasting’s argument for acculturation of the British in India, and defend against the “civilizing” project of more church-oriented European entities—including, of course, various missionary influences. By the time Warren Hastings had become the first Governor-General of India in 1772, he was already aware of the dangers, even the impossibility, of ruling through overt domination. He sought to utilize indigenous practices in order to implement a cohesive and stable British rule. Ironically, it was the eventual success of Hastings’s military and administrative initiatives that obviated his policy of acculturation, one that mandated company employees become familiar with the languages of South Asia. Under Hastings, most of the production and circulation of knowledge about India took the systematic, eventually institutionalized, form of Anglo-Indian Orientalism. Though missionaries and traders had been bringing knowledge of India back to Europe since the sixteenth century, it was through the influence of Hastings and his administrative policies that modern Orientalism took shape.4 In order to aid in the process of locating and translating influential indigenous texts, Hastings established an environment that attracted scholars like William Jones, a prominent British intellectual. It was primarily by means of Jones’s efforts that Anglo-Indian Orientalism began to produce and transmit some of its most influential findings.5 As the mission shifted from the securing of Bengal to the managing of it as a secured territory, the program of the Hastings administration inspired keen interest in the modern urban centers of Europe concerning India’s ancient cultural past. Indeed, Anglo-Indian Orientalism initiated a cultural engagement that influenced Western theories of its own history, aesthetics, theology and science. As the Orientalist movement aspired to a systematic study of non-European cultures via European methods of study, it provided ample raw material to the burgeoning fields of linguistics, anthropology and comparative history, literature, philology, and religion; Orientalism, then, fueled an academic regime with the materials provided by European expansionism.6 The second Governor-General of India, Lord Cornwallis, had little interest in indigenous culture and proceeded to ignore and occasionally denigrate it.7 By the early part of the nineteenth century, a policy of Anglicization—the Europeanization of native elites—proved to be the more expedient cultural policy for Hastings’s successors. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the writings of James Mill and the fierce advocacy of Thomas

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Babington Macauley had succeeded in undermining the Orientalists’ approach. Thus, after an early period of remarkable “discoveries” and debates over Indian antiquity, the work of the Orientalists became increasingly peripheral to the processes of British administration in India. However, the field of Orientalism–defined, for my purposes, as the study of the “East” via its linguistic and textual artifacts—became significantly enfranchised in European academies. Indeed, the most prominent European students of Indian antiquity, after initial British advances, were continental—primarily Germans. The Orientalist humanism that arose out of the study of Indian antiquity shifted to the continent as Britain’s political stakes in India began to demand a more antagonistic view of “Indianness.” Still, Orientalists re-emerged in British political and cultural discourse throughout the course of the nineteenth century in various capacities of expertise and authority. In this chapter I will examine how colonial administration, as a burgeoning mode of extending state control to those regions where the company was failing, made use of its knowledge of Sanskrit to oversee judicial and financial functions in Bengal. While the full transfer of power from East India Company to Raj would not occur until 1858, the steady transition to greater state control began with Warren Hastings’s administration and was predicated on the linguistic and textual knowledge of indigenous cultures. In the next chapter I will elucidate how, in conjunction with the work of those linguistic scholars, Indians began to exploit the massive social transformations produced by British colonialism towards their own ends of self-representation. Indigenous Indian appropriations of Orientalist knowledge production during the nineteenth century, and the reverberations caused by these appropriations within the metropole, will be the focus of later chapters. I argue that some of the most trenchant critiques of industrial capitalism, imperialism, and illiberal aspects of “liberal” political theory arise out of the spaces created by Orientalism. For example, Tagore’s virulent attacks on nationalism and industrialization at the start of the twentieth century would presage, by thirty odd years, the devastating effects of nationalist logic run amok in Europe. Eventually, I seek to fashion a re-theorization of Orientalism arising out of the context of the British colonial experience in India by highlighting the limits of “humane” knowledge in the face of political and cultural domination. LANGUAGE AND COMMERCE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARLY COLONIAL RULE IN BENGAL The decisive moment for the British in Bengal was Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757.8 At the time of this military consolidation of British authority in

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Bengal (which virtually eliminated the presence of their chief European rival in South Asia, the French), Warren Hastings had been in India for seven years. In 1750 Hastings had arrived in Bengal to a previous Empire in severe disarray. The Mughals, who were responsible for the political, legal and mercantile administration of a sizable portion of the subcontinent throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had been destabilized both by indigenous uprisings and European encroachment.9 British, French, and Dutch mercantilists desired Bengal, a fertile agricultural region that once marked the profitable Eastern edge of Mughal control. Clive’s victory cemented British dominion within the region that, though occasionally challenged during the second half of the eighteenth century, would not erode for almost two more centuries. By the time Hastings left India (for the first time) in 1764, the French and Dutch had been driven back to small enclaves and the entire region was effectively under British control.10 When Hastings landed as a clerk employed by the British East India Company in 1750, he was earning only £5 per annum. The company was the sole mercantile representative of Britain in India, with a parliamentary charter that guaranteed exclusive and monopoly rights on the subcontinent. By the time Hastings returned to England in 1764, he had accumulated a fortune of £30,000 (British Orientalism 17). In the course of those fourteen years Hastings’s increase in personal wealth dramatized the tremendous financial fortunes for the British in India. Like many other company officials, he accumulated this fortune through personal agricultural speculation; a form of trade that lay outside of official duties but in which the British thrived based on the privileged position provided by their place within the powerful company.11 But Hastings, unlike most other company servants, acquired first-hand knowledge of local languages (as opposed to hiring native go-betweens), becoming proficient in Bengali and Urdu as well as having an understanding of Persian, the language of the Mughal court. Indeed, it was this personal interest (and ability) in language that would later contribute to Hastings’s cultural policies as Governor-General. In the period following the consolidation of company dominion in Bengal, the lure of personal financial gain was drawing together investors and financiers from both sides of the Anglo / Indian divide. In Bengal, such speculation was commonplace—company employees sometimes borrowed money from men who were, ostensibly, in their employ. After acquiring capital from wealthy Bengalis, company men went on to use their positions within the company to finance futures in the agricultural trade of Bengal. Those who had mastered languages were able to more effectively traffic in the various networks of financial, cultural and social power that existed as

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a result of Mughal infrastructure. The connections between the zamindari landholders and company men could be astonishingly convoluted (See Chapter Three). Suffice it to say that wealthy Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim, developed an industry of advancing capital to East Indian Company employees who were speculating on land and crops in Bengal. Such relationships were conducted across a number of linguistic fronts and knowledge of the other’s language facilitated commerce. Some of the earliest and most prominent “modernizers” in Bengal were men who had become acquainted with the British through such financial arrangements. The years following Clive’s triumph saw a practice of “Dual government” in which the British assumed mercantile control in Bengal, yet claimed no interest in political administration. However, they continued to maneuver political administration by putting indigenous leaders of their own choosing into positions of power. These “Puppet Nawabs” allowed the British to have absolute power without the burden of administrative responsibility.12 In the decade that followed Clive’s victories, the increasingly unchecked power of the British, in addition to the absurdly feeble wages paid to the majority of company employees, led to serious corruption and profiteering. While tales of excess elicited various objections in England, it was not until a catastrophic famine in 1769 that stringent reforms were undertaken. The famine had resulted in financial losses to the company and its investors. In addition, reports of the loss of life in Bengal provoked tremendous public scrutiny of the company and its practices. As a result, after years of operating on the Indian subcontinent, the famine, along with the ensuing human loss, forced the company to reassess its practices. Since the fact of mass death highlighted the gross human costs of British overseas ventures, and thus on mercantile / state arrangements, the state was prompted to action. The British government had to cope with public criticism of the merchant territorial grants for which the state was ultimately responsible. At a certain point the sheer scale of human cost, bandied about in Parliament and the press as in the “millions,” forced a response by the government. Horace Walpole, son of the influential Lord of the Treasury, and himself a respected writer and Member of Parliament, angrily reproached: We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru. They were at least butchers on religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped—nay, what you think of the famine in Bengal in which three millions perished being caused by a monopoly of the servants of the East India Company. (Quoted in Kopf, 13–14)

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As a direct result of such wholesale destruction, the British “Prime” Minister, Lord North, was forced to take action. His intervention marked the first instance of the government’s direct intervention into company affairs. He established a “secret committee” that would both create and fill a position of oversight within the company. In April of 1772, the return of Warren Hastings to Bengal as chief representative of the company marked the end of the dual system of government utilized by Clive and his successors. The British were to finally stand forth as the political authority in Bengal, without the guise of intermediary indigenous representatives. Hastings moved quickly to centralize power in Calcutta, a city that would become the Eastern seat of the British Empire in India. Hastings initiated a formal British administration on principles that combined old Mughal structures of governance along with contemporary British legal practices. At the core of this administration lay a fundamental restructuring of the Mughal judicial system. He believed he could simply replace Islamic law, the dominant civil code, with British law. British law would be used for general matters, but indigenous religious law would still adjudicate religious matters. In an effort to systematize this process, the British attempted to codify indigenous traditions in order to oversee justice. While Islamic law was well known to the British, Hindu legal tradition remained ill defined. It was these British attempts to verify Hindu legal practices, along with a cultural policy that sought to understand indigenous texts and traditions, which led to the institutionalization of Orientalism on the subcontinent. As a systematic linguistic and text-oriented study of nonEuropean culture, this brand of Orientalism was keenly fostered by Hastings and resulted in a greater awareness of Indian antiquity in Europe. Orientalism in India was initiated as Hastings sought to create his own system for assessment and collection. Since the Mughal administrative structure consolidated judicial and revenue functions (in the form of the Diwani), Hastings’s reforms inevitably extended to the restructuring of the legal system. And, it was precisely in this sphere of adjudicating different legal traditions that Orientalism rapidly took form. The Mughal judiciary had utilized Islamic law for all civil proceedings, deferring to Hindu Brahmanical and scholarly authorities in matters where both plaintiffs were Hindus. Hastings, in his Judicial Plan of 1772, set about changing this system, displacing Islamic law as the general law of the land. British laws and regulations were placed in their stead. However, Hastings made an important determination. Title XXIII of the plan states:

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Negotiating the Modern That in all Suits regarding Inheritance, Marriage, Caste, and all other religious Usages or Institutions, the Laws of the Koran with respects to the Mahometans, and those of the Shaster with respect to the Gentoos, shall be invariably adhered to: On all such occasions, the Moulavies or Brahmins shall respectively attend and expound the Law, and they shall sign the Report and assist in passing the Decree. (Hastings, Forrest 296)

Thus, “religious” matters would pass through indigenous intermediaries, the Maulvis (Muftis) and Brahmins, in accord with what the British considered to be previous practice. Of course, the final authority would rest with the company. Rosane Rocher, an Indologist and historian of the period, points out that requisite differentiations–between Hindu and Muslim, religious and civil— were to “set the British on the dangerous course of having to discriminate the religious from the lay under changing conditions both in Britain and in India” (“British Orientalism” 221). As a result, the circumstances arising as a result of this decree would come to greatly influence administrative practice. By 1773 the British East India Company was no longer a private commercial enterprise. Legislation that year placed company operations under the supervision of the British Parliamentary system. Hastings’s power increased further due to Parliament’s passage of the Regulating Act: the first direct intervention by the state into company affairs. Under the act, Warren Hastings was promoted from Governor of Bengal to Governor-General, with power expanding beyond Bengal to the two other Indian presidencies of Delhi and Madras. From this point forward, Hastings would answer to Parliament. The Regulating Act, then, inextricably linked the fortunes of India with the British state, marking the formal starting point of British colonialism in the subcontinent. ORIENTALISM AND TEXTUAL AUTHORITY: THE EARLY COMPANY ORIENTALISTS In assessing indigenous religious practice, the British had a far better grasp of the Islamic vehicles of justice than of Hindu law. Islam, as a religion that could be traced to a solitary text, had a verifiable source that British scholars could access. The Islamic traditions arising out of Persian and Arabic were known to a number of British administrators. In fact, these languages had been studied (and chaired) at Oxford since the seventeenth century. Thus, these languages were well understood and many of the texts available to company agents. Hinduism, on the other hand, presented a different series of problems. Though specific sacred texts were known to exist, they did not necessarily

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have the same sorts of juridical authority prescribed by Koranic law. Hinduism did not share the same kinds of textual authority which Islam and Christianity offered. This is not to say that textual authority did not exist. Rather, textual authority moved differently, without the kind of specificity of power and denomination found in Biblical and Koranic laws. The mass of ancient literatures that recorded the core ideas of Hinduism was intertwined with Brahmanical and scholarly traditions, traditions that were not always the same.13 The implementations of the Shastras, or codes of conduct (religious and otherwise), were mediated by a number of factors. Amongst these was the fact that the Brahmins, though traditionally empowered to administer religious customs, were often shaping those customs based on their own local conditions. Thus, local structures of power and social contexts did much to define the way textual authority was mediated by the religiously empowered Brahman caste. Though Islamic law could rely also on local circumstances (ijma), the highly developed organization of a centralized Mughal authority allowed the company to discern such conditions in a way that they could not with Hindu religious authority. Hindu local traditions could vary tremendously. In fact, such variations of religious and social application, from village to village, district to district, continue to the present day. Rocher points out that if Hastings considered applying local customs, he was probably concerned that collecting them would take time. This, in turn, could provide fodder for Anglicist sentiment in Britain that “might mistake these customs for, and dismiss them as, the product of an illiterate, uncivilized people” (221). As it turned out, the cultural battles between Orientalists such as Hastings and those back in Britain in favor of directing Indians towards British cultural values and norms would continue to influence policy in India for the next half-century; in fact, such debates would help contribute to the notion of a consolidated “Hindu” identity. In order to sway Anglican-Christian opinion to his cause, Hastings had to project a unified, coherent Hindu culture which was amenable to a European notion of civilization—and thus, over time, civilizable. Towards these ends, Hastings crafted a policy that equipped company servants with the linguistic and cultural skills necessary for dealing with the indigenous population. He saw “a direct correlation between an acculturated civil servant and an efficient one” (British Orientalism 17). Hastings took to gathering about him men who showed an inclination for Asian languages and literatures, chief amongst them Nathaniel Halhed and Charles Wilkins. Their work initiated the flow of translations of Hindu religious texts back to Europe. In order to accelerate the tasks of translation, Hastings offered financial incentives to both Indians and Europeans alike.14 Not only did this

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catalyze interest in vernacular and classical Asian languages, it also led to Asian language typesetting and printing. By 1778, a Bengali-language printing operation was established in Calcutta. And by 1784, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, an organization devoted to the study of “Eastern letters,” was created with Hastings’s support. The earliest translation work focused on practical needs. Though the Judicial Act was crafted with indigenous traditions in mind, there were a number of oversights and errors in the way religious matters were to be settled. Even the simple categorical split between Hindu and Muslim was a problematic one. In the late eighteenth century, the population consisted not only of these two groups, but Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, and “tribals” as well. By recognizing only these two groups, the British were collapsing into Hinduism all that could not be classified as Islam. Again, this forced association was aided by Hinduism’s protean manifestations. Hinduism had little of Islam’s structure, outside of a hierarchy of caste.15 There was no centralized authority in Hindu religious practices, indeed no specific and discrete text. And, what textual authority existed was spread over a number of texts, ranging over millennia, and existing in a language that was all but unknown to Europeans—Sanskrit. Hastings’s displacement of certain aspects of Islamic legal practice, along with a concurrent emphasis on Hinduism, was a keen maneuver in company-mediated representations of indigenous practice and belief. In both the British and Indian political contexts, he saw the exigency of using Hinduism to reconfigure elements of authority previously constituted vis-à-vis Islam. Islam in India was already in a weakened state during the eighteenth century compared with earlier centuries. In addition, Hinduism was poorly defined in the European public imagination whereas Islam had an epic history in Europe, particularly as a cultural and ideological challenger to European Christianity. Thus, in displacing Islam in India—and, keep in mind, this is the relatively secularized and tolerant version of Islam practiced by the late Mughals—the British were engaging in a fairly natural undertaking, at least in terms of this process of displacement and discrediting, which had a tremendous amount of historical precedent amongst Christian Europeans. In India, Hastings could displace Muslim law with British law and, in the process, champion the assertion of Hindu “rights.” Courting a Hindu elite through the promise of empowerment—the majority of established landholders in Bengal were Brahmins—would allow Hastings a strong measure of cooperation in light of a rapidly transforming situation. In England, Hastings was trying to authorize Hinduism as a civilized and appropriate medium for combating Islam. By holding up Hinduism as having some of

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the cultural capital of antiquity (cultural capital in light of European NeoClassical movements in both the arts and philosophy), he might avert the desire of many in Great Britain to convert what they saw as a backwards populace. Hastings sought to transform and consolidate the subcontinent for the British by utilizing existing cultural structures as foils for one another. Thus, Hastings’s tactics made use of a broad and undefined (and thus, conquerable) Hinduism in order to oust the firmly placed Islam. Indeed, the unified Hinduism that Hastings offered to a European audience was defined and controlled by him, as much as it was a constructed and imposed unity. In order to codify Hindu law, Hastings isolated the text most revered by the Brahmanical caste in Bengal, the Manu Smriti. However, these works were not the sole source of religious authority, as the British would recognize in the following decades. Nathaniel Halhed undertook the first translation of Hindu law. Halhed had excellent knowledge of Persian and became one of the first Europeans to systematically study Bengali, publishing a primer of its grammar in 1788. Commissioned by Hastings in 1773, Haldhed’s A Code of Gentoo Law was published in London in 1776. The English translation, which was made from a Persian version of the original Sanskrit, circulated widely in Europe and garnered Halhed some fame. The conditions surrounding this text’s production and circulation, as well as the introductions by both Hastings and Halhed, provide some telling insights into the dynamics of administrative cultural policy and politics during the period. Well aware of those who wanted a program of Anglicization in India, Hastings sought to use Halhed’s translation as proof that the Hindus possessed a long history of property rights. The existence of property rights served to legitimate the argument against a wholesale adoption of European political philosophy in India. Since property rights lay at the core of an eighteenth-century European concept of citizenship, the historical existence of these very same principles in the Gentoo code would excoriate Anglicist critics of acculturation. Thus, Hastings began circulating sections of the newly translated code prior to its publication in order to garner political favor for his policies, a tactic that proved quite successful. When the code was published in 1776, Hastings provided a short letter of introduction. In it he points out that though he might have edited the piece to make it more fit “for the public eye,” he chose to heed the pundits who had the “sanction of their Shaster, and were therefore incapable of amendment” (140). This was a fascinating admission considering Hastings’s position in India. Here was the now Governor-General, commanding more power than anyone on the subcontinent, but unable to get eleven scholars to cede to his wishes. Not only was Hastings providing proof of a civilized

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Hindu culture, he was also demonstrating its resilience in the face of British authority. Hastings was trying to establish the terms of India’s political future. His appeasement of the pundits and their sacred text allowed him to demonstrate (to his English readers) a different style of conquest—of power exercised in an acquiescent way. Halhed’s “Translator’s Preface to the Gentoo Code” pushed further the political stakes of explicating Hinduism to a British audience. While Hastings was holding up “Hinduism” as proof that the Indians were not savages, Halhed attempted to walk the fine line of not offending a British public unaccustomed to thinking of Indians as having any of the traits of civilized peoples. In the “Translator’s Preface,” Halhed provides a slippery defense of Hinduism by routinely qualifying his observations with deference to the higher position of Christianity. He refers to certain aspects of Hindu scripture as “fanciful and injudicious” and to others that “our better information may convince us to be altogether false and erroneous” (Halhed, Brock 143,144). On the other hand, Halhed takes a remarkable step towards suggesting a form of cultural relativism, asking his readers to consider the Europeans from the point of view of Hindus: [T]he same confidential reliance, which we put in the Divine Text upon the authority of its Divine Inspirer himself, is by their mistaken prejudices implicitly transferred to the Beids of the Shaster. Hence we are not justified in grounding the standard and criterion of our examination of the Hindoo religion upon the known and infallible truth of our own, because the opposite party would either deny the first principle of our argument, or insist upon an equal right on their side to suppose the veracity of their own scriptures incontrovertible. (Halhed, Brock 145–6)

By couching the problem in this fashion, Halhed could disarm Christian critics, making the idea of other religions palatable to both orthodox advocates of Christianity as well as that orthodoxy’s critics. Ironically, by trying to maintain religious authority for Christianity, Halhed made a space for other religions. His admonition to the reader to guard against religious absolutism (so that Indians might not mistakenly get the idea that they have the truth) provided a small opening, a space that would eventually be utilized by Indians seeking self-representation in European discourses. Indeed, this small gap produced in early Orientalist discourse would become a dramatically contested area during and, especially, after Hastings’s reign (see Chapter Three). Representing “Hinduism” to a European audience was a consistent tenet of Hastings’s rule, a dramatic example of influencing sentiments at

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home. After Halhed’s translation, which was a practical work with direct instrumental applications, Hastings promoted Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, a part of the epic Mahabharata. The Gita provided proof of a philosophically engaged and imaginative Indian antiquity. Hastings recognized how proof of such antiquity might provide for a sympathetic assessment of his own policies in Bengal. Following Europe’s own reassessment of Hellenic and Roman antiquity in the wake of the liberalization initiated by the Reformation, the status of “antiquity” had become subject to continual theorization and re-theorization. Though the text could have no possible administrative applications, Hastings forwarded the translation to England to be published at company expense. This would become a key text in what Raymond Schwab has called the “Oriental Renaissance.” In a long and didactic prefatory letter to the translation, Hastings makes his intentions explicit: It 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, and teach us to estimate them by measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained in their writings; and these will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance. (Prefatory 189)

This statement embraced the humanism fostered by an eighteenth-century European discourse of universal natural rights. However, Hastings’s recognition of the transience of British power in the face of human antiquity would not survive into the nineteenth century, when imperialism took shape as an ideology and the permanence of the British Empire seemed incontrovertible. WILLIAM JONES AND THE INDOEUROPEAN LINGUISTIC CONNECTION While British imperialism, as an ideological system, had yet to take shape in the early years of British colonialism, William Jones’s attitude of absolute power and knowledge regarding India foreshadowed some very common nineteenth-century symptoms of Empire. Indeed, these attitudes highlighted the political circumstances that brought Jones to Asia in the first place. In

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1783, towards the end of Hastings’s tenure as Governor-General, William Jones arrived as a Judge for the Supreme Court in Calcutta. From the outset, he maintained the belief that the British must reign supreme in India. Two sentiments would come to the fore during his early years in India. One was Jones’s desire to “know” India better than anyone before him. The second was that the Indians “must and will be governed by absolute power” (Works v. ii, 482). These basic notions grounded Jones’s status as a judicial appointee in a rapidly expanding British Empire. Jones, then, must be considered according to the absolute nature of these early desires and beliefs, both of which can be seen as early symptoms of imperialist aspiration. Indeed, Jones’s lovehate, repulsion-attraction relationship to India was representative of an illiberal moment of humanism when it came to the non-white colonies. During the following eleven years, Jones’s observations on Indian cultural antiquity would do more to advance the study of India than any Westerner before him, setting off an intellectual fervor in Europe for the ancient cultures of India. Within a year of his arrival he established the Asiatic Society of Bengal, an institution where scholars who took the East as their subject could discuss and disseminate their ideas.16 Though he explored numerous topics during his stay, Jones’s most famous “discovery” involved the antiquity and lineage of Sanskrit. In his “Third Anniversary Discourse” to the Society, Jones positioned Sanskrit as a linguistic relative of the two primary European languages of antiquity, Latin and Greek. In presenting Indian antiquity as a contemporary of, and even precursor to, European antiquity, Jones catalyzed a reconceptualization of the historical relationship between Europe and Asia. Though not the first European to suggest this linguistic affinity, Jones’s preeminence as a scholar and intellectual in Europe gave his observations tremendous credence. Before William Jones arrived in India, he was celebrated throughout Europe as a premier scholar and intellect of the East. Jones had studied Arabic and Persian at Oxford. His translation of The History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia made him famous and won him friendships with such intellectual luminaries as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin Franklin. After quitting the world of patronage, Jones sought financial independence by studying law. He embarked on a career in politics and, in 1780, made an unsuccessful attempt to win a seat in Parliament. Three years later he accepted a judgeship in Calcutta. As a result of his prior accomplishments, when Jones left for India, he carried with him the authority of being considered the most famous English Orientalist of his time, as well as a legal scholar whose expertise extended beyond British law to encompass Hellenic, Roman, Persian and Arabic traditions.

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As a judge and scholar in service to the British East India Company as well as the British state, Jones’s beliefs were deeply anchored in the certainty that the British should have absolute power over the Indians. Interestingly, however, he was known in Europe and the American colonies as an advocate of democratic and egalitarian principles and it was only with his appointment to the Indian judgeship that his ideas took a draconian turn. Prior to being named to the company position, his political views in England were staunchly Whiggish and critical of heavy-handed authority. In fact, it seems probable that his strong support for American independence played a role in delaying his Indian appointment. Before he was sent to India, Jones’s political philosophy was firmly rooted in the idea that labor led to property, and property to prosperity. Thus personal possessions insured a stable civil society. He viewed “just” law as that founded on natural reason and was a diligent advocate of English common law—law as evidence for the “collected will of the people.” In turn, he exalted the English Constitution as a supreme document: “The original part of our Constitution is almost divine; to such a degree that no state of Rome or Greece could even boast of one superior to it nor could Plato, Aristotle nor any legislator even conceive of a more perfect model of state”( Mukherjee 60). Also, prior to his judgeship, he voiced strong opinions about the British presence in India, viewing company rule with some concern for the status of freedom at home. Many Britons back home saw the nature of British power in India as a corrupting influence on company servants. Jones too was concerned that immorality might return with these servants to infect the home country. In Britain, most of Jones’s political views were progressively liberal and he believed firmly that political power needed to be tied to the will of the people. He expressed the belief that power should not be fixed within any one person, and that “[d]istrust in power is the very nerve of wisdom” (Mukherjee 51). Yet, such views were not extended to the Indians. In a 1781 letter to Edward Gibbon, Jones wrote, “I should hardly think of instructing the Gentoos in the maxims of the Athenians” (Letters 482). The early reference to Athenians would, of course, present a degree of irony, as Jones’s own work would soon highlight the linguistic affinity between these very same peoples. On his six month voyage to India, Jones drafted a list of “objects of enquiry” to be studied during his stay. The list reveals Jones as a man firmly shaped by Enlightenment debates over the scope of viable “knowledge.” His encyclopedic ambitions might seem absurd to later observers had he not actually investigated many of these stated objectives during the remaining eleven years of his life. Following Francis Bacon’s system, his expansive

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vision of knowledge was devised according to the three main branches of History, Philosophy, and Poetry. Not limiting himself to South Asia, Jones extended his inquiries to East Asia, China, Kashmir, and Tibet. He named various scientific, as well as political objectives; contemporary issues as well as those related to antiquity. Not surprisingly, once he arrived Jones voraciously sought out the languages and texts he felt would provide him with knowledge of Asiatic origins of civilization. Despite this “liberal-imperialist” attitude, Jones’s scholarly endeavors, though often in service to his ideological beliefs, did advance the legitimacy of Indian culture in the eyes of many Europeans.17 Indeed, Jones’s aspirations for totalized knowledge of India were never really tempered during his lifetime. Six years after his arrival, and five before his death, Jones estimated that he would attain “a complete knowledge of India” before the end of the eighteenth century (Works v. ii, 184). While this view of his own scholarly aspirations did not appear to change during his stay in India, Jones did reshape his absolutist view of British dominion by arguing for the enfranchisement of certain individual rights. Mukherjee notes that by 1786 Jones was defending property rights for Indian individuals, as well as the freedom to practice their own religions. Jones’s administrative duties contributed directly to many of his academic concerns, highlighting the associations between power and knowledge that lay at the core of the Orientalists’ work in early colonial Bengal. As a court official, he worked in conjunction with Hindu and Islamic specialists in the dispensation of law. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, Jones was capable of examining and verifying the textual reasoning of the Islamic experts. Yet, Jones did not know Sanskrit, and thus had to work through intermediary Persian translations of Sanskritic texts. Jones’s initial desire to learn Sanskrit, however, was not a result of an intellectual desire, but rather an attempt to free himself from the need for translators. Without this skill, he was unable to verify the opinions provided by the various Hindu scholars appointed to Supreme Court service. Jones would lament, “I can no longer bear to be at the mercy of our Pundits, who deal out Hindu law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made” (Works v. ii, 67). Rosane Rocher points out that the pundits were working from a very different set of scholarly traditions and Jones’s frustration was likely caused by cultural misunderstanding—though it is tempting to ascribe at least some causality to resistance. The dharmasastra tradition dealt specifically with the ideas of Hindu law but was not a primary school of specialization in Bengal.18 Rather, logic (nyaya) seems to have been the Bengali specialization of choice. Thus, most of the Bengali pundits who worked for the British Court

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had limited experience with the specific dharmasastric tradition of Sanskritic textual interpretation from which the British sought knowledge. In fact, Rocher notes that there was a renaissance in Bengal of dharmasastra during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that came as a direct result of British demand. Furthering the confusion, the dharmasastra tradition did not offer the singular types of pronouncements to which the British were accustomed. Instead, dharmasastra was characterized by “a multiplicity of authoritative texts and a variety of commentaries that, in Indian fashion, sought to integrate and reconcile conflicting statements by the application of interpretory rules of mimamsa and the entire array of punditic learning and skill” (“Weaving Knowledge” 237).19 Consequently, Jones learned Sanskrit in order to decipher the various texts himself and thereby check the power of those pundits he felt were taking advantage of him. Linguistic and textual knowledge provided Jones with a direct route to oversight and control. His linguistic skills allowed him to achieve a remarkable proficiency in the language within a very short period of time. It was this skill in Sanskrit, possessed by only a handful of Europeans, which would lead to Jones’s most celebrated scholarly achievements. Thus, it was precisely this nexus of knowledge and power, Orientalism and colonial rule, which catalyzed the study of India in Europe. Linguistic proficiency, prior to Jones’s tenure, revolved around the languages of actual usage in late eighteenth-century India. But Sanskrit was alive as a textual language and as such provided an important avenue into the Indian past. Like Latin, Sanskrit could be viewed as a repository of the greatness of a previous civilization based on its status as a written and recited language, but not a spoken one. Jones’s philological interest in the language contained assumptions about tradition, civilization and religion that certainly carried over basic assumptions from Enlightenment arguments on the status of antiquity, as well as from the eighteenth-century British vogue for neoclassical aesthetic experimentation. He was a man shaped by his own British inflections of the Enlightenment, including a faith in the relative age and textualization of a language as a marker for that language’s “civilizational” status. While he was an Anglican Christian, Jones’s Enlightenment-inflected attitudes allied him with the notion that the existence of these texts was crucial to the documentation and examination of the “natural” world. By creating The Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, Jones facilitated the transmission of the Orientalists’ scholarly achievements to Europe and the United States. The society trafficked in a broad range of pronouncements— ranging from zoological and botanical observations to comparative assessments of European and Asiatic cultures. Jones became the society’s

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president and ushered in a new era of European knowledge production about Asia. Within a few decades, similar societies committed to disseminating “Oriental” knowledge were instituted throughout Europe and in America. But, for the following half century, The Asiatic Society of Bengal, as well as its publication, Asiatick Researches, would be the primary institution for relating knowledge of India to a European audience.20 It was Jones’s combination of immense enthusiasm and copious output which did much to circulate a greatly expanded vision of India to the West. His Third Anniversary Discourse to the Society, “On the Hindus,” was not the first account of the linguistic affinity between the languages of European and Indian antiquity. However, it was Jones’s reputation as a scholar that gave great credence to this famous and often quoted passage: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. (Collected Works 252)

Jones’s commentary, on the linguistic affinity between European and Asiatic antiquity, would dramatically affect the burgeoning science of language— which would take shape, during the nineteenth century, into the field we now call linguistics. The comparative philology utilized by Jones would extend European thinking on the nature and origins of “Western” language towards an Indo-European source where, for the most part, it remains today. At its core, this connection between Asia and Europe would provide tremendous intellectual fodder in Europe, eliciting both celebratory and condemnatory responses. In Great Britain the success of colonial rule in India would soon undermine the comparative framework being implemented through Jones’s brand of textual inquiry. This institutionalization of Sanskrit within a European model of education would first take place on the subcontinent soon spreading to Continental Europe. The study of Sanskrit in Britain would not become institutionalized until the middle of the nineteenth century, when a chair in Sanskrit at Oxford was established—some thirty years after being established in the universities of Germany and France. Jones’s efforts to provide a connection between the cultures of East and West had quite a bit to do with the universal vision of reason that the

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discourse of the Enlightenment had produced in Europe during the eighteenth century. By revealing India’s past greatness, as well as making a connection between that culture’s accomplishments and those of classical Greece and Rome, he provided a view of history that was consistent with a broader Enlightenment view; namely, that the present was inferior when compared with antiquity. In fact, this view was also consistent with the Brahmanical view of history, which considered the present (kali-yuga) to be a decline from an illustrious golden age (satya-yuga). Of course, this view of history presented one of the ways in which scholarship and colonial power facilitated one another. If trying to justify colonial rule, colonizers would be hardpressed to reconcile the use of authoritarian measures to rule over peoples who, according to the colonizers’ own standards, had exhibited such remarkable cultural advances. Thus, colonialism necessitated the later version of Indian history, in which Anglicists, Evangelists, and the Utilitarians argued that India had not degenerated from some greatness but rather, its current state was “emblematic of its immaturity” (Hutchins 11). These later characterizations of India were presented on the level of both cultural and political backwardness. While Jones was impressed, even awed, by Indian cultural achievements, he was quite insistent about the lack of Indian political development and insisted upon the need for absolute British power. This stance on India was completely at odds with his views on European polity: But your observation on the Hindus is too just: they are incapable of civil liberty; few of them have an idea of it; and those who have, do not wish it. They must (I deplore the evil, but know the necessity of it) they must be ruled by an absolute power; and I feel my pain alleviated by knowing the natives themselves as well as from observation, that they are happier under us than they were or could have been under the Sultans of Delhi or petty Rajas. (Works v. ii 712–713)

The parenthetical reference to the evil of absolute power was Jones’s attempt to explain his differing standards of political authority as applied to the subcontinent. In fact, in his studies of India and the other Asian nations, Jones concluded that Asia had so failed to produce a satisfactory governmental system, that “the religious manners and laws of the natives precluded even the idea of political freedom” (quoted in Mukherjee 125). Jones categorized the achievements of Asia as limited to the sphere of imagination, whereas “reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds” (quoted in Mukherjee 120). Thus, he perceived himself as extending reason’s gaze to Asia,

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excavating the human past for a discerning European audience. However, even if Asia’s accomplishments were limited to the sphere of imagination, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, many in Great Britain—coming from both orthodox and progressive points of view—would come to attack and discount the work of the Orientalists. Certainly there was a host of reasons for such a response. Amongst these must have been the cultural anxiety over European miscegenation, as well as re-theorizing the role of the rest of Asia to what had previously been thought to be of a decidedly European, white (and relatively recent) reconstruction of a Western “Classical” antiquity. In addition, religious orthodoxy would have been disturbed by the various dates being ascribed to the historical development of Sanskrit—many of which were decidedly antithetical to Mosaic conceptions of human history, and thus to Christian cosmology. Jones’s work was received enthusiastically throughout Europe. After his death in 1793, Jones’s influence was evidenced by the successive compilations of his work, the first in 1799, then again in 1805 and 1807. However, within a few years after his death, Jones’s life and work were subject to contestation and criticism in England, indicating a growing skepticism there over the value of the Orientalist’s work. The 1805 Collected Works of Sir William Jones, edited by a friend and colleague, John Shore, Lord Teignmouth displays precisely such anxiety over Jones’ legacy. Beginning with the “Preface” and continuing throughout the extensive biographical notes and commentary, there is a distinct defensiveness in Teignmouth’s tone. The “Preface” establishes a frame narrative that regularly extols the Christian virtues of the late scholar, as well as defending the political necessity of his work. Teignmouth’s evangelical connection to British politics is well documented; his biography of Jones, as well as his contextualization of the letters and essays, tend to forefront Jones’s faith in Christianity as well as his belief that his work in India strictly adheres to the Mosaic account of early human history.21 Clearly Jones and Teignmouth were similarly anxious to discredit Hindu claims to an antiquity which extended beyond that of Biblical time. There is a consistency with which Jones’s explorations of Hinduism, and Teignmouth’s defense of these, come at the expense of Islam. Neither of them is setting a precedent when they employ such a tactic. Hastings and Wilkins both defended Orientalist scholarship as a form of deliverance for the majority of Indians from the tyranny of Islam. This fracturing of the Orient seems to go beyond the Saidean thesis in that it forms a tripartite structure rather than a simple binary. To ignore these fracturings, which are clearly a condition of colonial and continental politics, seems to obfuscate important dynamic forces within such politics.

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Islam, over the course of the previous several hundred years, had proven to be a powerful antithesis to Christianity and, as such, was positioned both in relation to a European framework and within an Indian context. As I have already pointed out, the early Orientalists were very much concerned with excavating a Hinduism that had been repressed by years of Islamic rule. In his “Preliminary Discourse” to A Code of Gentoo Laws, Halhed points out that after the ravages of Islam, “a change of religion took place, and a contrariety of customs arose, and all affairs were transacted according to the principles of faith in the conquering party” (Halhed, Brock 183). He goes on to credit Hastings and the Orientalist excavations for reversing an Islamic policy where “terror and confusion found a way to all the people and justice was not impartially administered” (Halhed, Brock 183). Teignmouth’s biographical notes follow up on this theme and he begins his narration by recounting a confrontation Jones had with African Muslims on his way to India. He depicts Jones as encountering their religious bigotry in an elegantly erudite fashion. Eventually, Jones goes on to attack the Islamic conquest of the Hindus, “prosecuted with the zeal of a religious crusade” (Works v. II 21). There is no mention, however, of Hindu dominance in Bengal, where most of the landholders were Hindu Brahmins, often ruling over a majority Muslim peasantry. Jones points out that the British needed to be particularly prudent in their handling of the Hindus, who were “of course naturally disposed to apprehend the effects of a similar bigotry and intolerance in their European governors” (Works v. II 22). Obviously, Mughal rulers had to negotiate a similar disposition, allowing for a Hindu power elite to, in many instances, rule over their Muslim workers. In order to surmount the possibly negative appraisal of the Hindus, the British had to act by “the most liberal and equitable principles” (Works v.ii 22–3). Teignmouth’s shows the work of Jones as an act of toleration and acceptance, necessary for bringing stability to a Hindu populace subjugated by, and subsequently wary of, Islamic rule. These opportunities to discredit Islam in India have repercussions that go well beyond simply this particular Asian context. In a fascinating passage, Teignmouth digresses into an extended discussion on the religious tolerance of the sixteenth-century Mughal leader, Akbar. Teignmouth then claims that Muslims now have come to hold the example of Akbar’s tolerance and rule in low regard. Nearly a century after Teignmouth’s criticisms of Islam, when early Indian nationalists began to agitate against their colonial rulers, the situation became reversed in British public discourse and it was Islam that was valorized. We might consider such a reversal to be a prominent example of the fluidity of imperial representations in response to the needs and fears of public opinion in the metropolis.

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As we have seen so far, Orientalism in India arose in response to the exigencies of early British administration. Hastings, during his tenure as Governor-General, vastly expanded the territorial reach of British dominion in India. By the end of the eighteenth century they controlled nearly the entire subcontinent. Ironically, as the British stretched their administrative control, the efficacy of Hastings’s cultural policy of administration via indigenous language and culture became undermined by the success of British expansion. As different populations were consolidated under British rule, the variety of regional cultures in South Asia proved to be an obstacle to the policy of acculturation for company employees. While Orientalists in both Asia and Europe continued to delve into India’s textual antiquity, such work was no longer as instrumental to administrative concerns and cultural policy shifted towards Anglicization. These numerous regional cultures would merit scrutiny and study over the course of the next century, but a policy of Anglicization offered both a cohesive and expedient approach to managing the cultural complexities of a vast subcontinent. At the same time, while scholars and academics on the European continent embraced Hindu culture, the work of the Orientalists could not overcome the religious and cultural biases of most Britons and especially not of those the men making decisions about India. Though Hastings’s successor, Lord Cornwallis, adopted Hastings’s cultural policy, he was notable for his contempt of all things Indian, voicing harsh racial and cultural condemnation. Eventually, it was the work of a Scottish philosopher and historian who had never traveled to India and did not understand any Indian languages, and who actively sought to undermine the work of the early Orientalists, that most profoundly elucidates the entrenchment of the Orientalist project in modern thought. James Mill’s 1817 publication, The History of British India indicated a paradigm shift in colonial management, becoming the influential textbook and primer for British East India Company officials, as well as the standard nineteenth-century British history of India. THE HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA: FROM TEXTUAL ORIENTALISM TO INSTRUMENTAL ORIENTALISM As we have seen in the previous discussion of Hastings and Jones, textual antiquity became a means for both establishing a specific form of colonial management, as well as giving rise to a new line of intellectual inquiry in Europe. But the success of Mill’s History reveals a methodological shift in colonial rule; a shift highlighted by Mill’s distaste for what he saw as a misguided Orientalist project. Mill’s History resisted the early Orientalists’

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reliance upon language and antiquity and valorized instead the objectivity achieved only via critical distance. By placing Mill’s anti-textualist approach alongside the textuality of Jones and Hastings, I aim to show that the move away from the work of the early Orientalists marks an evolving Orientalism rather than its end. Though the early brand of Orientalism in India was certainly shaped by political and public sentiments in England, there was at least a degree of engagement with indigenous institutions and practices. Mill’s version of Orientalism attempted to issue statements about India with an almost willful disregard for the indigenous population, as well as for any valorization of Indian culture. Thus, unlike the early Orientalists who were committed to an excavation and elucidation of Indian culture, Mill, and later Thomas Babington Macauley, seemed intent on erasing indigenous institutions. In opposition to those who attempted to gain some linguistic and cultural familiarity with their subject matter, Mill sought to authorize his view of India with an objective clarity produced by the distance between observer and observed. Prior to writing his History, Mill was already an advocate of Utilitarianism and a well-known disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the liberal radical and founder of the Utilitarian school of thought. In fact, a number of scholars read the History as an attempt by Mill to use British India as a laboratory for Utilitarian concepts.22 As early as 1793, Bentham suggested utilizing Bengal as a proving ground for a system of universally applicable laws. He looked towards Bengal as an environment that lay in full contrast to that of England, suggesting, “[t]ill a lawgiver, who having been bred up with English notions, shall have learnt to accommodate his laws to the circumstances of Bengal, no other part of the globe can present a difficulty” (quoted in Majeed 125–6). Bentham was attempting to formulate a systematic approach to governance that would alleviate corruptive influences of power. A number of scholars have read Mill’s work as an extension of the principles developed earlier by Bentham. Mill scholar Javed Majeed points out that a “stress on an all encompassing and systematic approach was also the characteristic feature of the History, a text which reinforced Mill’s position as a spokesman for the philosophical radicals” (Majeed 127). The Utilitarians were active participants in the debates over the best modes of governance in India. In 1810 Mill considered utilizing Hindu institutions to enact reforms. However, seven years later, when his History was first published, Mill had shifted to advocating a policy of wholesale displacement of indigenous institutions. Indeed, Mill set his sights directly on Jones and the Orientalists as having an exaggerated appreciation for Indian antiquity.

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The vitriolic nature of Mill’s assessment of indigenous Indian culture seems particularly harsh when one considers his lack of experience with the languages and cultures of South Asia. In his introduction, Mill defends his qualifications by asserting that, by way of secondary and translated material, he actually has a more critical understanding of Indian affairs. Mill argues that by maintaining a distance from the object of study, one is more capable of producing an objective picture of Indian affairs than were Orientalists such as Jones. His fundamental Eurocentrism is evident at the beginning of his study where he asserts that, in order to study India, “the qualifications alone which can be acquired in Europe, would come, in an almost infinite degree, better fitted for the task” (Mill xxi–xxii).23 During the rest of the nineteenth century, these two brands of Orientalism existed in tension with one another, though there was little doubt as to the dominant variety. Mill’s History was followed, a decade later, with a reversal of British policy in India. Within that decade, Anglicization became the dominant mode for dealing with India—English the linguistic medium for administration. Meanwhile, Orientalists within European centers of learning continued their project of excavating Indian cultural antiquity. Though they no longer had the early Orientalists’ close ties to the administration, they continued a humanist project of studying and comparing the cultures of Orient and Occident. By the nineteenth century, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the subcontinent proved to be a barrier against the early Orientalists’ text-based approach to governance. Their incursions into Indian antiquity catalyzed academic interest in the Asian past, offering up the possibility (and for many, the threat) of connecting the early history of European civilization to that of Asia. In England, Horace Hayman Wilson and, later, Friedrich Max Muller (an expatriate German) continued to champion the study of Indian antiquity, arguing for its ongoing relevance to British rule and humanistic knowledge. Yet, an Anglicist approach to developing native intermediaries, as well as a shift from textualism to empiricism (from philology to ethnology and anthropology) would characterize British power as it came to control the entire subcontinent during the nineteenth century. Mill is a prime example of a dramatic methodological shift that occurs in the early nineteenth century. Though he was a philosophical radical who championed many of the most progressive British political ideas of the period, a prime objective of his History was to depict Indians in a manner contrary to that of the early Orientalists. While Hastings and Jones attempted to foster an appreciation for India, and especially for the antiquity of Sanskritic culture, Mill dismissed the view that the Indians had a long history of cultural

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achievement. As I have pointed out, the cultural humanism fostered by the early Orientalists was no longer a necessity to administrative concerns by the end of the eighteenth century. Rather, it was the instrumental use of India as site for experimenting with British political reform that became the provenance of this new brand of Orientalism—an Orientalism that was less concerned with the study of Indian culture than with attempting to issue statements about India via European paradigms.

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Chapter Three

Orientalism, Vedanta, and Indian Modernity: Raja Rammohan Ray on Sanskritic Antiquity

SOME TRANSITIONAL REMARKS ON MONOTHEISM, HINDUISM, AND THE EARLY ORIENTALISTS In the preceding chapter I outlined a number of political factors that determined the ways in which British Orientalists undertook their translations and explanations of a textual basis for Hinduism. Legal administration and the desire to usurp Islamic influence were key motivations. I will explore a third dynamic in the present chapter: The early Orientalists’ general view of “Godhood” in Hindu scripture.1 In his “Introduction” to The British Discovery of Hinduism, a collection of excerpts from some of the earliest British works dealing with Hinduism, P.J. Marshall points out that, with “the possible exception of Jones,” the early “Orientalists” were not trying to understand what Hinduism meant to the people on the ground (Marshall 43). Their research was academic and textual. In focusing so specifically on texts, these early scholars were contributing to and reinforcing a division which still remains in place today—between the “popular” and the “philosophical” in Hinduism. Marshall goes on to add that these Orientalists “created Hinduism in their own image” (43). I would like to modify Marshall’s statement somewhat. While many British Orientalists investigating Hinduism were certainly judging Sanskrit texts from within a Biblical frame of reference, they struggled to reconcile the apparent contradictions within Hinduism, as well as contradictions in relation to Christianity. Perhaps nowhere was this struggle more apparent than in efforts by Orientalists to show a precedent for monotheism in Hindu antiquity. Two of the fundamental criticisms against Hinduism arising out of Anglicist and Christian circles were the ubiquitous nature of idolatry and polytheism. However, by pointing out a textual basis for monotheism, Orientalists sought to disarm these critics. Obviously, for many Christians, the 55

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existence of multiple gods, as well as the idols that served to represent these gods, was pure anathema.2 The Orientalists, by providing a textual precedent for a monotheistic past, contributed to representations of a degraded present. And, as noted before, by explicating a past which accommodated Christian notions of what was civilized and advanced, Orientalists displayed how Hinduism might be amenable to Christian belief; not a heathen and paganistic void to be usurped by the wholesale Christianization of the sub-continent. The idea of mutual intelligibility proved to be an underlying drive behind the manner and style of the translations and interpretations that the Orientalists transmitted to Europe. Again, the struggle to pin down a textual basis for monotheism, and to valorize such a conception of God as the “true” basis for Hinduism, was an attempt at providing an ideological conduit for converting Hindus to Christianity. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, John Shore (later Lord Teignmouth), the fourth Governor-General of Bengal would pronounce that the Vedanta was the true basis for Hinduism (Dhar 27). And in 1805, H.T. Colebrooke would publish some pointed commentary on the late Vedas, the Upanisads; those tracts that form the basis for the philosophical tradition called Vedanta. In this very influential tract, On the Vedas, Colebrooke would conclude that: The real doctrine of the whole Indian scripture is the unity of the deity, in which the universe is comprehended: and the seeming polytheism which it exhibits offers the elements, and the stars, and planets, as gods . . . But the worship of deified heroes is no part of that system; nor are the incarnations of deities suggested in any other portion of the text, which I have yet seen. (Colebrooke 100)

One of the West’s most forceful and consistent criticisms of non-Islamic religion was the so-called worship of idols. This became a critique of the Indian present that was prevalent. Both European and Indian textualists, such as Colebrooke and Rammohan Ray, proffered Vedanta as the core of “Hinduism.” Yet, since this position went beyond monotheism and into monism, such a view also carried within it the “mystical” core that was increasingly being located as the source of Eastern thought—a stereotypical and essentialized version of the Orient. In this chapter, I will explore Vedanta and some movements that contributed to Indian proto-nationalist sentiment during the nineteenth century, concentrating on appropriations of and assertions made via Orientalist discourse by a central figure in Indian modernization, Raja Rammohan Ray.

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Ray was part of that first generation of Bengalis living in a life-world transformed as a result of British colonization and rule. He would become one of the first Indians to assert elements of a specific “Hindu” identity that was cognizant of, and responding to, European criticisms of India. Ray’s utilization of Vedanta was an effective tool for asserting the monotheistic basis of Hindu “tradition”—an assertion would have mixed and lasting consequences for conceptions of India and the East. INTRODUCTION: VEDANTA AND ORIENTALISM A fact not sufficiently emphasized in the literature on the East-West encounter in modern times is that the Bengali intelligentsia was the first Asian social group of any size whose mental world was transformed through its interactions with the West. (Raychaudhuri ix:1989) By 1830, Calcutta had Hindu College, the only Western-styled institution of higher learning to be found anywhere in what is presently known as the third world. It had several printing and publishing establishments, turning out thousands of copies of Western scientific and other textbook sources in Indian-language translations; it had three colleges with modern scientific laboratories, each with a full curriculum of science courses. Calcutta had a free public library as early as 1816. By 1830, Calcutta had three major Bengali newspapers that carried foreign and local news. (Kopf 42–3:1978)

The development of British colonialism in Bengal during the late eighteenth century radically affected life in the region. Western institutions of learning and belief circulated rapidly throughout the new colony, facilitated by the introduction of print technology. The two excerpts that make up my epigraph both highlight the unique situation of Bengalis, for whom such influence became pervasive at a relatively early stage in European colonial expansionism. In this chapter I proceed from the early work of the British Orientalists to the writings of Rammohan Ray and the organization he helped found, the Calcutta Unitarian Association. This group would eventually develop into the proto-nationalist Brahmo Samaj, an assembly devoted to reforming religious and cultural practices in the region. As I have shown, Orientalism in Bengal (during the early colonial administration of that region) revolved around interpreting religious texts in order to ascertain and adjudicate codes and habits of the native populace. This led to a steady European exploration

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and commentary upon Sanskrit literature—a body of work that would contribute greatly to The Oriental Renaissance so exhaustively documented by Raymond Schwab.3 Crucial to this process of Europeanizing Indian antiquity was the celebrated announcement from William Jones, a leading British and late-Enlightenment luminary, that Sanskrit was linguistically related to Latin and Greek—and thus, in terms of the European conception of the development of civilization, to Europe’s own Classical antiquity. My focus here is a particular strand of thought arising out of Sanskritic literature and commentary. I begin with the basic premise that a version of “textualized” Hinduism was being brought into a comparatist framework dominated by European values of text—the “invention of Hinduism” debate.4 During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the body of textual commentary surrounding the late Vedas (Vedanta, or “end of the Vedas”) came to be seen as the philosophical core of Hinduism. Vedanta came to the fore, at least in part, as a result of the value being assigned to ideas revolving around text and print; ideas arising partially out of the European interest being paid to Indian textual antiquity, and partially through the new primacy of print technology. Also contributing to this rise were debates over “backwards” indigenous cultural practices such as idolatry and polytheism. A transnational discussion in the 1820s, sparked by Unitarian criticisms of Trinitarian theology in Europe and the United States, certainly played a part as well. As I will show, the Unitarian / Trinitarian controversy created a conceptual space of critique into which Vedanta fit quite well: these various forces helped to shape a modern version of Vedanta, a traveling form of the philosophico-religious system that, for its proponents, represented a perfected and uncorrupted version of Hinduism. A modern form of Vedanta arose as a textualized formation that often mirrored, and occasionally distorted, the controversies surrounding the role of religion in the post-Enlightenment European state. First I will locate the place of Vedanta in early Orientalist assessments of an Indian past. Then I will examine how Orientalist discourse and print technology coalesce for Raja Rammohan Ray, one of the earliest and most prominent Indian modernizers, allowing him to utilize Vedanta to rebuff missionary attacks on Indian religious tradition. Ray, whose polyglot abilities—Bengali, Hindustani, Persian and Sanskrit—permitted him to utilize the multiple linguistic arrangements of pre-British Mughal Bengal, eventually added the English language (and later some Latin, Greek and Hebrew) to his linguistic store. This mastery of multiple language communities allowed him to take part in debates arising from the British presence in Bengal (such as the issue of sati—the practice of burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands) as well as matters of Christian theology born out of tensions in Europe and North America.

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Vedanta is the name given to a very broad body of religious and philosophical discourse surrounding the late Vedas—the Upanisads. The oscillation between religion and philosophy in Western usages of Vedanta accounts for much of the nineteenth-century potency of deploying Vedanta within and outside of Orientalist discourse. Vedanta could be applied to issues raised by theology, as well as to questions of ontology and epistemology. Though Vedantic scholarship existed in a host of different forms, the particular form relied upon by virtually all of its prominent nineteenth-century adherents (including Ray, Müller and Vivekananda) was Advaita (non-dualist) Vedanta: This was, in essence, the argument for a conception of divinity as uniform. Codified during the ninth century CE by Shankaracharya (Shankara), this rigorous conception of the “divine” remained highly influential in India—particularly in relation to the subcontinent’s other major religious formations, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam. Shankaran Vedanta argued for a rigidly defined monism: a position which superseded any other version of theism in that it promoted the inherent unity of divinity, a unity which would thus be intrinsic to all facets of human materiality and consciousness. Thus Shankara developed the implication, found in the Upanisads, that all reality was a single principle, brahman.5 As such, the practitioner’s goal would be to transcend the limitations of identity rooted in the self (atman) and to realize one’s unity with brahman. Such rigid monism explained human experiential knowledge as the individual’s differentiation from the universe’s essential “oneness.” Thus, the impulse for seeking divinity involved a movement outside of the individuated “self ” in order to experience the unity of all things. Vedanta’s conception of the mind / body problem necessitated the rejection of the body as a transient, ephemeral basis for human perception of the material world. This monistic view of divinity transgressed the human-divine hierarchy developed within the Western monotheistic tradition (stretching from and through Judaic, Christian and Islamic conceptions of “God”). Instead of viewing divinity from a theistic imagination, such monism argued for a mind / body unity that could only be developed under rigorous and austere methods, and which promised religious enlightenment. I suggest that it is Vedanta’s mystico-religious tenets that inspired so many Western observers to presume a mystical faith system for the entire Orient. Interests in text, language and the question of origins coalesced around Vedanta during the rise of British colonialism. The discourse of “civilization” in Europe played a particularly influential role in the revival of Vedanta by Indians seeking to represent themselves to the West. As I noted in chapter two, ancient systems of thought were extremely important to discourses of

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civilization, as their existence served to highlight the degradation or “fallen” nature of the colonized, justifying the presence of the colonizer as savior or redeemer. As part and parcel of modernizing Europe’s colonial endeavor came an unprecedented large-scale movement of people and goods across the globe. For the first time, then, geographical translocation allowed for evidence of antiquity to be imported to new sites. This information provided new fuel for systematic empirical treatments of the question of human origins. Empiricist strategies of accumulating concrete “proof ” and scientific methods of assessing evidence were being brought to bear on the rapidly secularizing, industrializing and technologizing life-worlds of the colonizing European powers. For Bengali proponents of Vedanta during the nineteenth century—which includes many if not most reform-oriented brahmins—the Orientalists had established avenues of discursive exchange between past text and present condition, allowing for the possibility of reworking both religious and social identity on a massive scale. The combination of textual past and print present was a brand new form of social power. In this space, Vedanta became a sphere of shared discourse between Orientalists and Bengali religious reformers.6 Non-Western ancient texts brought along a new kind of threat to Christian orthodoxy. This fresh empirical evidence (particularly with literary texts) necessitated conjecture, exploration, elaboration, and analysis. The entry of a new body of evidence into European intellectual circles forced empiricists to respond to their own late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury debates about the origins, nature and roles of religion, especially in what would become the modern state. During the Enlightenment, anti-clerical thinkers like Voltaire posed the ancient civilizations of China and India as foils against Christian claims to creation and origin. However, at that time the lack of any established, non-religious European presence in Asia made many of those sources suspect. Indeed some texts were completely fabricated specifically to enhance or discredit particular arguments occurring in Europe. The work of the British Orientalists offered the first systematic exploration and dissemination of India’s Sanskritic culture outside of Asia, bringing a new level of accuracy and reliability with regard to discussions about nonWestern antiquity. Recent debates on the colonial roots of textual Hinduism reveal a particular set of concerns surrounding Vedanta. While it can be viewed as a colonially-inflected construct, Vedanta must also be viewed as a “textual” solution to the European-conceived problematic of “civilization.” The elevated, or “modern” status of European civilization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was predicated on literacy. Therefore, debates over the

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hierarchical and developmental nature of civilizations were deeply rooted in the concept of language. Indeed, the existence of writing and literacy were indices of a culture’s relative evolution in relationship to an imagined European center. Within such criteria for “civilized” status, Vedanta was enlisted in the construction of Indian Modernity—both the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj sought access to European notions of civilization through Vedanta. Vedanta could provide a space to show the Hindu’s equality with the European / Christian, and even to show how the Hindu might be dominant: through a claim to the origins of religious thought the Easterner could pronounce the spiritual core of humanity as being of Asian provenance. Though the administration of India in the late eighteenth century often had the theoretical pretension of being an empirical science, British colonial intervention nonetheless involved an ongoing tension between religious conflict and collaboration. Christian humanism often overlapped with liberal sentiment when it came to debating the ethics of ruling over a sub-populace of the less than (or even, according to some, non-) civilized. Of course, the very concept of civilization was rooted in a battle over texts—ur-texts that connected the culture of the present to the culture of the past. The contradiction then presented by those who had access to text and monotheistic religion would set off a whole range of explanatory gestures—ranging from the dismissal of such texts as forgeries, to the complexities of late-nineteenthcentury Aryan race theory. Vedanta enters into the purview of Orientalists and elite religious reformers, of those trying to negotiate a “modern” Hinduism, both in response to and accordance with some of the intellectual values of contemporary Europe. Vedanta satisfied European valuation on a number of fronts. It was based on textual commentary, philosophical idealism, and a rigid monotheism. These were values that the elite indigenous modernizers in Bengal could enlist in the aid of social transformation. Rammohan Ray was one the earliest figures to transgress a variety of orthodox brahminical practices in Bengal. Vedanta was presented by Ray as a textual and traditional body of Hindu discourse, idealized through a lens of “reason.”7 Ray relied heavily on Advaita Vedanta to defend indigenous “civilization” against the attacks of Baptist missionaries. He achieved broad transmission of these ideas through print technologies imported by Europeans to the subcontinent. Thus Vedanta serves as an interesting marker of the complex path of European “literariness” (or, perhaps, literateness), and the civilizational sense of superiority anchored in this linguistic and textual lineage. European notions of “civilization,” indeed the notion of a coherent “Europe,” were premised on the belief that a nearly 3000-year-old genealogy, dating back

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to Ancient Greece, through Roman Christendom, and into Modern Europe provided a continuous and stable connection to the past. This myth was supported through a comparative discourse of literary texts, primarily via the Romance languages and ancient Greek documents—both directly by European scholars as well as through a series of (silenced) Islamic mediations. In this reconstituted and modernizing Europe of the mid- to late eighteenth century, the empirical nature of European expansion and the circulation of new proof of non-Primitive pasts, all set the stage for a cultural disturbance within the family of languages. These languages had previously been accounted for within a specific geographical region, a genealogy contained within Europe.8 Orientalist incursions into this genealogy of languages affected the very highest levels of European thought. Indo-European, the linguistic category invented as a consequence of the work of British Orientalists, thus became an area of tremendous cultural anxiety and contestation—later contributing to the sorts of racialized thinking (i.e. Aryan race theory) that would have devastating effects during the twentieth century.9 Any exploration of indigenous responses to Christianity in nineteenth-century India must keep the following in mind: Orientalist conceptions of the East inherited many of the intellectual influences of pre-British India—particularly the stringent monotheism of Islam and the non-theistic notion of the divine offered by Buddhism. In that sense, Vedanta had spent a significant amount of time being influenced and shaped by the numerous conceptions of divinity being put forth by other religious traditions within the subcontinent prior to the arrival of Europeans. As we have seen in Chapter Two, the Christian bent of many of the early Orientalists produced a desire, within a number of religious and political figures both European and non-European, to invigorate such pre-existent lines of thought. Of course, the British were a source of heretofore unseen power in South Asia. Thus, South Asians were more than willing to enter into the dominant (and dominating) logic of a Eurocentric Orientalism. In the following pages I will explore how religious reformers in both Bengal and Great Britain enter into the spaces created by Orientalist discourse in Bengal. Vedanta, Unitarianism and a new scrutiny of the concept of monotheism coalesced into what would become a transnational debate over the unity of divinity, an early attempt to account for and accommodate religious difference. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, India would become critical to such debates in the Anglo-American world and the message of spiritual unity would come to comprise a sizable portion of representations of India, by both Indians and non-Indians, in the West.

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RAMMOHAN RAYVEDANTA AND MONOTHEISM IN EARLY COLONIAL BENGAL The term “Raja” (or “King”) denotes royalty, an odd designation for one who has been widely characterized as the father of modern India and a chief catalyst in a movement that would later become very important to early Indian nationalism. In the Dictionary of Modern Indian History, Raja Rammohun Roy is frequently referred to simply as “the Raja” (734). The Mughal emperor, Akbar Shah II, conferred this title upon him so that he might go to England as an envoy to the court of St. James and argue, in front of the king, that the stipend received by Emperor Akbar was inadequate. Thus, in an interesting series of semantic displacements, this dictionary entry explains that the “Hindu” designation for “king,” conferred by an Islamic ruler, becomes the common title given to a figure deemed responsible for initiating modern Indian statehood. Such semantic slippages are particularly apt for distinguishing someone like Rammohan Ray because of the remarkable fissures of language and culture that he bridged in early-nineteenth-century Bengal (indeed, consider the change in the English transliteration between the Dictionary’s spelling of Ray’s name and my own, the latter now considered the more “correct” spelling).10 To my reading of this dictionary entry on Ray’s life, I add the following supplement: Ray was one of the first prominent South Asians to travel to England, and he did so in breach of a brahminical caste regulation against traveling overseas.11 The British East India Company, which did not recognize the “Raja’s” newly-conferred title, allowed him to go to England nonetheless, where he arrived in 1830. He would never return to India, achieving a degree of celebrity and recognition in the West before dying in Bristol during the fall of 1833. Ray was born around 1773 and was part of the first generation in Bengal to experience full-scale British rule from birth onwards. He was raised in a family of wealth and privilege, their prosperity secured by property holdings. Though the details of his early life are in some dispute, it is clear from Ray’s family name that his ancestors had status within the Mughal imperial bureaucracy (Robertson 11).12 Ray learned Arabic and Persian from his father, “as preparation for government service,” and Sanskrit from his mother in order to serve his religious duties. Bruce Robertson, in his recent study of the Raja, suggests that Ray would spend his lifetime traversing this cultural polarity established between mother and father—the two separate writing communities of a worldly Bengali brahmin of the day. Thus Ray would become one of those who had, during the previous two centuries, developed a strategy

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of social accommodation to the Islamo-Persian influence of Mughal rule. There was a precedent amongst certain brahmins in Bengal who had made such accommodations for quite some time and, therefore, these negotiations between religious and political power were not uncommon.13 Ray’s family name signifies his place within the custom of laukika, or worldly brahmins in service to the Mughal emperor. Ray’s family would have been stigmatized by many Orthodox brahmins, for whom the priestly life of a vaidika was not to be abandoned. In many ways, the adult Ray’s brand of “equal-opportunity” criticism against religious orthodoxy, which was to become his modus operandi, was influenced by the pre-British cultural dynamics of Bengal. During his lifetime Rammohan Ray’s linguistic faculties and comparatist bent would ingratiate him to, as well as alienate him from, a startling variety of communities in Bengal and abroad.14 A large audience in both India and Great Britain received Ray’s English and Bengali writings. Often, these writings addressed the task of assessing and propagating India’s textual antiquity, its Sanskritic tradition. As a Vedantin (scholar of the Vedas), Ray took it upon himself to edit and translate the Upanisads for an English reading public. In another work, Ray edited the Gospels. Both these acts were soundly condemned by Hindu and Christian religious orthodoxies successively. Interestingly enough, in an exclamatory call for stringent monotheism, a youthful Ray’s first publication was in Persian, the language of India’s previous Imperial rulers. The overlap in Ray’s use of these languages, occurring as they were within Bengal at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, demonstrates the political and social positions he occupied throughout his lifetime. In Persian, English, and Bengali (and as an interpreter of Sanskrit) Ray alternately addressed the three principle language communities that were historically intersecting within Bengal, thus thoroughly circulating his voice within the discourses of power in Bengal and England.15 The majority Bengali Hindu landholders in the region, of which Ray was a part, were busily reacting to the economic and political upheaval in the region. As the fortunes of the Mughal Empire withered away over the course of the eighteenth century, the mercantile wing of British overseas ventures would blossom into the full-fledged political and economic management of the Indian subcontinent. Crucial to this rise of British power were the interactions occurring between the British East India administrators and their Indian informants (see Chapter Two). Ray’s regular affiliations with the British did not occur until the turn of the century when he moved to Calcutta. His linguistic faculties made him a prime commodity within the administrative circles of translation and linguistic work that were part and parcel of the East Indian

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Company’s Bengali holdings. Around 1804, Ray became a diwan in the company—the highest post for a native at that time. Like many enterprising and affluent Bengali landholders of the day, Ray entered into contact with the company through money-lending institutions in Calcutta. There, Bengalis provided loans to enterprising company employees, and he himself speculated on company paper operations (Robertson 19). While company reforms enacted around the year of Ray’s birth were intended to curb such enterprising behavior, corruption was not uncommon at the turn of the eighteenth century when Ray was moving actively in company circles.16 The company man who hired Ray as a diwan, secretary to the Collector of Dacca-Jalalpur, Thomas Woodforde, had earlier borrowed five thousand rupees from Ray. In Max Müller’s biographical sketch of Ray, he points out that Woodforde allowed a special clause into Ray’s contract that he should not be kept standing in the presence of his employer, illustrating the “special” circumstance of the Raja (Müller 17). Ray would eventually become Woodforde’s munshi when Woodforde became Registrar of the Appellate Court of Murshidabad. It was here, in what had once been the seat of Mughal Adminstration in Bengal, that Ray composed the Persian tract Tohfatu ‘l-muwahiddin (Tohfat), or “To the Believers in One God.” Written between 1803 and 1804, the Tohfat “attacked religious leadership in general and Brahmans in particular” (Robertson 20). Thus, Ray’s initial entry into public discourse via Persian, the language of the Mughal Court, displays the ease with which the young scholar perceived various religious and political perspectives.17 Both the language in which the Tohfatu ‘l-muwahiddin is composed, as well as its polemic emphasis, reflect the religious and theological wrangling occurring in Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ray provides a powerful and sustained argument, via the stringent monotheism of Islam, for the essential monotheism of all religious beliefs. The piece is an examination of the concept of God in various religions. Ray’s simple premise is this: a fundamental split exists amongst religions between natural state and human habit. Nature provides for one true god, habit stokes the existence of many. In the Tohfat, Ray makes a very enlightened appeal to reason, claiming that one must carefully examine claims to the supernatural: all events have a cause, a reason, but individuals and institutions take advantage of situations where such a reason is not explicit, claiming for themselves supernatural powers. Ray delivers an impassioned entreaty, appealing to a turn away from “special beliefs in the forms of pure truths resting on miracles or on the power of the tongue” (Works 956). Indeed, such calls to reason might be viewed as being in line with general European Enlightenment criticisms of

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human religious behavior. His attack, couched as it is in Islamic terms, is aimed at faith without reason. This is accomplished through a careful dissection of how reliance upon magic and superstition (he lists raising the dead and ascending to heaven as examples) reflects the corruption of most varieties of religious behavior. Again and again Ray returns to the idea of “One Being” as a means for reconciling the diversity of human religion. He utilizes the reoccurring phrase, “the truth and falsehoods of various religions,” in an effort to traverse the boundaries of any single religious perspective. While Christianity and Orientalism have established various means of setting up comparisons between an expanding field of religions and cultures in early colonial Bengal, Ray utilizes this situation to construct a measured criticism of all religions. His examination, composed in Persian and utilizing Islamicist categories, is highly dismissive of supernatural, faith-based explanations as it seeks out a path among multiple religious traditions. No religion is spared from some measure of criticism. But his attack is clearly directed at Bengali brahmins, whom Ray blamed for a corrupt social system. Generously supplemented with quotations from the Koran,18 Ray would extend his defense of monotheism to Sanskrit sources. Over the course of the next two decades, as Ray’s prominence as a public figure increased, his stances on various political positions of the day (including sati, widow remarriage and English-language education) would be constructed out of such a characteristically comparatist framework. Jogendra Ghose’s “Introduction” to a 1906 compilation of Ray’s English writing emphasizes the contextual nature of these ideas. Ghose quotes Count Goblet d’Alviella: “It has been said that Rammohun Roy delighted to pass for a believer in the Vedanta with the Hindus, for a Christian among the adherents of that creed, and for a disciple of the Koran with the champions of Islamicism. The truth is that his eclecticism equaled his sincerity” (xiii).19 As I will document, Ray’s eventual reliance upon Vedanta comes about as result of influences and pressure coming from all three of these religious traditions. During the decade following his publication of the controversial Tohfat, Ray set about mastering the English language. He assumed a post as munshi (private secretary) with another company official, John Digby. It was Digby who aided Ray in his study of the language. Robertson speculates that this must also have been the time when Ray privately studied the Brahmasutras with a pundit, thus securing a more thorough grounding in brahminical literature. Niranjan Dhar goes further, stating that it was during Ray’s stay in Rangpur, where he has already started to assemble people for “meditation of one Supreme Brahman,” that he began translation work of the Upanisads

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(38). Over the course of the next ten years Ray continued his association with the East India Company through his employment under Digby, moving with Digby to Jessore (now in Bangaldesh), Bhagalpur (modern Bihar) and, in 1809, to Rangpur. In Rangpur Ray was near the border states of Bhutan and Cooch Behar and thus was privy to the frequent disputes that occurred on the fringes of British dominion. In 1815, with his permanent move to Calcutta, Rammohan Ray established himself as an important voice in these debates. He immediately began mixing within the most erudite circles of bhadralok learning,20 spending considerable time at the College of Fort William, the centre of Orientalist studies in Bengal. Again, the affiliation with Digby facilitated this connection, as Digby was part of the college’s first class. Bruce Robertson points out that “[t]he list of pandits in Gilchrist’s Hindustani, Colebrooke’s Sanskrit, and Carey’s Bengali departments reads like a Who’s Who of the nineteenthcentury Bengali academic community” (23). Later that year Ray published his first essay on Vedanta, Vedantasara, or “Abridgement of the Vedant.”21 Initially published in Bengali, Ray offered an English translation of Vedantasara the following year. The Bengali translations, according to Robertson, “represent the first time, on record, of the sacred Upanisads being rendered by a Hindu into an Indian vernacular language for a non Sanskrit-reading public since the work of Dara Shukoh’s Benares pandits” (30). The 1816 English-language translation of the Upanisads was the first English language treatment of the Vedas since Colebrooke’s 1805 treatise.22 The Vedantasara, much like the earlier Tohfat, would again place Ray, and his stance on brahminical corruption, into the center of controversy. Whereas the Tohfat had already positioned Ray in opposition to idolatry and polytheism through Islam, his abridgement of the Vedanta would mark an important moment in claiming a core “Hindu” religion. In both cases, Ray shares Islam and Christianity’s antagonism towards the culturally “backwards” traits of present-day brahminical behavior. But the Vedantasara made the move to defending Hinduism as a distinct and textually verifiable religion to a modernizing Bengali elite, to missionary critics of Indian indigenous culture, and, more broadly, to Western conceptions of Hinduism. In his introduction to the 1816 English language translation, Ray makes his primary aim explicit: “In order, therefore, to vindicate my own faith, and that of our early forefathers, I have been endeavoring . . . to convince my countrymen of the true meaning of our sacred books” (3). Making a claim for the Vedas as divine in origin, “affirmed to be coeval with creation,” Ray goes on to take aim at brahminical orthodoxy as he sees it. The Vedas have been “concealed within the dark curtain of the Sanskrit language, and the

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brahmins permitting themselves alone to interpret, or even touch any book of the kind, the Vedanta, although perpetually quoted, is little know to the public” (3). Ray’s goal was to counter the priestly monopoly of text and remedy it with his translation into Hindi and Bengali. The beneficent result was to be distributed “free of cost, among my own countrymen” (4). The tract itself is short and pointed in its aims. It follows the tenets of Shankara’s interpretation of the Vedas, which viewed divinity as holistic, ineffable, and inseparable from all elements of creation and being. Ray’s monotheistic monism is described thus: “The Supreme Being is not comprehensible by vision, or any other organs of sense; nor can he be conceived by means of devotion, or virtuous practices . . . inaccessible to the reasoning faculty, not to be compassed by description; beyond the limits of the explanation of the Veda, or of human conception” (7). The text struggles with the inscrutability of divinity through language. Thus passages such as, “He is the smallest of the small, the greatest of the great; and yet is, neither small nor great,” highlight the paradox of ascertaining the “divine” in human language (11). Despite this resistance to any linguistic characterization of deity, Ray was attempting to utilize the human technology of print to break the “sacred” order of text held by brahmin orthodoxy. This was in addition to placing Indian theology and “tradition” in line with Western notions of civilization. While there is no question that Ray felt a proper British influence would have a positive influence on Bengal, his approach cannot be seen simply as a concession to European influence.23 The long-standing tradition of Vedanta, though certainly not the dominant variety of braminical scriptural interpretation in Bengal, provided an indigenous solution to the recently heightened argument against idolatry and polytheism proffered by East India Company servants and missionaries alike.24 While official East India Company policy was to ban missionary activity, many of the company employees held strong religious convictions. In addition, the presence of several small outposts belonging to other European powers near Calcutta provided determined missionaries with safe-havens from which to operate. The missionary presence in Bengal during that period was most concentrated in the Danish settlement of Serampore, where the Baptist press contributed significantly to the print discourse in Bengal. Ray’s claim that the Vedas were of divine origin would have been anathema to even the casual Christian, and thus sparked outcry from the Baptists in Serampore. Ray was already familiar with the Baptists due to his land-holdings in the region. The affiliation went even deeper, due to their shared sentiments on issues of brahmin reform. During the next fourteen years, Ray would continue to practice such

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polyvalent tactics, challenging multiple elements of Calcutta’s diverse political and religious milieu and thereby draw the censure of European Missionaries and Orthodox brahmins alike. During the next three years Ray regularly published translated extracts and commentaries from the Upanisads in Bengali, Hindustani and English, all of which were based on Shankara’s expositions. This was part of a continuing attempt to place Shankara’s interpretation of the Vedas into the center of Hindu belief and practice. However, Ray differed from Shankara in that he promoted an egalitarian Vedanta, a Vedanta that was not to be restricted only to the spiritual goals of brahmins but, instead, extended to worldly practice for all Hindus. Reinterpreting Shankara to suit current social issues, Ray argued that anyone, not just brahmins, was “qualified for theological studies and theognostic attainments,” and later argued that non-brahmins (Bengali Sudras, or lower castes) “were eligible for Brahma knowledge” (Robertson 63). He also argued that scripture did not support the practice of sati, one so shocking to European mores. Ray sought an indigenous basis for responding to European criticisms of Bengali social life. In response to social issues such as the treatment of women, of lower castes, and of foreigners, he preached an egalitarian brand of Vedanta. Ray’s Vedanta maintained the core philosophical principles of Shankaran Advaita Vedanta but ignored the dictates of caste-based “qualification” for Vedic study (adhikara).25 The person who engaged in worldly activities, who did not belong to the priestly class that dispensed spiritual and religious knowledge, was not precluded from such knowledge. Halbfass notes, “Again and again, Rammohan emphasizes that being a householder, having worldly, temporal goals is not incompatible with knowing the supreme Brahman” (209).26 In doing this, Ray was also trying to “marshal the considerable force of European public opinion behind his campaign” (Robertson 87). The sizeable print culture emerging in Bengal and urban regions of India insured that Ray’s views circulated widely. The printed word was primarily an urban phenomenon, occurring via the dissemination of print— journals, periodicals and newspapers. Ray’s utilization of the English language made him directly accessible to the language communities of Europe, though he and his associates were also writing in the vernacular Bengali and Hindustani. In 1817 Ray was involved in a spirited exchange with one Mr. Sankara Sastri, who published a letter in the Madras Courier attacking him. The letter took issue with the titles being applied to Ray by the Calcutta Gazette—“reformer” and “discoverer”—and accused Ray of misappropriating Shankara. Ray believed Sastri to be a pseudonym for an Englishman and

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replied with the polemic, A Defence of Hindu Theism. In all of his works on Vedanta, Ray single-mindedly sought to dethrone the power of brahminical priests and orthodoxy by showing that their uses of ritual and ceremony were counter to the tenets of the sacred texts themselves. He reiterates in the Defence a point that he has already made in the Abridgement of the Vedanta. Ray explains that with his English translation of the Upanisads and expositions on the Vedanta, he expected “to prove to my European friends, that the superstitious practices which deform the Hindoo religion, have nothing to do with the pure spirit in its dictates . . . by explaining to my countrymen the real spirit of the Hindoo scriptures which is but the declaration of the unity of God, tend in degree to correct the erroneous conceptions which have prevailed with regard to the doctrines they inculcate” (author’s emphases, 90). Such heightened polemic characterized much of Ray’s work during the period, further highlighting the controversial nature of his positions. In 1820 Ray’s writings initiated the infamous Precepts controversy, a matter that drew press coverage throughout Asia and Europe and the Americas. As he had done earlier with the Upanisads, Ray took it upon himself to edit and abridge the text of the Gospels. For his edited translations of the Upanisads, Ray received harsh censure from brahmins and vedantins alike; for his editing of the Gospels he inflamed missionary passions. His stated purpose in producing an edition of the Gospels was to focus upon the ethical teachings of Christ. Published at his own expense at the Calcutta Baptist Mission Press, Precepts of Jesus, The Guide to Peace and Happiness invited controversy that would make Ray known throughout Europe. The fact that Ray had access to the press demonstrates that he had, for the most part, affable ties with the Baptists. Since Ray was promoting monotheism to the Bengali elite, “some missionaries viewed Rammohan as nothing less than an instrument of Divine Providence” (Halbfass 209). The Precepts controversy contributed to a severing of ties between Ray and most prominent missionaries. The Baptists had provided literate Bengalis with some of their first Western-styled Bengali-language papers. One of the most prominent of the Serampore Baptists, Joshua C. Marshman, edited both the monthly Digdarsan and the weekly Samachar Darpan, both of which began their runs in 1818. These papers published the latest news from Europe, various articles on European and Asian history, and articles explaining scientific subjects. Both papers proved to be very influential in the rise of the Bengali press. The language of these journals was “simple,” as they were intended for young men. The same year the journals came out, the Schoolbook Society solicited the Serampore Press, purchasing many copies as well as requesting English language versions of the publications. Soon both English and Anglo-Bengali

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versions were made available. Chakraborti assesses the role of the Samachar Darpan as contributing “much to the growth of political consciousness in Bengal by making the people aware of the shortcomings of the East India Company’s Government and pleading for the removal of grievances. The political agitations sponsored by Raja Rammohan Roy and his associates found expression in the generally liberal Darpan” (23). Yet the Darpan, being a missionary paper, still held to certain scriptural constraints. Though the Baptists contributed mightily to Ray’s voice reaching a fairly sizable audience, Ray felt little loyalty to the Baptist missionaries. The burgeoning press trade in Bengali provided a regular stream of news and commentary on happenings in the region and beyond. Ray was one of the first Bengalis to take full advantage of the situation. The Baptist response to Ray’s edition of the Gospels evidenced, once again, Ray’s unwillingness to conform to the expectations of his missionary benefactors and allies. Marshman responded quickly to Ray, attacking him for undermining the integrity of the Gospels. The main criticism leveled was that the Gospels were to be read as a whole and that any piecemeal version undermined the divine nature of the works. This was the same charge made against Ray by many Vedantins in response to his Abridgement of the Vedanta—not surprising, considering that those who viewed sacred text to be of divine origin would tend to view scripture as an inviolable whole. In addition, for Ray to emphasize Christ’s teachings without recognizing his divine status was a repetition of the old Arian heresy, which made Christ out to be mortal. Ray would issue subsequent Appeals to the Christian Public, in which he defended his approach in a systematic fashion (Works). This exchange drew enough attention in Europe that Marshman had his A Defense of the Deity and Atonement of Jesus Christ in Reply to Rammohun Roy published in London in 1823. The Precepts incident, along with other controversial applications of Vedanta and Islam, show Ray taking advantage of comparatist interactions—interactions ushered in by the late-eighteenth-century collaborations amongst British Orientalists and various literary communities in Bengal (as well as other regions in South Asia). During the final ten years of his life, accounts of the Precepts controversy appeared in most prominent European periodicals—including some of Ray’s defenses against Marshman and the Serampore critics. In the period following the Precepts incident, Ray increased his contacts with adherents of British Unitarian liberal-theology. The Unitarians were amongst the most reform-oriented Christian groups in England, agitating for abolition of slavery and greater rights for women. Eventually, through such contacts, various segments of society in Bengal and England (with

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extensions into the United States) became linked by their core doctrinal belief in a universal theology.27 Due to the work of the early Orientalists, and the publication of Asiatic Researches, the ancient roots of brahminical religion were viewed as being monotheistically oriented.28 Not unlike the use of Asian culture during the Enlightenment, such knowledge of ancient culture allowed Europeans and Americans who were against the doctrine of the Trinity to rely on Indian antiquity to address contemporary cultural issues in Europe. The question of the Trinity had plagued Christianity over much of its history. The British Unitarians were simply the latest to take issue with the seeming inconsistency between a religion that prided itself on its monotheism and yet ascribed god-like status to Jesus. In the fourth century, the Arians (named after the North African Arius) contested the divinity of Christ as being inconsistent with the Biblical characterization of God—that Christ and God could not be consubstantial since God had no beginning or end. The Arians were branded heretics and the Arian heresy became a charge leveled against those who challenged the Christian Trinity. Following the Reformation, various schools of Unitarian belief arose throughout Europe. In England the Toleration Act of 1689 allowed people to adopt Unitarian belief without official persecution. However, it was only in 1813 that Unitarians were legally categorized with other dissenters. In the United States Unitarian belief grew as a response the Calvinistic-bent of American Protestantism. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, American Unitarianism grew throughout New England and by the turn of the century many of the churches in the region had adopted Unitarian beliefs, though the name did not gain common usage until the 1810s. The American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825 and would go on to fuel the philosophical and aesthetic movement known as Transcendentalism.29 In Bengal, Unitarian Christians saw a shared theological commitment with reform minded brahmins such as Rammohan Ray. Not long after his battles with the Baptists over his editing of the Gospels, Ray, along with Dwarkanath Tagore (grandfather of Rabindranath) and William Adam, established a meeting ground for promoting Unitarian religious belief, Christian and Hindu. In early 1823, the Calcutta Unitarian Committee was established, becoming an important space of dialogue between Unitarians and Vedanta-Oriented Hindus. During the following years, as the Unitarian Committee gradually morphed into the Brahmo Samaj, the shared underlying motivation between these two bodies—Brahmo Hindus and Unitarian Christians—was a view of universal theology common to all “civilized” peoples.

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The trio launched their own Unitarian Press, ending Ray’s previous reliance upon the Serampore publishers. His relationship with the developing international Unitarian movement would increase the friction even further between Ray and non-Unitarian Christians. The Unitarian commitment to rationalizing religious orthodoxy catalyzed their attacks upon a variety of staid Christian positions—primarily over the consubstantiality between Father and Son, a doctrine that Unitarians claimed led to the deification of Christ. Ray followed up on these criticisms and used Vedanta to do so. In that sense, Ray utilized a similar strategy as those in other religious camps. He considered “sacred text” as central to a culture; he sought to explain, explore, and compare the status of a culture’s civilizational worth through those texts held to be sacrosanct by that particular culture. Ray, as a Bengali growing up under the influence of Islam and Christianity as well as his own brahminical heritage, was able to use his considerable intellectual abilities to partake in the comparatist spirit of the period, referring to the sacred books of Hindus and Christians in much of his published work.30 While impressed by the achievements of Christendom, Ray felt that the attacks on Hindu and Indian tradition were fundamentally unsound, particularly in light of Trinitarian consubstantiality. Even prior to his formal affiliation with the Unitarians, he regularly questioned those missionaries who attacked the polytheism of the Hindus and yet embraced Christ as an embodiment of the divine: the Son of God. In the 1821 “Preface to the Second Edition” of The Brahmunical Magazine, a publication Ray started in order to address missionary criticism of the Vedas, he attacked the apparent hypocrisy in the Trinitarianism of missionaries: “Yet if while he declares God is not man, he again professes to believe in a God-Man or Man-God, under whatever sophistry the idea may be sheltered,—can such a person have a just claim to enjoy respect in the intellectual world? And does he expose himself to censure, should he, at the same time, ascribe unreasonableness to others?” (Works 148). Ray was arguing for the universality of the divine, drawing attention to the multiple varieties of human belief to posit a single divine force. David Kopf claims that Ray gained his Unitarianism from early century Unitarian writings. Lynn Zastoupil addresses these Unitarian ties also. Like Kopf he argues that Ray derived much from Unitarianism’s radical history. This is a very credible observation. But both minimize the impact of Shankaran Vedanta on Ray’s thought.31 Robertson’s study makes a very specific attempt to remedy such oversights with an excellent chapter on Ray’s use of Vedanta, as well as on the credibility of his claims as a Vedantin. Robertson validates Ray’s Sanskritic claims but points out his specific deficiencies as well—those

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schools with which he showed little or no familiarity. His conclusion is that Ray was firmly grounded in the non-dualistic tradition of Vedantic interpretation established by Shankara (15–18, 146–7). However, Ray’s deployment of Vedanta could vary depending on which language community he was addressing. Halbfass describes Ray’s polyvalent use of Vedanta: “the ‘Veds’ which were thus presented to two different audiences, serve as vehicles for receptivity and reform as well as self-assertion in the face of the West” (214). With regard to the debate over monotheism, Ray’s choices in translating the Upanisads contributed to a significant degree of slippage when it came to his depiction of Vedantic conceptions of the divine. In his English translations Ray was consistently evoking the linguistic (and Christian) notion of “person.” As pointed out earlier, the notion of deity systematized by Shankara was monistic. But in Ray’s English-language texts, the God he depicts is a “personal God.” Thus, as Halbfass cogently summarizes it: “Even in those places where the Sanskrit text of the works translated and paraphrased by Rammohun uses the term brahman in the neuter case, he consistently uses the masculine form (“he”) in his English works, in effect replacing the monistic principle of reality with the God of monotheism” (208). Interestingly, in Ray’s Bengali language translations this was not an issue as there is no distinction between the neuter and the masculine in Bengali. Such translational variations show Ray gauging the reception of various language communities to his ideas.32 He would have been aware of the increased European receptivity to his translations if Shankaran monism were couched in the language of person. The gendering of brahman could serve as a useful rhetorical device, suggesting a personal god when the actual prose and commentary stayed within the basic tenets of Shankaran monism. By utilizing the masculine instead of a non-gender specific term, Ray made the text agreeable to a reader seeking a personal god rather than the more abstract, deistic notion provided by a long line of Advaita adherents. Ray’s textual interventions were arising out of an extremely dynamic milieu. In terms of his place within the literati of Calcutta, Ray shared much with the early British Orientalists. He had read their work and was aware of the European and Christian traditions in which they were grounded. He was familiar with Orientalist assessments of various aspects of Indian antiquity, including Colebrooke’s 1805 treatise, and it would be reasonable to identify him as the first Indian scholar to be widely acknowledged beyond Asia during his own lifetime.33 In addition, Ray’s company and Baptist ties provided him with disparate and often opposed communities within the various European camps. Ray’s eventual affiliation with the Unitarians provided a forum from which he could espouse the idea of an ancient, textual monotheism to

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declare a reformist, modernized Hindu identity. Halbfass writes that because of the work of Ray, and later the Brahmo Samaj movement he founded, “the framework and potential for the encounter and reconciliation of the traditions (Western and Christian) is now sought within the Hindu tradition; receptivity and openness themselves appear as constituents of the Hindu identity and as principles of self-assertion” (215). During the 1820s Ray expanded his reputation as one of the most prominent Indian modernizers of his time. In 1823, as the Precepts controversy was waning, Ray began to publish a series of petitions in his own Bengali and Persian newsweeklies. He petitioned the Supreme Court and Indian Government and, later that year, published Appeal to the King in Council, the first instance of an Indian subject directly addressing the monarch of Great Britain. When British authorities sought to establish a Sanskrit College in Calcutta, Ray published A Letter on English Education in appeal to Governor-General Amherst to establish a more Westernized approach to education. Rather than Sanskrit, “so difficult that almost a life time is necessary for its acquisition,” he proposed that “European gentlemen . . . instruct the natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world” (Works 472). This document shows Ray advancing a modernist agenda, ceding the superiority of European achievements as a necessary prerequisite to raising the condition of Indians. Ray was not abandoning the education of Sanskrit, but felt that more contemporary topics of study would have a greater immediate effect.34 His opening of a Vedanta College in 1826 evidenced his commitment to Sanskrit while the previous year his AngloBengali school did the same for a modernist agenda. Ray sought answers for the present in both history and hope, negotiating a Bengali identity that accommodated a Sanskritic past as well as a British future. In his deployments of Sanskrit and English, Ray was trying to establish an agenda that fought brahminical orthodoxy as well as what he perceived as being unfair European criticisms. It was also during this period that Ray heightened his opposition to the unfair treatment of women, perhaps the most lasting legacy of his egalitarian vision of a modern Hindu identity. A few years before, in 1818 and 1820, Ray had published two dialogues between an opponent and advocate of the practice of sati. Both works were grounded in discussions over the scriptural basis for sati, since advocates sought to portray the practice as grounded in the Vedas. The 1820s saw Ray pushing for women’s rights even further. The title of his 1822 tract, Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females,

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neatly encapsulates Ray’s consistent use of the Vedas to initiate contemporary reforms. The main gist of the piece was to secure a scriptural basis for female property rights. In all of these texts, as well as in later petitions supporting the 1829 ban on sati (attributed by most scholars to Ray), we see Ray’s reliance on the ancient tenets of Vedic scripture to enact reforms that allow increased access to social status by greater numbers of people.35 In 1828 Ray withdrew from the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, recently renamed the British Indian Unitarian Association, supposedly because it was not drawing enough support from Bengalis. The Bengali members of the Association set out a Trust deed at the beginning of 1830 to establish a new organization called the Brahmo Samaj. This organization, over the course of the next fifty years, would become the most influential bhadralok organization in Bengal, eventually giving rise to some of the first nationalist overtures by indigenous Indians. The Samaj became a meeting ground for others who shared Ray’s views on Advaita, as well as his stance on a number of social issues such as education, government and sati. Several months later Ray embarked on his voyage to England. This historic visit allowed Ray to establish personal contacts with religious reformers in the West; he sought to forge alliances and gain support for his causes back in India. In a letter to the editors of the London Times dated 1 June, 1831, Ray explained: “one of my objects in visiting this country has been to lay before the British public a statement, however brief, of my views regarding the past conditions and future prospects of India” (quoted in Robertson 45). Unfortunately, a nasty fall when disembarking from a ship plagued Ray during his time in Europe, contributing to his overall frailness in an unfamiliar land. He died in Bristol on September 27, 1833. Perhaps not enough emphasis has been placed on Ray’s role in the revival of Advaita Vedanta. Robertson’s study has a detailed chapter on the matter, pointing out how Ray established a precedent, via Vedanta, for Indian self-assertion in the face of the superior organization and technology of the European colonizers. Advaita fit into a reading of human religious phenomena as arising out of a universal theology. The discussions of various theologians and scholars in the wake of European colonial expansion and the greater awareness of various non-European cultures helped to initiate what we might today call a “sociological” perspective on the function of religious belief in societies. This can be seen as an inevitable outcome of the “scientificizing” tendencies catalyzed by industrialization and modernity— the fairly recent historical movement towards “rationality” and away from “metaphysics.” I am certainly not trying to say that Ray represents an initial moment or movement. What I am pointing out is that Christianity was being

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reconceived throughout Europe due to some powerful nineteenth-century “re-districting” forces—particularly the increasing moves away from religion and towards secularism as the European nation-states began to industrialize. The re-invigorated debates over Trinitarianism being fought out in both the United States and England constituted but one small segment of this growing fissure between church and state. In debates such as these, the East entered into metropolitan conversations, forging spaces for germination and growth in the newly industrializing colonial powers. In early colonial India, Anglicization provided a utilitarian tool for Ray to speak with institutions of power in the language of power. In the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, Ray did not clearly align himself to either position. Ray’s reliance on indigenous print culture showed how important it was for him to interact with various literate communities in Bengal and throughout India. The British hold on India would not unite that sort of concerted response until the modest demands of partial sovereignty petitioned for by the early Indian National Congress near the end of the century. But the Brahmo Samaj did begin to make distinct nationalist overtures to the British ruling authorities around the middle of the century. The initial terms of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy were organized around the issue of how best to rule Bengal—to “Orientalize” certain British East India Company employees or to “Anglicize” indigenous literati. I do not believe the native “Hindu” elites were against the idea of becoming educated in English. They saw it as an avenue to European power, a means of Western enlightenment. The effort to de-sanctify brahmins as a divinely sanctioned social class who would administer ritual and who held sacred purity was supplemented by Ray’s development of an egalitarian version of Advaita, accessible to anyone who sought out such knowledge. My larger aim is to suggest that India, during the nineteenth century, became central to Western liberal theology. Efforts to sociologize religion— to study religion as relativistic, comparative, and contextual—occurred in no small part due to the “discovery of Hinduism.” Religion came to be seen by various liberals and intellectuals as a human (as opposed to divine) phenomenon. In light of this recognition, India came to represent spirituality for a Western imagination that saw its own life-worlds being evacuated of the once-dominant metaphysics of Christian theology and cosmology.

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Chapter Four

Colonial Divides and Shared Orientalisms: Kipling and Tagore in the World

INTRODUCTION The preeminence of Anglo-Indian literary discourse in the first two decades of the twentieth century provided a platform for representing differing accounts of the colonial endeavor. Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and Rabindranath Tagore followed in 1913. While Kipling was already a celebrated author (arguably the most celebrated) in the Anglophone world, the Nobel pushed Tagore into the Western literary limelight. After he won the award for his mystical and pastoral poetry about rural Bengal, Tagore’s voluminous artistic and critical productions were rapidly introduced to the West. By 1917 Macmillan had published no less than fourteen volumes of Tagore’s plays, poems, and prose. As Tagore’s US publisher told Maurice Macmillan, there was a “furore” over Tagore and his sales were booming (Dutta 206).1 Kipling and Tagore, then, were widely read by the contemporary English-language reading public during the early part of the century, providing key representations of India through their imaginative fiction, poetry, and essays. Though these two authors emerged from dramatically different backgrounds, their literary prominence structured much of the discursive terrain of British India, especially as it was represented to the West. Despite their opposed views on imperialism and colonialism, both relied on a similar presumption about the East, formulated and enhanced by nineteenth-century Orientalism. In this chapter, I will chart the progression of this conceptual and thematic convergence in the work of both authors: an Orientalist binary that essentialized the West as rational and the East as spiritual.

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RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE DECLINE OF IMPERIALIST NARRATIVE As far as allegories go, Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King” is a fairly simple one: a cautionary tale against the hubris of imperial ambitions. Written in 1888, the novella provides an important contrast with Kipling’s later novel, Kim. The latter work accepts the Orientalist division and attempts to seek out a synthesis between the spiritual desires of the Easterner and the rational desires of his Western counterpart. Interestingly enough, as I will discuss in Section III, Rabindranath Tagore seeks a very similar synthesis of these essential qualities that differentiate East and West. Both in lectures as well as in imaginative fiction, Tagore seeks to reconcile the excesses of Western scientific materialism through an appeal to ancient Hindu tradition. What remains consistent for these two ideologically dissimilar authors is a fundamental Orientalist division—a division promoted in multiple scholarly, political, and social discourses “about” India over the course of the previous century. By the turn of the twentieth century, this basic Orientalist paradigm had found its way into way into Anglophone imaginative literature. Significantly enough, however, “The Man Who Would Be King” promises no such Orientalist binary. Rather, this tale of imperial fantasy rests on the premise that the spoils of conquest await the bold European willing to explore the bowels of a vast and little-known geography. As such, it is an obvious allegory of the imperialist project. Danny and Peachy, two shady but self-sufficient adventurers enter into a virtual blank spot on the map of Asia in order to establish their personal kingdom; a task in which they succeed. Using their Masonic background, the pair exploits an indigenous belief system that just happens to have connections to Masonry (which Kipling establishes by concocting a link between Masonry and Alexander the Great). Through mastery of the Masonic code, as well as some quick-witted deception, Danny comes to be seen as both God and King—a successor to the ancient rule of Alexander. Accepted as such and made wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, Danny ignores a pact he has made with his partner and succumbs to his sexual desire for one of the native women. This personal defect results in his downfall; no specific quality of the native initiates this action. Thus, when the enraged natives put Danny to death, the moral of the story locates the failures of imperialism as internal. The Imperial Project and its effect upon the natives is never critiqued, nor even questioned. In fact, prior to succumbing to his personal demons, Danny even manages to consolidate warring factions and turn them into an army. It is the unproblematic manner in which the logic of this story functions, its utter consistency, which is most

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telling. The man who would be king is doomed only by himself, not by the natives he hoped to rule. Kipling enjoyed success in the Anglophonic-reading world and beyond following the publication of Plain Tales from the Hills when he was just 23. With the publication of Kim thirteen years later in 1901, Kipling cemented his hold as one of the most popular living English-language writers of his time. In Kim, Kipling returned to explore the colony where he had been born and which he had left some twelve years earlier—the colony that had nurtured his writing. And in the longer and more ambitious narrative structure of Kim, Kipling attenuates the overt imperialist aspirations of earlier works such as “The Man Who Would Be King.” Kim’s narrative structure attempts to converge the personal quests of Kim and the lama: both of whom seek out the congenital desires borne of their racial origins, as Westerner and Easterner respectively. In fact, if the relationship between the lama and Kim is viewed allegorically, it seems rather uncomplicated. Old Man East meets with Young Boy West. Old Man East is on a quest to discover himself, and thus the universe, in the fashion prescribed by the ancients. Unfortunately, his ascetic lifestyle keeps him apart from the rapidly changing world around him. When he descends from his monastery in the far off mountains, he encounters confusion and awe. He meets Young Boy West who guides him through the strange world of trains and traders. But the boy is on a quest also. While conversant in the ways of this world, he is not really aware of his own identity. You see, Young Boy West has been displaced from his heritage. The two get together and after many adventures are intimately allied in a fashion which is mutually beneficial. Old Man East achieves enlightenment, and Young Boy West hones his logic and reason. However, this simple allegory becomes quite complicated when one examines the subtleties of the narrative. Both principle characters are seeking their identities—one religious, the other secular. While the ending of the novel brings together these two quests, it does so rather unsuccessfully. In the following pages I will explicate Kipling’s attempts at bringing together imperialist ambition and indigenous tradition. Kipling’s humanist tone, even with its running ethnological commentary of stereotypes, displays a great love for the native. Kim’s quest for identity is deliberately intertwined with the lama’s search for the “stream” that will place him upon the true path of devotion. Both involve some sort of self-comprehension. However, the self-absorption of the lama’s search for enlightenment is meant to highlight the very specific social and political ramifications of Kim’s road to self-discovery. The Buddhist “Way of the Middle Path” and the British imperial “Way of the Great Game” exist in

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a hierarchical relationship that emphasizes a very different form of enlightenment—an enlightenment mediated by reason and concurrently promising individual and social progress. Or at least, that is the governing gist of the narrative. The lama represents a treasure trove of ancient wisdom whose power is not to be casually discarded as the world faces massive scientific and technological onslaughts. However, in the world of late nineteenth-century India, the lama can only hope to function under the intelligent and cunning pragmatic guidance of Kim. Thus, the imperialist endeavor is made more human. But why should Kipling bother delving into such mystical traditions? Why bother with an ancient past? After all, there is little reason to consider internal opposition in Kipling’s narrative. As Edward Said notes in his “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of Kim, there are no nationalists in this novel. Rather, when the mutiny of 1857 is recalled, it is told from a colonialist point of view. But more telling is the character voicing this sentiment: an old Indian matriarch. Opposition to the empire exists at the borderlands of the colony, where other imperialist powers are threatening to encroach. If there are natives involved, they are part of these same peripheral territories, far from the plains. The lama has descended from beyond even the periphery, beyond the beyond, in order to walk along the paths of the Buddha. In the streets of Lahore, he wanders past Kim, who promptly guides him out of the street and toward the museum. Obviously, Kim’s life on the streets has served him well. He knows the customs, manners and languages of his environment. Not only does he know them, he has obviously mastered these elements of this world. We are introduced to Kim sitting astride a cannon, defying both municipal dictates and the Punjabi policeman who patrols the yard at his feet. And as Kipling puts it, “[t]here was one justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English” (49). For Kim, this action is part of a simple game. In this variation of “king of the mountain,” the king, though a “poor white of the very poorest” (49), displaces little Chota Lal, a native Indian. And though this Indian lad’s father is worth “perhaps half a million sterling,” Kipling wants us to know that the playground which is Kim’s municipality, India, is “the only democratic land in the world” (52). But this is a definition of India that will change over the course of the novel. At this point, in a land that has seen its share of conquerors, the battle over the cannon is a symbolic fight. The democracy of India to which Kipling alludes in this passage is the consistent change of authority that has been part of India’s past. This particular form of democracy rests upon the rule of various races and religions. The Aryans have made their mark, as have the Greeks. And this distant past is no less

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dynamic than the more recent contestations between Hindus and Muslims, Mughals and Rajas. Inextricably forged into the very material of the cannon is the tumultuous history of those who have tried to maintain Indian rule. The green-bronze piece astride which Kim sits was made with metal that was levied as a tax by the ruling Muslims in 1757. By weaving this reference into the text, Kipling inscribes into his work a subtle historical note. The year 1757 marks the moment when British rule in India became consolidated (see Chapter II). With the establishment of a stable force, British colonial rulers set about organizing an India based upon civic definitions—definitions that helped constitute municipal areas, allowing rule to be established over a specific territory with a determinant number of locals. And while that India, in Kipling’s fiction, is still somewhat unruly and continually perplexes its colonial administrators, it is a place that offers some possibility of becoming “known.” Thus, a subtle epistemological battle over knowing “India” is constantly at play in the way Kipling deploys his definitions. The municipal India of the opening pages has been established. While many have managed to rule, the efforts of the British are different. British rule is not only about force, but about knowledge as well. On one side of Kim’s municipal territory lies the cannon, upon which he reigns. And on the other is the museum, described as a place “given up to Indian arts and manufactures, and anybody who sought wisdom could ask the curator to explain” (52). It is a treasury of tradition, into which Kim has yet to be formally inducted. In between these two spaces lies colonial life, the “democratically” populated India of the Punjabi policemen, street beggars, stammering holy men, industrious water-carriers, carpenters and wealthy and poor Hindu and Muslim children moving about in the streets. The tension between the cannon and museum, between military force and ethnological knowledge, forms the basis for much of Kipling’s explicitly formulated imperialist ideology. The concepts that allow him to articulate such an ideology borrow from a variety of different discourses. Essentialized notions of race, ethnicity, and nation abound within the pages of Kim. These, in turn, contribute to Kipling’s Eurocentric notions of civilization and progress. Thus, for Kipling to reach into the ancient traditions of Tantric Buddhism, of which the lama is a descendent, he must mitigate indigenous tradition in order to allow Buddhism and mysticism to openly enter the narrative of Kim.2 Kipling does this by presenting the lama as an individual and not an institution. The lama comes from outside the boundaries of empire. Tibet, while drawing many cultural influences from the Indian sub-continent, had existed outside of British interests during the nineteenth century and was famously

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isolated.3 The first European expedition to visit Lhasa did not even arrive until three years after Kim’s publication, when Colonel Francis Younghusband led a military expedition there in 1904.4 Thus, the lama lies outside even Kipling’s notions of the “other.” He seems to exist as a third term in Kipling’s anthropological equation of Orientalist discourse. However, word of the empire’s famed progress has reached even the remote monasteries of Tibet. The lama seeks out the curator because he has heard that this “fountain of Wisdom” can help him escape from the discord and rivalry within the institution of the monastery. The lama tells the curator: And I come here alone. For five–seven–eighteen–forty years it was in my mind that the Old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knoWest, with devildom, charms and idolatry. Even as the child outside said but now. Ay, even as the child said, with but-parasti [idolatry]. . . . Even the followers of the Excellent One are at feud on feud with another. It is all illusion, Ay, maya, illusion. (57)

The lama’s quest is initiated by an attempt to escape from the corrupt religious institutions of his homeland. This allows Kipling to draw from an Eastern tradition without allowing the imperial venture to be discredited. In this way, Kipling can focus his energy on the only non-colonial venture in the novel without portraying the empire in a negative light. After all, though there are a host of Indian characters, the lama is the only one that claims no desire related to empire. Rather, his desire is to go and free himself “from the Wheel of Things by the broad and open road” (57). Aside from those who partake in the Great Game, all the other Asian figures in the novel express affiliation with, and even gratitude for, the empire. Both the colonel and the old woman of Kulu express this openly while the woman of Shamlegh sentimentally recalls her privileged days as the companion of a sahib. The old woman of Kulu goes so far as to distinguish between the good and bad colonial: ‘These be the sort’–she took a fine judicial tone and stuffed her mouth with pan–‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the lands and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongue from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings.’ (124)

This affiliation between the British and the natives is characteristic of Kipling’s India. The British are not without fault. Kipling has a penchant for

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depicting the British subjects who clearly do not belong in India. But there is a “good” colonial presence that counteracts native critiques of British rule. For, implicit in the woman from Kulu’s observation is that something is not right in the colonial administration of India. This is a moment of slippage in the narrative. The humanist endeavors of those “true” colonists is seriously jeopardized if the critique of colonial rule becomes too long and detailed. Discord in the narrative makes the entire humanist colonial endeavor discordant. The natives must be aware that the relationship between themselves and their colonial rulers is a beneficial one. And virtually all the natives in Kipling’s India are aware. If they were not, it would threaten the ideological consistency of the system of rule not only in the colonies but at home as well. In a modernizing Europe, if the steady enfranchisement of a middle class through various capitalist ventures was to continue unabated, bourgeois political identity needed to be justified along Enlightenment lines of human equality and universality. Discourses of racial difference allowed for the depiction of cultural formation along various levels of evolution, thus creating a sustainable and consistent hierarchy. If the native articulately challenged the humanist discourse of empire, she threatened to crumble the hierarchies implicit in nation, race and civilization. After all, how could liberal democracy be argued at home when its opposite political ethic was being practiced abroad? Thus, if British rule in India is critiqued—and Kipling does allow such criticism within the pages of the novel—it must occur with a standard disclaimer: there are in fact some bad British, who understand neither themselves nor the natives whom they rule, and who discredit the noble purposes of those who would do good by the natives. But, the lama’s role in this narrative is somewhat anomalous in terms of this pattern. He is an outsider to the colonial system. Kipling stays closer to form in his detailed depiction of Western practices of scholarship and knowledge. The curator is able to impress the lama with his museum’s collections of Buddhist art and scholarship. In fact, it is in the discussion between the lama and curator that the only sustained narrative of Buddhist tradition and practice is provided. The lama sits through his audience with the curator in wonderment: Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone, puzzled here and there by the unfamiliar Greek convention, but delighted as a child at each new trove. Where the sequence failed, as in the Annunciation, the curator supplied it from his mound of books— French and German, with photographs and reproductions . . . For the first time he heard the labors of European scholars, who by the help

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Negotiating the Modern of these and a hundred other documents have identified the Holy Places of Buddhism. (56)

It is here that certain aspects of Kipling’s primary narrative, a narrative of empire, begin to falter. While the important work of European scholars is highlighted, it is superfluous knowledge in terms of that which the lama seeks. Western scholars know the lama’s story of the stream into which Buddha’s arrow had fallen. However, they have been unable to identify its location: the one piece of information for which the lama has sought out the curator. The lama laments, “one thing only that thou hast not told me” (58). The curator, unable to help in any other way, gives the lama his own pair of spectacles. In this way, he tells the lama, he can acquire merit. Thus, the curator acknowledges not only a scholarly pursuit of Buddhist practice, but sympathy for such practice as well. And at this moment, the merit acquires function, both from the Buddhist perspective as well as the curator’s humanist perspective. Yet, the visit to the museum marks a moment of narrative failure. The narrative supplied via the museum proves insufficient. Recently a spate of scholarship has considered how the museum comes to legitimate the construction of nations, colonies and empires. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson notes a number of different ways in which the colonial museum functions. For one thing, the museum places the colonial present against the past in a particular hierarchy. The colonized natives can be shown the achievements of their ancestors. Stressing these past achievements, especially when the wisdom of the curator and the scholars imparts such knowledge, places the colonized in a position where the colonizer can say, “[o]ur presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either greatness or self-rule” (Anderson 181). Another function of the museum, which is obviously at work in Kipling’s treatment, is the way the museum allows Europeans born in the colonies to believe that the state is responsible for the care of indigenous traditions. Kipling emphasizes this powerful humanist function. Thus, it logically follows that where Western scholarship can be of little service to the lama’s quest, at least the curator can improve the lama’s “vision.” It is this symbolic token, this small service taken to acquire merit, which is the first and last resource that the colonial system will directly supply for his quest. In an important way, and I will point this out as I continue, the gift of spectacles is a double failure of narrative. The narrative of the museum is not useful to the lama, thus ensuring the lama’s continued presence throughout the novel. And it is the lama’s presence that repeatedly troubles a number of Kim’s drives. I will return to this point later in the discussion.

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Kim “discovers” the lama; being unlike any Indian he has ever seen, he is drawn to the old man. His curiosity intensifies after the visit to the museum. Upon exiting, Kim plots his next move: Kim followed him like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly. This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove and he purposed to take possession. (60)

But Kim has not been inducted into a system of formal education and this seems to be his primary failing as he enters deeper into the intrigue of the Great Game. He has a natural curiosity and an innate desire to take possession, which he acts upon when he is confronted with the novelty of the lama. But before this can happen, he must master a different kind of knowledge. And, interestingly enough, it is the lama that initiates and sustains this process. The entry of both Kim and the lama into the museum is highly fortuitous in terms of the desires that drive the narrative. After this encounter, Kim’s curiosity to obtain and explicate his new treasure keeps the pair together. The museum endeavor is seemingly validated by the lama’s immediate reliance upon Kim. The lama hands Kim his begging bowl, “[s]imply, as a child” as Kim tells him, “rest thou, I know the people” (61). As a foreigner in Kim’s land, the ascetic outsider becomes dependent within a very short time. When he thinks that his newfound chela (acolyte) has left him, he wails out loud. This reversed dependency, along with a set of prophecies, sets the stage for their adventures together. Mastery and control at the level of the streets, roads and by-ways are hardly a challenge for Kim. The challenges that Kipling will introduce later in the novel will prove far more difficult. Mental faculty alone, though an attribute that the reader can readily see in Kim, does not secure his importance in the narrative. Kim must be schooled in a different fashion. This incomplete education becomes the ground for Kipling’s painstaking construction of Kim as the “good” colonist. But before this can happen, his racial inheritance must be made clear, and Kipling does this in myriad ways. Kim’s racially congenital fear of snakes distinguishes him from the Asiatics amongst whom he has been born and bred: “No native training can quench the white man’s horror of the Serpent” (91). Both young man and old are driven by a sense of prophecy. Yet the novel distinguishes the lama’s prophecy, rooted as it is in a mystical vision as opposed to that of Kim’s “great Red Bull on a green field,” firmly grounded within explainable phenomenon in the second paragraph of

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the novel.5 During their early interactions Kipling interjects that it is Kim’s boy-like habits that allow him to trade prophecies with the lama. Later, when questioned further on the topic, Kim admits that he is making up his tale. At exactly that moment (and quite fortuitously), one of the passengers on the train corroborates the story, thus giving it a rational basis (82–3). It becomes clear that the adjoining prophecies which help set the quest in motion are not the same, nor could they be. Kim’s “faith” in his prophecy must be rooted in a logical structure if he is to be faithful to the racialized patterns of Kipling’s narrative. He may be wily, logical and cunning—but not in a puerile fashion. If there is any childishness displayed on his part, it is performed for the sake of maintaining his fluency within the dynamic cultural milieu of the colony. This performance allows Kim to stay allied with the aims of both the empire and the lama at the same time. The negotiation of this alliance involves deft maneuvering on the part of Kipling. In Kim’s fluid traversal across racial boundaries, the fact of performance must be constantly reiterated. Thus, when Kim fulfills his “prophecy” and is detained by his father’s company, he must define himself. When they ask him if the Indian woman who raised him was his mother, his reply is a vehement, “No!—with a gesture of disgust” (135). In this fashion, and on a regular basis throughout the course of the novel, Kipling takes great pains to make sure that the idea of miscegenation is never associated with Kim’s character. The fulfillment of Kim’s prophecy insures that the education of the streets will be supplemented by more formal modes of instruction. When the woman on the train informs Kim that she has seen his Red Bull, the boy goes to investigate. At the military camp of his father’s former regiment he is taken in by the authorities, who soon realize that Kim is not a native. Thus the fulfillment of Kim’s prophecy does not provide spiritual release, but it does provide education. The lama (somewhat magically) intercedes to assure that Kim is assured the best schooling possible. He tells Kim: “It is no wrong to pay for learning. To help the ignorant to wisdom is always a merit” (142). The stunned authorities agree to send Kim to St. Xavier’s School in Lucknow at the lama’s expense. (The mystery of how the lama is able to procure such large sums is never truly explained, and perhaps the reader must draw her own inferences about the types of “corruption” supposedly endemic to the lamasery.) Resisting all the way, Kim rationalizes his predicament with the comfort that, “[s]ooner or later, if he chose, he could escape into the great, gray, formless India, beyond tents and padres and colonels” (143). But, with time, he grows accustomed to his new environment. Kim soon comes to a different realization. His schooling at St. Xavier’s, supplemented by the special guidance of those agents of the empire who have taken an interest

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in Kim, begins to take hold. During breaks from boarding school, he gets special “spy” training in the ways of the imperial “Game” from Lurgan Sahib. Kim’s greatest test involves the triumph of logic over magic. When Lurgan tries to make him believe that a shattered vase is spontaneously reforming, Kim experiences a revelation: So far Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came on him, and with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks, who hurls himself half out of the water, his mind leaped up from the darkness that was swallowing it and took refuge in—the multiplication-table in English. (202)

This is a remarkable moment in the narrative, drawing obvious comparison to the historical epoch of the European Enlightenment, which (according to the familiar grand narrative) saw magic and superstition banished by the light of logic and reason. In this passage Kim’s cognitive development is not only signaled by the linguistic shift, but is highlighted even further by Kim’s refuge within the logical grid of arithmetic. With his mental faculties sharpened by formal schooling, and tested by Lurgan, Kim begins to reach some conclusions about himself. Within the waves of Huree Chunder’s loquacious banter, Kim picks out a trade he can live with—the art and science of mensuration, of measuring and mapping geographical terrain. Kim realizes that, “[h]ere was a new craft that a man could tuck away in his head and by the look of the large wide world unfolding itself before him, it seemed that the more a man knew the better for him” (211). The boy’s hybrid identity as master and child, white-imperial and brown street-urchin, has evolved into a useful state. East meets West in Kim such that the unmapped formlessness of India can be tamed and measured. Meanwhile, the lama, who finances the St. Xavier’s education that fosters Kim’s success, has been unable to get any closer to achieving his own goal—discovering the location of the stream. The lama has long known that his journey would be difficult: “it was shown to him in dreams that it was a matter not to be undertaken with any hope of success unless that seeker had with him the one chela” (213). Thus, the lama’s quest is contingent upon the fate of Kim. At the same time, Kim’s realization of his own prophecy raises new questions about his identity. The once-soothing stories of his childhood have been converted into the mystery of a strange hybrid background. Thus, Kim repeats a personal mantra, “Who is Kim?,” and transmutes his quest in a way that bears more than little resemblance to the lama’s.6 The chants of Tantric Buddhism become Kim’s own:

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Negotiating the Modern A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into amazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power usually departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment. ‘Who is Kim—Kim—Kim?’ (233)

Kim will contribute to his own sense of identity by drawing maps—maps that will locate the stream where the lama will achieve his enlightenment. Regardless of whether he does the actual surveying or not, Kim lays the groundwork for the possibility of even imagining that the stream of the Arrow will, indeed, be found. After his schooling, Kim and the lama set off on a journey into the foothills of the Himalayas where a torn mandala—the symbolic diagram of the universe—will initiate actions that set them firmly upon their chosen paths. On the borderlands of empire, Russian and French interlopers plot their incursions. But when they display their inferior knowledge of native custom, tearing apart the lama’s mandala and thus drawing their native coolies’ wrath, their mission to encroach upon the empire is doomed. In warding off their threat to his lama (and securing their incriminating documents), Kim aids his side in the Great Game. And in being struck on the head by the Russian, the lama realizes that he, like the Buddha, has been tempted in his search for enlightenment. In an exhausted state, they return to the plains. In turning now to the end of the tale, I hope I have been able to identify the parallels between Kim and the lama which fuel the narrative drive of the book. Such parallels continue through to the final pages of the novel. Both Kim and the lama find what it is they have been looking for: self-identity and enlightenment. For Kim, the realization of his identity applies form to the perceived formlessness of India. Things that once were meaningless to him fall into place: “Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible— clay of clay, neither more nor less” (331). Restored by “Mother Earth,” Kim returns to the lama. The lama has found his stream not far from where Kim’s self-realization has taken place. Having followed the Buddha’s doctrine of the Eightfold Path—of right views, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration—and with the help of his chela, the lama achieves a cessation of earthly woe. In the moment of revelation the lama transcends all space and time:

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Yea, my soul went free and . . . saw indeed that there was no Teshoo Lama nor any other soul. At this point exalted in contemplation I saw all of Hind . . . I saw every camp and village . . . I saw them at one time and in one place . . . By this I knew the soul had passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. (337)

But, in this state of rapture, the lama still thinks of the boy. Having reached the state of enlightenment, the lama wrenches himself away from the great soul and returns for his chela, “lest he miss the Way” (337). Thus, reunited with Kim and able to bring him the news, the lama “crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved” (338). The novel ends on this note of mutual success. While Kim’s revelation is rooted in the concrete specificities of geography and access, the lama achieves transcendence and is convinced that he has found this for his chela as well. By allowing the lama’s spiritual intangibility to be carried along by the legitimating narrative of Kim’s logical and concrete realization of who and what he is, Kipling hopes to expand the scope of empire into the realm of the spirit. Though the novel ends with this apparently glorious moment of double illumination, the actuality of Kim’s situation leaves the reader fearing for his future. For Kim’s “enlightenment” plays out as an enlistment in the “Great Game.” Kim exits the novel to become a spy for the colonial endeavor. This happy ending seeded with doubt produces a moment of aporia that is highly relevant. The lama, through the course of the entire novel, is a benevolent and kind character who is never ridiculed. The enormous respect paid to his characterization stands in marked contrast to the one Indian who has any intellectual capacity, the Bengali mimic man Hurree Babu. Granted, Kipling has to go outside of the space of the colony to engage with a transcendental philosophy, but the mysticism of the lama remains in stark contrast to the logical progression that is Kim’s path to Enlightenment. Kipling’s narrative attempts to close back into itself and finds nowhere to go—Kim’s happy enlistment into the “Great Game” necessitates a future of war and danger. Sara Suleri in The Rhetoric of English India finds Kim’s fate chilling because “the narrator knows that Kim must be killed.” Kim’s fascinating beauty and remarkable adaptability are sacrificed when the reader is forced to view him as an analogy for colonial causality. And perhaps, there is reason to feel some apprehension at this ending. But, I think, the failure is not so dramatic. Whether Kim will die or not is far less compelling than the failure of imperial ideology to draw this story to a close. This failure has elicited disappointment from a variety of critics. Satya P. Mohanty notes, Kim’s

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“relationship with the lama leaves him essentially unchanged . . . [a]nd the lama’s own otherworldliness is quite convenient for the narrative: the (moral and religious) Law he follows is left sufficiently undefined by the end of the novel for it to blend into the Great Game.” This reading, like Suleri’s, seems to push the lama aside. While I agree that the tenets of Tantric Buddhism are not well defined in the narrative, it should still be noted that the benevolence, faith and mystical visions of the lama have substantial narrative force. They parallel and contrast with Kim’s own endeavor at virtually every crucial point in the story. While these two critics look at the lama as a means to legitimate the Orientalist narrative of empire that is played out in the figure of Kim, I see the lama as an important intermediary in Kim’s path to selfrealization. Mark Kinkead-Weekes examines Kipling’s portrayal of the lama in very positive terms, as a tension between different ways of seeing. He writes that Kipling’s creation of the lama is a triumphant achievement of: . . . an anti-self so powerful that it became a touchstone for everything else. This involved imagining a point of view almost at the furthest point of view from Kipling himself; yet it is explored so lovingly that it could not but act as a catalyst towards some deeper synthesis. Out of this particular challenge—preventing self-obsession, probing deeper than a merely objective view of reality outside himself, enabling him now, to see, think and feel beyond himself—came the new vision of Kim, more inclusive, complex, humanised, and mature than that of any other work. (Quoted in Said 22)

This reading validates the lama, but in a way that portrays Kipling as a universal humanist instead of just an imperial one. Edward Said, in response, notes that Kinkead-Weekes’s reading may be accurate, but Kipling never forgets that Kim is a part of the colonial endeavor. Said explains that any conflict between Kim’s colonial service and his love for the natives is never resolved “because for Kipling there was no conflict . . . [t]here were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialist world view held by Kipling” (23, 24). However, if one compares Kim to the earlier short story, “The Man Who Would Be King,” it becomes clear that the uniform dominion of empire is modified in the later work. Kim attempts, albeit with clear restrictions and reservations over the native role, a narrative synthesis between the mystico-religious desire of the lama and the rational objectivity that is a part of Kim’s Europeaness. This very attempt—the reliance on mysticism even as the main character recognizes his role within the logically determined gaming board

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of mapping and surveillance—points out the damaging internal aporia of Kipling’s ideology. The unsatisfactory ending, the sentimental closure, marks the failure of Kipling’s narrative of empire. The author’s sensitivity toward an India that he clearly has strong feelings for produces a narrative that would like to follow the ideological tenets of “The Man Who Would Be King” but instead ends in a profound acknowledgment of the waning strength of England’s colonial presence in India. Perhaps, in these oddly juxtaposed “enlightenments” that conclude the novel, we can locate the same attempt at balancing what Gerard Genette has identified as the difficulty of determining “the delicate relations maintained [within narrative literature] between the requirements of narrative and the needs of discourse” (3). In the case of Kipling’s Kim, the conflict between narrative and native, though masked, finds its way to the surface of things. RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND THE CRITIQUE OF “EUROPEAN” MODERNITY ON THE PERILS OF SCIENCE WITHOUT SPIRITUALITY Science has been the dominant mode of intellectual inquiry before and since the diminishment of what might be called “openly” imperial ventures. The forms of skeptical rationalism that Partha Chatterjee equates with post-Enlightenment thought are grounded in the human documentation, manipulation, and prediction of “natural” phenomena. Such instrumental rationality has also been cited by members of the Frankfurt school, such as Theodor Adorno, as being the primary methodology of capitalist behavior. This reliance on science is particularly fascinating during the cusp period of Indian nationalism, from the middle of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, as indigenous populations attempted to muster a sustained and unified response to colonial domination. European Enlightenment thought has become, in many ways, emblematic for the ideologies that fostered and justified colonial rule. As I have shown in the previous section, it is the futile attempt to fuse together an Eastern notion of enlightenment, via the lama, with Kim’s burgeoning skeptical rationalism, which creates a moment of narrative aporia in Kim. This attempted fusion finds a different sort of representation in the works of Rabindranath Tagore. Regardless, I would argue that both Kipling and Tagore’s projects rely upon a similar view of East and West. Tagore’s Ghare Baire was translated into English as The Home and the World. But this translation does not really capture the sense of the title. Much more literally, Ghare Baire translates as “Outside the Room.” The

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word “room,” as it does in many languages, covers quite a bit of metaphorical ground in Bengali. It can be argued that in Bengali, “room” has much more to do with the domestic sphere than the socio-political. Surendranath Tagore’s 1919 English translation emphasizes the tensions of nationalist discourse within the novel. But, as can plainly be seen in the narrative strategies of The Home and the World, questions of nationalism are highlighted much more in terms of ideas than action. The political struggles outside of the rooms of the house become violently domestic by the end of the novel. But, until that point, the arena in which the novel’s actions take place are limited, primarily, to the quiet, segregated spaces of the home—symbolic of the nation, definitely; symbolic of the world, perhaps. But most importantly, the domestic space, and especially that inhabited by the primary female character in the novel, Bimala, is the space of the mind.7 The mind, in Vedantic philosophy is always distracted by the world outside. However, sadhana (or self-realization) can only be attained when the mind entirely forgoes the pleasures of worldly living and seeks to concern itself with spirituality.8 A true notion of community can only be attained in such a state because the mind is free from the divisions and hierarchies that define relations on the earthly level. In seeking to free oneself from the bonds of worldly desire, the enlightened spirit finds community in a universal sense. The normal boundaries of society are transcended and the individual is free to become a universal citizen. Thus, the movement inwards is followed by a movement outward that supersedes all human forms of organization—family, village, state, and nation. The only type of affiliation that remains as part of sadhana is on a universal scale—it is, in effect, a celebration of formlessness. And as the structures for organizing modern communities do not have such scope, the jump from a national scheme to a global one is, ironically enough, quite logical. And perhaps it is in this space, between the formlessness of a consciousness with no boundaries, and the form imposed on such a consciousness by community, that Tagore’s exploration of Indian nationalism can take shape. In The Home and the World, it is a woman who inhabits this space between the domestic and the political. For Tagore, Bimala becomes a theoretical field of possibility. And, in this sense, Tagore’s deployment of her is quite a damning depiction of nationalist rhetoric, much more so than husband Nikhil’s charity or lothario Sandip’s villainy. She is a poetic creation of an imaginary debate on the pitfalls of superimposing the enlightenment of modernity upon the enlightenment of Vedantic “self ” realization.9 The issue of gender, and the role of women in an Indian modernity are critical to such debates—and the novel is well aware of this.

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It is the specific representation of “woman” that makes this novel so intriguing. From the outset, Tagore makes it very clear that Bimala will be deployed as a figure of the nation, an allegory for the social and political changes that will allow India to become a more “Enlightened,” and less ritualistic, body. In this sense, the changes that Bimala will undergo, and which, in part, will be engineered by her husband Nikhil, become an indication of what it is that India will have to do to become free of colonial, as well as self, bondage. In fact, in The Home and the World, Tagore is much more concerned with the internal struggles of the nationalist movement in Bengal; the British are barely even mentioned. It is the internal Swadeshi movement that becomes the focal point in the debates between friends Nikhil and Sandip. But, this question of politics remains abstract for the better part of the novel. The politics of Swadeshi are played out within the home. Nikhil is Bimala’s husband, a scholar and estate owner in rural Bengal. His friend, Sandip is a charismatic figure within the nationalist Swadeshi movement—the Bengali nationalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the movement of Bimala between these two opposing polarities that forms the narrative drive of the book. We are introduced to Bimala as someone who, in her own words, must fight a tendency to “worship” her husband. Viewing him as a supremely benevolent figure, she is unable to find fault with him. She mentions that it is in early childhood that she comes to the realization that, “devotion is beauty itself, in its inner aspect. It transcended all debates, or doubts or calculations: It was pure music” (18). This relationship between devotion and beauty as a transcendent category is echoed throughout the debates over Swadeshi. These debates pit a spiritual and transcendental approach toward the problems of colonialism against a pragmatic, often violent, model of rebelliousness. But while the eventual object of these critiques remains the British, the primary matter concerns the construction of an appropriate form of Bengali identity. Bimala soon leaves behind her transcendental devotion for another aspect of “worship”—desire. Sandip’s passion, his fervor for the cause of Swadeshi, draws Bimala to him. It is during the drawing room discussions between Nikhil and Sandip, where Bimala initially plays a passive role, that this desire begins to manifest: through her increasing interjections into the conversation, her bold moves into the outer drawing rooms, and her risky attempts at being alone with Sandip. Ironically enough, it is Nikhil’s attempts to modernize Bimala, to draw her out of zenana and into a world of free will that equip Bimala with the tools necessary to break out of her role as a dutiful wife. Nikhil’s fatalism over his wife’s obvious attraction for Sandip is telling—modernization is

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necessary; it must occur as an inevitable function of the kind of equality and freedom from hierarchical division that he preaches. And whether she chooses Sandip or himself, the choice must be made on the basis of an informed but free will. Again, this attitude reflects a fundamental tenet of European Enlightenment thought. And yet, there are certain key differences. Nikhil’s quest for truth does not center upon “man,” in the EuropeanEnlightenment sense of the word—formulating a universal doctrine is not part of his agenda. Rather, his method of deciphering truth is an ascetic selfinquiry, with all appearances of being devoid of emotion. Nikhil does not apply his reason with an eye toward understanding the politics of Swadeshi or its contestation of colonial rule—the realm of inquiry is not the outside world. Rather, the realm of his inquiry is almost solely concerned with self. Nikhil, though benevolent toward others, and generous with his resources to those who are materially needy, is firmly convinced of the need to perfect himself, before and above all else. In one of his debates with Sandip he says: All I want to say is that in Europe people look at everything from the viewpoint of science. But man is neither mere physiology, nor biology, nor psychology, nor even sociology. For God’s sake don’t forget that. Man is infinitely more than the natural science of himself. You laugh at me, calling me the schoolmaster’s pupil, but that is what you are, not I. You want to find the truth of man through your science teachers, and not from your own inner being. (61)

As he watches his wife move away from him, he attempts to accept the pain that it causes in an abstract, impersonal fashion. He attributes such pain to desire, and views it as a necessary step toward achieving self-realization: “We think, that we are our own masters when we get in our hands the object of our desire—but we are really our own masters only when we are able to cast out our desires from our minds” (134). This clear statement of purpose seemingly affiliates Nikhil with the home, with an insular spirituality that, in its attempts to destroy the subjective ego, is engaged in a significantly “hermetic” form of egotistical behavior. The scope of humanity is leveled by such an attitude, for there is a lack of judgment or criticism. There is, on the surface of things, a freedom from hierarchy. However, while allowing others the opportunity and freedom to find their own self-realization, this attitude also promotes a radical withdrawal from community. This negotiation between self and community mirrors the movement with which Bimala will flirt. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that Bimala’s attraction to Sandip is initiated outside of the home, in the world. During a speech in favor of

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Swadeshi, she becomes mesmerized by Sandip’s fervor for the cause of his nation, to the extent that she unconsciously reveals herself to the world: “I do not know how it happened but I found I had impatiently pushed away the screen before me and had fixed my gaze on him” (31). Thus, Bimala no longer simply peeks into the world, but reveals herself to it. Strangely enough, no one notices, except for Sandip. That Nikhil’s ability to engage with the outside world elicits nothing but introspection on his part is paradoxical. His desire to get Bimala to venture into this world can be considered an exercise in providing free-choice. It is an attempt at using his concrete power within society—as a member of the upper castes, as a gentrified estate owner, and as a husband—to allow his wife to engage with himself, and other men, on a more equal footing. And in the fraction of a second when Bimala is not simply an observer of the world, but a participant who engages in a dialogue of glances, she instantaneously renounces most of the ideals that Nikhil holds so dear. This moment, which occurs quite early in the text, marks the only instance of Bimala’s exposure to the world outside. Over the course of the novel, as she comes to take part in the debates between Nikhil and Sandip, the movement is restricted to the slow progression from inner zenana to outer sitting rooms. Sandip, once he recognizes Bimala’s attraction to him, has no qualms over seducing the wife of his friend and patron. Unlike Nikhil’s dry asceticism, Sandip offers a range of powerful emotions that draw Bimala to him. His enthusiasm for politics is mirrored in his overt sexuality and brusque manner. His stated task is to draw Bimala into the emotionally laden sphere of the “modern:” Let her gradually come to the conviction that to acknowledge and respect passion as the supreme reality, is to be modern—not to be ashamed of it, not to glorify restraint. If she finds shelter in some such word as ‘modern,’ she will find strength. (62)

For Sandip, Nikhil’s loss is Nikhil’s own doing. Since Nikhil can find no calling other that his own attempts at self-realization, he is doomed to fail in a world which traffics in terror and domination. Sandip views the colonial conquerors as worthy of emulation. His vision of the world is unabashedly Western in this sense. Hybridity, for Sandip, becomes a mark of confusion. He describes these conjoinings between Indian and European as “curious anomalies” which only obfuscate and deter India’s ascent toward modernity. Spirituality, in an age of imperial conquest and rule, is dangerous:

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Negotiating the Modern We must have our religion and out nationalism; our Bhagavad Gita and also our Bande Mataram. The result is that both of them suffer. It is like performing with an English military band, side by side with our Indian festive pipes. I must make it the purpose of my life to put an end to this hideous confusion. I want the Western military style to prevail, not the Indian. (81)

Sandip recognizes a quality of the English victor and subscribes whole-heartedly to it. Thus, he dwells in a world whose parameters he sees as being pre-established, a static structure where truth is not realized but rather reenacted. It is not a particular national characteristic that enthralls him so much as a world-view conditioned by domination. Quite simply, he would like to rule using the same methods of his own dominators. By living so fully in the “world” of imperialism, he can only view success as an emulation of his colonizer. Unlike the self-absorbed ideology of Nikhil, Sandip the mimic is wholly obsessed with his colonizing “other.” And finally, there is Bimala, the object of this contestation. As I have mentioned before, her deployment is quite strategic and revealing. Both Nikhil and Sandip want Bimala to enter the world. For both, the zenana is an archaic, repressive institution. But Nikhil wants Bimala to enter into the world so that she will return to him. He wants to present her with a range of possibilities so that her choice will be an informed decision as opposed to a matter of conforming to traditional expectations and roles. For Nikhil, the desire to find fulfillment with another human being on a level plane represents the ideal of humanly loves. Unlike his introspection, which is a matter of personal duty, human love is desired but not necessary. Nikhil, though unable to suppress the agony of his rejection, is ultimately willing to let Bimala go. Regardless of whether she loves him or not, Nikhil ultimately wants to see Bimala blossom “in all her truth and power” (41). Thus, while Bimala’s response when limited to the home is to engage in a form of worship, the outside world signals the coming of a desire that is free to roam. And roam it does, for no longer is her devotion limited to the only form available in a traditional marriage. She now has the option of viewing herself in conjunction with the nationalist movement; the worship of one is transferred to the worship of another. Her interaction with Sandip leads her to feel that she is “no longer the representative of the Rajah’s house, but the sole representative of Bengal’s womanhood” (31). This grandiose vision of an inflated self comes under attack in Tagore’s moralistic tale. The nationalist drive toward community, toward consolidation, is meant to come across as a false, impermanent desire. And while Nikhil remains wary

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of being critical or condemnatory, the tragic outcome of Sandip and Bimala’s nationalist fervor facilitates a critique on the part of the reader. It is Nikhil who is validated, even though his political initiative in the novel is nil. Nikhil is gravely injured when he gallantly attempts to intercede in the communal violence that Sandip has instigated. Sandip runs off, neither caring about the outcome of his political agitation, nor willing to take any responsibility for it. Bimala, who has been undergoing another transformation, conceiving of herself less as the “womanhood of a nation” and more as a maternal figure, decides upon a suitable role for herself. She involves a young boy in a complicated plot to embezzle funds from her husband in support of Swadeshi. Her maternal instincts blossom as she interacts with the boy. However, this transition from maiden to mother is still done within the context of the nation. She asks, “Why does not my country become, for once, a real mother—clasp him to her bosom and cry out: ‘Oh, my child, my child, what profits it that you should save me, if so be it that I should fail you?’” (140). Unfortunately, as the reader soon comes to see, her transformation comes about too late. In the last line of the novel, we find out that the young boy, her surrogate child, “has a bullet through the heart. He is done for” (203). In considering the implications of this modernizing tale, of the reconceptualization of traditional practices, the reader will have difficulty finding a marked anti-nationalism. Rather, the nationalism that Tagore seeks needs to be grounded on some very specific, non-European ideals. Certainly, the trait of associating the mother figure with the nation can be found in most (if not all) nationalist movements. But Bimala’s transition from wife, to maiden, and finally to mother follows a pattern of exploration and return that has powerful implications. Bimala, though corrupted by the outside world, returns to the path of devotion, the place where the “river of love meets the sea of worship.” She goes back to “the feet of him, who has received all my sin into the depth of his own pain” (199). The circuitous path brings Bimala home, to her role as wife; though not without painful consequences. Importantly, it is Bimala herself who initiates her return. She is able to decide for herself, without being told, without succumbing to public outrage or private superstition, that her role, if it is played properly, can engender a nation. Thus, the function of reason, in a hostile and difficult world, leads back to the path of devotion. Bimala’s bout with a modern world, as a properly equipped, educated young woman, is to rest, once again, at her husband’s feet. But why does Bimala become the site for this negotiation? It is strange, after all, that though she embodies the contested ideological terrain of the novel, and though she has a central narrative presence, very little is actually heard from her. After all, unlike Nikhil and Sandip’s narration, much of

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her narrative voice involves the recounting of debates between the two men. Instead of being a fully participatory character, she exists as an observer, and her narrative presence remains vague. It is this lack of representation that, in large part, signals Bimala’s representative quality. For, in effect, Bimala is part of the transactive currency in this symbolic economy of anti-colonialism. The question that plagues the text is not whether modernity is a beneficial category. Undoubtedly, and almost unproblematically, both Sandip and Nikhil accept it easily. What the figure of woman allows, however, is a grafting together of Enlightenment reason and Indian mysticism. Bimala, in spite of her central position in the novel, retains an almost iconic status. The icon, despite being debunked by reason’s perceptive gaze, winds up in the same position in which it had always been. However, the function of free will in this narrative allows for such mysticism to move through the field of reason unscathed. I read Tagore’s basic premise as claiming that, while sadhana is ultimately a move away from reason, it relies upon rational thought to distinguish it from mere belief. Thus, without reason, and as a slave to tradition, Bimala’s status is irrelevant to nationalist anti-colonial discourse. But, once reason becomes a factor in her calculations, Bimala, tragic as her story may be, salvages a triumphant Indian legacy. At the same time, though reason transforms Bimala, she remains, essentially, the same—supplicant at her husband’s feet. As mentioned above, Bimala remains elusive as a narrative presence. Rather, it is Tagore’s positioning of her in various schemes that allows her to function as something of an experiment. Tagore decides to use the figure of woman to occupy this space since it is, in effect, relatively unrepresented. The Woman Question in Bengal is, for the most part, a discourse dominated by males.10 Thus, the field of possibility remains open for representing her. She must be malleable because it is virtually impossible to raise her own voice within Bengali society. Not unlike Kipling’s lama, who must descend from the mountains beyond the farthest periphery of empire, Tagore’s woman is drawn from the inner reaches of the zenana and placed within the world to justify a particular ideological position within the highly contested colonial terrain. The nation without enlightened women is only a monstrous replica of the domineering West. But if the enlightened woman can decide her own place, she might re-affirm Hindu male identity within a rapidly transforming world. ANGLOINDIAN LITERARY DISCOURSE AND THE ORIENTALIST CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY During a speaking tour of the United States in the winter of 1916–1917, Tagore delivered the lecture “Nationalism in the West.” In it he explicitly

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formulated his critique of nationalism and the modernity it had engendered. In this powerful, sometimes fiery denunciation of the excesses of Nationalism, Tagore went about constructing the same Orient/Occident binary that he had novelized in The Home and the World. As Europe suffered through World War I, Tagore launched a full frontal attack on what he perceived to be the cause of such conflagration—the self-interest, greed and power-politics of Western nations. Keep in mind that Tagore was speaking from the standpoint of a colonial subject. His notion of the nation was conditioned by the very recent history of imperialism in his homeland. Thus, he saw the nation and nationalism as an imperial phenomenon, not content to remain within its own geographical boundaries; the nation had produced itself by penetrating into the regions of “no-nations” and living off of them. He likened the situation, where the colony is plundered while its inhabitants receive minimal sustenance, to insects feeding on the paralyzed flesh of their victims, “kept just enough alive to make them toothsome and nutritious” (42–3). Tagore defines the nation as “that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose” (19). In fact, it is this notion of mechanical, instrumentalized political and commercial power that draws the bulk of his ire. The nation is “merely the side of power, not human ideals,” and as such “the living bonds of society are breaking up, and giving place to merely mechanical organization” (20). In essence, man is becoming the machine. This is not a particularly novel or new critique of modernity. However, Tagore’s formulation of how the nation produced such a global condition neatly illustrates the Orientalist underpinning of his critique. Essentially, as he argues, the machinistic qualities of the nation are the inevitable result of applied knowledge, knowledge that fuels the rise of the nation and the West. The application of human intellect to the material world had, however, produced Europe’s present condition. Europe’s (and, thus, the West’s) rise to power had come about through “the age of intellect, of science” (47). But, he continues, “intellect is impersonal” (47). Intellect produces power but not humanity: “Therefore we must not forget that the scientific organizations vastly spreading in all directions are strengthening our power, but not our humanity” (56). It is man’s reason and intellect which, in all its objective and instrumental force, has given rise to the present condition: “This government by the Nation is neither British nor anything else; it is an applied science and therefore more or less similar in its principles wherever it is used”(28). Tagore’s solution is to turn to India, which has a long history of negotiating racial difference. As he puts it, in the opening lines of the lecture,

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India’s great problem has been one of race. In negotiating vast racial differences within a limited geographical sphere, India has dealt with the kinds of issues to which the globalizing aspirations of Western nations have given rise. And his solution is, quite simply, a plea for humanism. But Tagore’s model for humanism is one he considers to be uniquely Eastern. He writes, “India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other” (15). And while acknowledging that this process has not been perfect, he argues that this lesson of acknowledging unity, regardless of racial difference, is India’s lesson to the world: Take it in whatever spirit you like, here is India, of about fifty centuries at least, who tried to live peacefully and think deeply, the India devoid of all politics, the India of no nations, whose one ambition has been to know this world as of soul, to live here every moment of her life in the meek spirit of adoration, in the glad consciousness of an eternal and personal relationship with it. This is the remote portion of humanity, childlike in its manner, with the wisdom of the old, upon which burst the Nation of the West. (17)

In other words, Tagore reverses the Orientalist circle, pleading for the ancient and eternal spiritual oneness that he considers to be the totality of humankind (and a unique contribution of the Vedas), as a solution to the globe’s increasing distemper. As we have seen in the work of both Tagore and Kipling, the realm of imaginative fiction offers a space for representing varying accounts of colonial India. While these two authors exist almost diametrically opposed to one another in terms of their position on the legitimacy of British rule in India, both anchor their representations of the past on the subcontinent as one rooted in religious belief—both endorse the idea that the ancient legacies of human spirituality lie in the East. I suggest that though these two Nobel laureates do in fact share an Orientalist notion that reason resides in the West and spirituality in the East, they also hint at the transformations taking place in Orientalist discourse during the twentieth century. Whereas Kipling frames the “cultural” heritage of East versus West as a binary of mysticism versus reason, Tagore’s terms are grouped around the pairing of spirituality and science. The shift in terminology signals a further polarization in the essential characteristics that Orientalism posits, suggesting a crucial anxiety, during the twentieth century, in the governance of the liberal democratic nation: secularism and the separation between church and

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state. In the following chapter I will explore Virginia Woolf ’s subtle modernist resurrection of Orientalist mysticism in order to address precisely such issues: issues that to this day continue to plague the post-colonial and post-industrial “nations” of the world.

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Chapter Five

Modernist Orientalism and Empathetic Subjectivity: Mrs. Dalloway and the Discontents of Modernity

PART I: LITERARY MODERNISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION Literary Modernism has long been defined as an acute crisis of representation. While realism and naturalism were the dominant modes of novelistic representation that proliferated during the latter half of the nineteenth century, for much of Europe’s literati these narrative modes were proving to be insufficient for rendering new forms of human experience, of consciousness fashioned by industrialization and imperialism. As a result, the literary avant garde experimented with formal and thematic arrangements which wrought entirely new types of narrative in imaginative fiction. Such a turn toward formal experimentation became particularly pronounced during the second decade of the twentieth century, as the newly industrialized powers of Europe became increasingly aggressive toward one another. Forster’s famous Modernist entreaty to “Only connect . . .” was being widely enacted at the level of “High Culture.” For artists and other cultural producers of the period, this was an effort to address a past that had come to the fore as a result of Europe’s expansion during the previous few centuries. As a result, new variations of primitivist and Orientalist appropriation and representation were being wrought. Pound (Chinese poetry), Eliot (Vedic hymns) and Picasso (African art) were all famously experimenting with nonEuropean materials. Thus, on the surface, associations were being explored in terms of the artifacts and representations of cultures other than those of Europe: this was a degree of cultural connectivity provided by the increasing reference to sources outside of the modern classical tradition at the levels of “High” cultural production; such artistic works were consumed by a highly literate and privileged elite. Of course, such juxtapositions, and the subsequent epistemological impulse to do comparative study, had long sparked 105

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discussion amongst various groups of literati—those who were seeking to both transform and transcend the conditions of a (variously defined) aesthetic (Ancient Greek, Hellenic, Latinate, Judeo-Christian, “Post-Renaissance European” High Culture). Many of the sources to which the High Modernists were turning were, geographically speaking, no longer of European origin. In Western Europe, the first prominent wave of such cultural assessment and utilization was during the Enlightenment, as European states drew upon the awareness, created out of their mercantile and political expansionism, of long extant human cultures and civilizations. Literary Modernism, indeed Modernism as a whole, might be considered a structurally related phenomenon to that earlier historical moment. As I point out in the first two chapters, during the eighteenth century Western Europe’s earlier engagement with a “non-Europe” gave rise to a slew of interpretations and theorizing based on evidence culled from the colonies (which tended to give centrality to the cultural and sociological phenomena occurring in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe). Literary High Modernism, for virtually all its canonical practitioners, reexamined in various implicit and explicit ways, connections which Europe itself had wrought over the course of the previous four centuries. Oftentimes an explicit critique of Empire appeared, as evidenced most famously in Forster’s A Passage to India. Modernist artists, in their European contexts, examined and critiqued the social fragmentation produced by the massive thrust of industrial and imperial modernity; they brought to their works (to varying degrees) an awareness of the sense of simultaneity and interconnectedness that was occurring between increasingly broad networks of human beings—both within individual Western European (and North American) nation-states, and well beyond them. High Modernism’s acknowledgement of a more expansive humanity was, in many ways, a response to European discontents and not totally dissimilar from Enlightenment thinkers’ deployments of sparse and fragmentary information on Chinese and Indian cultures; information which was used to undermine and weaken various positions held by religious orthodoxies in Europe. Unlike the Enlightenment, however, the Modernist period did not cater as powerfully to the desire to interpret and integrate non-European cultures into a Eurocentric cosmology. Perhaps this was in part due to the fact that after high imperialism, such dominance and centrality were no longer in question. Rather, early twentieth-century Modernist appropriations of African art, Buddhist iconography and Sanskritic antiquity were, more often than not, geographical juxtapositions aimed at providing new sites for commenting upon modern European life after large scale industrialization. This was

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coming, not surprisingly, at a historical moment when recent technological developments were about to radically transform cultural production. In artistic High Modernism, non-European works were often selectively positioned in order to make them available to the aesthetic sensibilities of an audience that, as K. Anthony Appiah quite correctly points out, “mobilized ‘difficulty’ as a mode of privileging its own aesthetic sensibility and celebrated irony appreciable only by a cultural elite” (143). Artistic High Modernism relied on the inclusion of non-European materials, through primitivist and Orientalist appropriations, in order to both defamiliarize its European audience and to re-assess human(e) workings in light of some disfiguring historical conditions. High imperialism had made the happenings of far away colonies vital to the political strategies of European states. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the British were also forced to contend with indigenous populations (whose independence leaders were, more often than not, elites schooled in many of the same traditions as their colonizers) seeking political sovereignty. Out of this milieu, high British literary Modernism explored new paths of engagement with the Indian subcontinent it had continuously ruled for more than a century. These new cultural engagements gestured beyond the rarefied stratum of the Anglo-Indian ruling class and turned, increasingly, to more sympathetic representations of South Asian peoples and their cultures. This development has been documented in a variety of studies on British literary representations of India over the course of the colonial period: Benita Parry’s 1971 Delusions and Discoveries being one of the earliest and best of these studies.1 Almost all these literary responses can be linked back to the discontents and problems of urbanized, industrialized life, as well as the European crisis of nation-states that would lead to World War I. If the straightforward response of the earlier Modernism of Kipling and Tagore involved an essentialized East and West coming together (as a hopeful integration of Western modernity with Eastern antiquity), then the crisis of representation for Modernist novels of the twenties included an acknowledgement of a growing desire for the East’s independence from colonial rule. Such is the case even when doomed to the sort of failure found in 1924’s A Passage to India, where Forster’s sympathetic rendering of Indian characters, in an effort to seek out avenues of communication between Europe and Asia, still gives way to the fundamental differences between European and Asiatic. The final episode in A Passage to India depicts the mystical rapture of Dr. Godbole, as he immerses himself in the ancient ritualistic ceremonies of his ancient Hindu religion— inexplicable and inscrutable. Godbole provides characteristic stereotypes of

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Orientalist representation that manage to emerge despite Forster’s effort to bridge the chasm between the colonizers and colonized.2 Indian antiquity appears rather deliberately, conjoined with other ancient traditions, in the poetry of Eliot, whose 1922 “The Wasteland” is a paean to the erosion of Western civilization as a result of modernity’s radical social impacts. Others such as the British public intellectuals and writers, Christopher Isherwood (who was associated with the Bloomsbury group and published in its Hogarth Press) and Aldous Huxley explore and write about the esoteric possibilities of Indian spiritualism. The head-on approach to the question of British imperialism in works by the likes of Forster, or even Leonard Woolf, is very different than that of Virginia Woolf, who makes oblique, yet insistent, references to India in her novel of 1925. Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, presents a fascinating thematic and structural illustration of Forster’s credo. While the context of Clarissa Dalloway’s London revolves around the tumult following the first “modern” war, it puts the colonies back into circulation in important ways. Virginia Woolf’s novels of the twenties and thirties are now considered central to any account of English (and Anglo) literary High Modernism. Her experimentations with form make her work important to the assessment of the avant-garde English language novels of High Modernism. And, as a writer situated in the intellectual and artistic life of Bloomsbury during and after World War I, one might think some of the pressing issues involving the colonies and colonial rule would come into her writing. For many in her circle, such conversations were part and parcel of the intellectual ferment of the day. Her husband, Leonard, had experience in the colonies (mostly in Ceylon), and would later become a British MP with ties to the progressive Fabians. In his own nonfictional writings, including Civilization and Imperialism and his autobiography, the topic of imperialism and the dangers of colonialism were repeatedly addressed. And yet, for the most part, Virginia’s fiction, and her non-fiction as well, rarely explicitly addressed such issues. While there are varying assessments of Woolf ’s political inclinations (or lack there of) toward the colonies, they will not be of primary concern in my assessment of Mrs. Dalloway.3 Rather, I locate Woolf ’s quiet but insistent references to India in the novel to be relevant to central issues of both theme and form. Allusions to India are regular. But no sense of a historical India, or of a native “voice,” appears. However, as I will argue over the course of this chapter, the presence of India in the novel and the deployment of colonial space allows a central feature of Orientalist depictions of India—its mystical antiquity—to address and aid Woolf’s depiction and critique of what ails Clarissa Dalloway and, accordingly, what ails the English upper classes in 1921 London.

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I will show how a latent form of Orientalism, in many ways, no longer needs to address the Orient directly. Attitudes toward and derived from the “cultural” impact of colonialism—a pervasive logic of a materialist, rationally minded-West and an immaterial, spiritually minded-East—still provide a problematic but, nonetheless, possible redress to modern discontents. Thus, into the heart of empire, 1921 London emerges an India whose role in the politics of the day are barely visible within a novel whose imaginative rendering of a historically “real” social space are considered revolutionary in terms of narrative innovation. Despite the increasing prominence of Indian arguments for self-rule within the British public sphere, the India of Amritsar and Gandhi and the Indian National Congress will not be represented. Yet, despite India’s absence in terms of the political order of the England depicted in the novel, I will argue that Orientalist tropes emerging out of Europe’s cultural engagement with the subcontinent make an appearance by means of a quasi-mystical, affective solution to the novel’s central premise—the formal and thematic exploration of human inter-subjectivity and attempts at forging connection for which Mrs. Dalloway has become well-known. For, if we consider Clarissa Dalloway’s early years at Bourton, when the stable and rigid social order left her grasping for different avenues out of which one might find connection, we can discount her desire for a uniformity of being—of an “absolute” homogeny which links her sense of self to all time and all things, a basic interconnectedness—as rooted in a naïve sense of sympathy. We are left to conclude that Clarissa Dalloway, at the tender age of eighteen, is subscribing to a certain kind of simplistic idealism—of a sense of being that relates to an essence or quality linking all living and natural things: It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped on the back of her seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind the counter—even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions (souls), the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads

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In my reading of the novel, this is a moment where a lurking Orientalist discourse on “India” emerges at the very core of what the novel is trying to both say and do. The theory provided by Clarissa here models a subjectivity that actively extends beyond the self to that which is not known, in effect recovering the “unseen.” The passage above, narrated by Peter, provides insight into something the reader already knows: namely, that Clarissa has maintained, from those days of her youth, a “transcendental” theory about the nature of existence. Peter’s recollection of that distant day resonates with a series of earlier episodes within the novel establishing Clarissa’s metaphysical inclinations, her affective leanings with regard to a higher order or power. In the world of Clarissa Dalloway, even prior to the Great War, the concept of “God” has been undermined by historical events—modernity has given rise to a disaffection with the Judeo-Christian notion of a supreme being that, according to many historians and theorists of Modernism, contributes to the sense of crisis amongst so many artists and intellectuals of the day. Thus, toward the end of the novel, when Peter recalls their youthful conversations, the reader is already aware that the connectivity once offered by God is no longer a tenable position: Clarissa’s thoughts and actions have made it adequately clear that even as an adult she is distinctly distrustful of the church and relies on her transcendental theories for metaphysical comfort. Religion, as a belief in divine power, is degraded in Woolf ’s text by the course of human events: by modernity and the growth of human sciences that increasingly explain the world in non-religious terms. Modernity can be, and frequently is, defined as being oppositional to religion, though such a formulation masks the complexity of how human science has transformed the sphere and scope of religious belief. Indeed, one of the grand narratives of European history, “the rise of the nation-state,” rests heavily upon the notion that the existence of the liberal-democratic nation state was predicated on the transfer of what had been religious authority to increasingly non-religious institutions. At the end of the novel, the sense of connection to the world that was once such a sphere of religious impulse is instead enacted through Clarissa’s supernatural understanding and empathy for Septimus, as the suicide makes his way via Sir William Bradshaw into Clarissa’s consciousness: “in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” (279).4 The reader has already encountered the argument against institutional religion much earlier,

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through Clarissa’s own sentiments and a highly unsympathetic portrait of the zealously religious and proselytizing Mrs. Kilman. Peter’s recapitulation of Clarissa’s neo-religious sentiment (in the long passage from page 8) happens moments after Septimus’ death and highlights, in my reading, the connection that occurs between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. These are two people who will never meet and yet, through the remarkable formalistic experiment of this work, are metaphysically brought together by novelistic invention. The form of their connection is made possible through newly emergent aspects of fiction in early 1920s London—the time and place when Virginia Woolf conceives of and enacts this canonical High Modernist work. I submit that such a conception of connection by way of inter-subjective “affect” owes much to the colonial encounter and the nineteenth-century rise of the “spiritual” East. In the previous chapters, I have shown how this “mystical” core becomes emblematic for many Western (and Indian) representations of the East and plays a prominent role in Orientalist discourse on India. My reading links a latent form of South Asian Orientalism with the thematic and structural concerns over connectivity in Mrs. Dalloway. This long-existent strand of thought about India and the “East” informs most of the novel’s central observations about the possibilities and impossibilities of developing empathy for those outside of one’s purview. It is empathy that might, perhaps, suture back together the fragmented everyday world of an increasingly technologized society. I would like to introduce such “affective connectivity” as an allusive basis for inter-subjective affiliations occurring in Woolf ’s novel, a way of reconceptualizing the metaphysical functions once administered to by institutional modes of religious belief and now being given renewed articulation through the discourse of Orientalism.5 My reading will demonstrate how Empire, which had so clearly been established (during the second half of the nineteenth century) as radiating outward from Westminster, draws the periphery back into the center, a location from which that periphery has generally been occluded. Into the heart of Empire enters the colonial “out there” that, though crucial to the workings of imperial power, rarely occupies the center. Many of the attempts at providing connection in Mrs. Dalloway are particularly Orientalist in the sense that they owe a debt to the popularization of Vedantic and Buddhist notions of the self and the material world. The mystical bent of such Orientalist reconfigurations of South Asian cultures appear both in Clarissa’s fear of death and Septimus’ madness. Over the course of my reading I will locate the particular sorts of political and cultural anxiety that inform Woolf ’s usage of India in Mrs. Dalloway. 6 This chapter, then, furthers the implicit argument of my claim in Chapter One—that manifest Orientalism

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loses most of its instrumental efficacy during the twentieth century, but latent Orientalism plays a significant, if peripheral, presence in the realm of Anglophonic imaginative fiction. PART II: CONTRAPUNTAL WOOLF Religiosity, Connectivity, and State Power: Modernity and the “Death of the Soul” Mrs. Dalloway takes place in the geographical seat of Empire—London’s Westminster, where parliamentary and monarchial power (the modern and the symbolically traditional institutions of modern power) both reside. The novel carefully traces out these concentric circles of power as they emanate outward—the resounding peals of Big Ben continually remind the reader of the centrality of Westminster to power. The leaden circles move across and through the consciousness of a myriad host of characters, major and minor, who are linked through their internalization of modern state power—unconsciously, yet, in this scene, palpably. The presence of Big Ben and an aura of Prime Ministry serve as devices for displaying the working of modern connectivity within the very center of the metropole: Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailor’s shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. (25)

This passage, occurring in the second “section” (rather than chapter) of the novel, displays the first formal attempt to extend the scope of London beyond the subjective experiences of Clarissa Dalloway.7 It follows an opening section that introduces us to our protagonist as she heads into the streets of Westminster to run her morning errands. During her walk Clarissa ruminates on a variety of topics, criticizing Hugh, recalling Peter, pondering her past as a young woman on the verge of adulthood. The first passage involves a series of radical connections in Mrs. Dalloway’s temporal configurations, her subjective, personal time.8 Thus, we are introduced to Clarissa by means of interpenetrating insights into her past and present (free direct and indirect discourse), as well as her interactions in a more realist register, such as bumping into Hugh or waiting for a van to pass. All the while, the reader is moved

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through representations of thought and consciousness, the leaps and jumps in subjective time that mark a radical departure from previous approaches to novelistic narrative. For example, the motorcar backfiring like a pistol shot provides the transition to the more “public” sphere of the second section. Whereas the first section moves the reality of London on a mid-June day in 1923 through the character of Mrs. Dalloway, the second section inverts this relationship and introduces a series of characters through the objective occurrences of a morning in Westminster. Thus the reader is moved from inside to outside, private to public, very early on in the novel. The disjuncture between the first (private) and second (public) sections establishes a primary formal concern in Mrs. Dalloway (and, one could argue, in all high Modernist prose).9 The interpenetrations between inside / outside, personal / social, and private / public are all subject to radical transformations as a result of drastic reorganizations of space and time that have occurred over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The issue of representing these continuities and discontinuities in new ways has, as we have seen, been a primary tension for defining literary Modernism. In high Modernist prose, the aim of disrupting realist forms of representation serves to renegotiate the place of fictional prose and its relationship to the increasingly internalized strictures of modern life. With Mrs. Dalloway, the modern forms that are subject to interrogation include not only Empire, as we have seen in the previous passage, but other modern structures of connectivity such as advertising, transportation and medicine. Certainly the phenomenon of the “masses,” of an increasingly mobile populace, is a central conceptual feature of the novel and the idea of mass consciousness is first introduced in the second section of the novel. In Foucauldian terms, modern “governmentality” serves as the narrative lynchpin in Woolf ’s prescient description of how the power of the state is internalized by the populace. The disruptive automobile backfire that jars Clarissa at the end of the first section, and which draws the narrative voice away from her internal dialogue, brings about an intriguing series of events: people on the street try to grapple with who the car’s important passenger might be. As rumors silently circulate about the occupant of the car—Prime Minister, Prince, or Queen—Woolf narrates the feeling on the street as akin to a new form of religion: “they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide” (20). This connection between religion and ostensibly “modern” forms of state power develops over the course of the novel, and I will return to this theme later. But it is already clear how extensively modern state power has intruded upon the sphere of religious belief. The idea of internalized

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discipline and deference to state power, and the ubiquitous quality of such internalization, provides a demarcation (or lack thereof, in the sense that old boundaries have moved) for modern power and its relationship to the individual. As the street-scene inquiry climaxes, we are first introduced to Septimus Smith. Septimus is a war veteran who does not join the crowd in wondering about the motorcar. Instead, he attempts to interpret the social phenomenon occurring on the street, where all other eyes are turned toward the motorcar. Septimus, who is flirting with madness, will be developed as a formal and thematic counterpoint to Clarissa. Though they will never meet, the novel draws them together in multiple ways. Woolf allows the reader to engage with their shared sympathies and complementary insights. In the hubbub over the motorcar, Septimus literally visualizes the energy drawn collectively into focus by the promise of power. For him the vision is a harbinger of something awful, “this gradual drawing together of everything to one center before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames . . . the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames” (21). Septimus, in his madness, is the only one to see the accumulated curiosity of the crowds (the supra-sensual quality of their response to power) as potentially disastrous, a portent of violence and destruction. As the tale unfolds, Septimus’ visions, caused by mental trauma from the horrors of trench warfare, often produce such penetrating, if hallucinatory, insight. The second section of the novel, in its exploration of the social field, demonstrates the ongoing erosion and displacement of religion as a symbolic authority in public life—Woolf ’s references to religion in Mrs. Dalloway are mostly along the lines of the historical sites of religion (St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey); the depiction of institutionalized religion, and particularly proselytizing Christianity is acerbic and derogatory. The episode with the motorcar certainly exhibits the shift in attributing metaphysical impulses, “the spirit of religion” in the crowd, as they are drawn to a new form of faith offered by the secular state system. In a moment of crisp disdain, Woolf likens this scene of mass mobilization, of massed attention, to a phenomenon of weather, “invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like,” producing a quieting effect on the once “utterly disorderly” faces of the public: “But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide” (20). This critique of governmental power is deliberately constructed with the language of institutional religiosity—a form of expression chastised throughout the novel. Yet, the displacement of religion

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is not simply a wholesale shift from one source of faith to another. Woolf makes a point of displaying the fragmentation of metaphysical desire as it morphs into new forms of social ordering: nationalism and imperialism chief amongst them. The second section moves the gaze of the masses from one focal point, modern government, to another, modern technology. From the enigma of who might be inside the car, Woolf turns to two technological innovations that provide for mass connectivity: the airplane and advertising.10 As a plane races across the sky, people in the crowd turn from the mystery of the car’s occupant and, one after another, try to make out the skywriting left in the wake of the plane’s passage. Once again the indeterminacy of the situation suggests the fickle and incomplete nature of such methods of bringing together large numbers of people. In a near religious moment, the revelation of writing in the sky is brought back to the banality of earthly need—the marks are variously interpreted as “Glaxo,” or “Kreemo,” perhaps even toffee. Such a desire for religious revelation from above is written by Woolf as farce, a displacement from the heavenly to the consumerist wonders of advertising—technology in service to commerce. Once again, these signs of modern connectivity—political, technological, consumerist—serve to draw the reader across and through a variety of disparate individual perspectives as character after character is shown responding to the force of these signs of modernity. Indeed, Woolf provides an eerily sentient notion of how the power of the modern state will be interwoven with consumerist and technological fascination—a phenomenon that many cultural theorists have read as the passage from the modern to the postmodern. This second section offers a series of individual consciousnesses linked by the airplane’s passage across the London sky serves to reorganize the scope of subjectivity, providing new linkages across time and space, as highlighted in the final segment of the section. Moving from Mr. Bentley’s musings upon science and abstraction to an indecisive figure on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral, unsure of whether to enter the church or not, Woolf illustrates modern urban life as a crisis of faith: where old means of spiritual belief have been eroded and the new have yet to supplant them. The fluid traversal of the plane across large expanses of territory also serves to bridge the vast psychic spaces of these characters, placing disparate and contrary situations (bridging class, gender, and ethnicity) against one another. Thus, the sense of abstraction evoked by Mr. Bentley allows him to feel as if he is leaving the vessel of his body behind, achieving a higher state through science: “to get outside his body . . . by means of thought” (41). This happens just as the very next figure, the (generic) man on the steps, cannot decide whether the spiritual transcendence once promised by organized religion is worth his

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effort. The passage ends with this “seedy-looking nondescript man” standing at the entryway of St. Paul’s, wavering in his faith, when the plane comes along and draws his attention, like that of the many others, upward to a new mode of “religion.” Man has found the means to ascend to the heights once reserved, literally and figuratively, for God. On this note, the second section ends. With this passage we recognize that the energies once sequestered by religious belief are being radically transformed, displacing modes of religiosity into emerging forms of state and commercial enterprise. As discussed earlier, the first section draws the reader through an extended narration of Clarissa’s experiences, thoughts and memories as she walks through Westminster. The second section, while working through a variety of characters (including Clarissa), makes a formal leap at rendering the shared and multiple subjectivities yoked together by modern phenomena: as I have named them, government, technology, and commerce. In addition to the larger issues of thematically addressing such structural shifts in social organization and power dynamics, Woolf also utilizes formal arrangement within the novel to produce connectivity in Mrs. Dalloway. NARRATION AND FORMAL SUBJECTIVITYWHO SPEAKS THE “I” OF INTERIOR MONOLOGUE? Mrs. Dalloway is narrated, primarily, in the second-person omniscient voice. Thus, the recourse to the personal pronoun, “I,” is limited. Over the course of the entire novel only about fifty instances of the personal pronoun are used, most of these in the form of dialogue. While a number of primary characters, and a smaller number of secondary characters, have access to this privileged voice of narrative authenticity, I will, in the interest of space, desist from a more comprehensive analysis of Woolf ’s use of the “I.” Rather, I limit my reading to the initial appearances of the first person pronoun in the novel, which provide a crucial, formal connection between Clarissa and Septimus. Woolf makes use of the “I” to provide a linkage between the first two sections of Mrs. Dalloway, structuring the novel’s formal pattern of pronominal usage in order to allow the reader to connect Septimus and Clarissa. The first four instances of the personal pronoun occur in the following fashion: in the first section, Clarissa first uses “I” in dialogue, then interior monologue. In the second section, Septimus mirrors Clarissa; referring to himself in monologue, then dialogue. In the first section, narrated entirely from Clarissa’s point of view, Clarissa first speaks of herself in the first person during an encounter on the street with Hugh: “I love walking in London” (7). Quite simply, Clarissa openly

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expresses her interior state. Through the omniscient narration, the reader is already well acquainted with the sense of pleasure Clarissa derives from the liveliness of Westminster. And, as the reader is beginning to grasp, Clarissa is sorting through not only the sensual realities of walking in London, but also through the spatial and chronological translocations occurring within Clarissa’s mind as she walks. Her mind goes off in a variety of directions, chronologically retracing various aspects of her life. She goes back, again and again, to Peter Walsh, the friend and suitor she spurned years before and who is now returning to England after a stay in India. Clarissa’s second use of “I” is in interior monologue and involves a subtle shift in referent that further displays Woolf ’s technical mastery. In exploring the pleasures of urban life, Clarissa penetrates into her past to reveal the scope of Peter’s influence on her: “She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that” (11). Clarissa’s first evocation of self in monologue sympathetically pulls Peter into her own sense of linguistic subjectivity, once again foreshadowing the deep and lasting sway he continues to have on her. The play in notions of self, the ability to treat Peter with deep sympathy is a central plot device in the novel: the reader becomes well acquainted with the unrequited love and rejection Peter has felt during the thirty-odd years since Clarissa chose another man to be her husband, as well as with Clarissa’s uncertainty as to whether she made the right choice. Yet, as this first section shows, Peter’s long absence in India has made him no less critical to Clarissa’s sense of identity. During her late adolescent years spent summering at Bourton, her notion of self develops closely with that of Peter’s. In looking back she also considers her identity as having become attenuated due to her marriage to Richard: “not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (14). The first section, which revolves around Clarissa’s experiences, ends with a “pistol shot” from a car in the street. The subjective experience of that pistol shot is taken up in the second section—a function of modern power hailing the masses as I have pointed out earlier. At this point, Clarissa (who, later in the novel escorts a prime minister about her party) is not included in the hubbub of the next few pages, as all eyes on the street turn to the car and try to guess who is inside. This is the point where Septimus enters the tale: “Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard him.” (20) This notion of the self “unable to pass,” though meant quite literally in this passage, will return with much greater figurative force as the scene proceeds. In terms of

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form this scene will invert the pattern of narrative voice we have just seen with Clarissa earlier. After we meet Septimus, the linkage between the two is further reinforced as Clarissa briefly returns to the narrative, drawn to the shop window to look at the excitement on the street. We then return to Septimus, whose frightening internalization of the objective reality on the street threatens to disperse his internal world into Armageddon: Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything into one center before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose? (21, my emphasis)

At this point, Septimus imagines his subjectivity as that which keeps the world from exploding into flames. The cohesion of his “self ” keeps such chaos at bay. Literally, his sense of a unified self blocks the path of annihilation. And yet he is unclear as to his purpose. He knows that his self keeps the world in order, but wonders what end this serves. Later, as he reverses this equation and privileges the absence of self, Septimus finds some sense of affective joy in this dispersal. He imagines himself connected and disseminated through the leaves and trees, a coterminous, harmonious extension of self that produces a sense of religious ecstasy (a feature associated with virtually all mystical religious experience).11 Before that happens, however, Septimus’ wife, Rezia, hears him say, “I will kill myself ”(22). The disparity between these two public utterances—Clarissa’s “I love walking in London” and Septimus’ “I will kill myself ”—display the chasm of sensibility Clarissa will have to cross in order to eventually come to an understanding of Septimus’ predicament. And yet, Woolf has already been establishing thematic parallels between the two that will be borne out over the course of the second section, as the reader becomes increasingly familiar with Septimus’ point of view. As we can see from the long passage above, for Septimus the self / world distinction is threatening to collapse—in this instance the resultant terror is one of destruction. But the novel will continually pose the following dilemma: is the loss of subjectivity a problem or a solution? In this scene, Septimus sees his subjectivity as responsible for keeping the world in order—

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his “self ” blocks the world from obliteration. In this passage Woolf associates the barely tangible response of the masses (to the unknown occupant of the motorcar) with the sense of impending catastrophe felt by Septimus; who locates himself at the center of this accumulated “energy.” However, the full sense of Woolf ’s critique of the masses’ “hailing power” has yet to be fully revealed. The reader does not yet know that Septimus is going mad because of the actions of the very same state that is the symbolic object of the people’s curiosity. The annihilation imagined by Septimus as he internalizes the crowd’s response is, of course, written much more tangibly in Septimus’ military service—and by his very madness itself. In this episode, power of the state displays a destructive influence upon the self, eventually resulting in Septimus’ elevation of self as a form of defense. His portentous sense of disaster created by the energies of the masses (mobilized by mystification, since we never do find out who is in the car) is simply what he already knows to be true from his own experience. When Woolf transfers the attention of the masses to the sky, everyone diverts their eyes upward and the narrator makes note of the fact that their previous fascination, the motorcar, “went into the gates and nobody looked at it” (30). The narrator tracks the movement of the skywriting plane across the sky and we are again taken through both the internal and external thoughts of numerous characters. Rezia draws Septimus’ attention skyward, in an effort to heed the doctor’s suggestion and get Septimus to take an interest “in things outside himself ” (31); another signal from Woolf to the reader that the very idea of self is being radically reconfigured by the developments of post-Great War Europe. This suggestion, to look “outward,” serves as a direct counterpoint to the previous episode, where he detaches the world and recedes into a hardened self. In this scene Woolf reverses what has occurred in the previous episode as Septimus directs his sense of self outward. Looking at the sky, he imagines that the writing is, like the attention on the street, directed at him. Yet, in this instance he interprets the view as one of “unimaginable beauty” (31). The episode inspires for him something akin to religious ecstasy; an unbounded quality that provides the sense of being intimately connected to the world around him: But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down, when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement. . . . Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds . . . All taken together meant the birth of a new religion. (Dalloway 32–3)

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In this instance it is the dissolution of self, not its consolidation, which allows for the transcendent joy that Septimus feels. In no longer being separated from the world but of the world, Septimus has a profound sense of understanding and connection with the world. Though, as we can see from this passage, that sense of connection lacks any human component. “Connect,” in this instance, is limited to a shared organicism with the natural world.12 These first two sections of the novel demarcate the spaces of individual consciousness and social reality. More importantly, they traffic in the spaces between: the inter-subjective and shared spaces of modern life. The intersubjective experience of modernity displayed here comes across, for the most part, in a negative light. Yet I would suggest that the possibilities for more substantial and constructive modes of consciousness are not simply discarded. Woolf highlights the fickle quality of modern connectivity, noting the repressed energies and violence within some of these tendencies and providing moments of connection through Septimus that flirt with the sublime. But while Septimus may be going mad, his experience of connecting self to the world offers moments of harmony, perhaps even transcendence, of the social and personal, outside and in. As I have described it so far, the first two sections establish a tension between public and private, inside and outside. And as both sections manage to move between these polarities, indeed at times confounding easy demarcation between them, they also establish a series of parallels between Septimus and Clarissa. Though completely disparate figures, the novel’s narrative structure moves Clarissa toward a mysterious and insightful understanding of the causes that precipitate Septimus’ tragic suicide. This form of desire, for an empathetic connection to the world outside one’s self that can then be brought into that self, is clearly something that both Clarissa and Septimus share. Septimus imagines himself connected to the organic world around him, alive and inseparable from the trees and leaves. Several pages earlier, Clarissa laments the loss of being alive as a loss of just such connections. She fears death because she can never again have the wonder of not simply being a self that is living, a self that is connected to the world around her. It is the loss of those connections which motivate Clarissa’s fear of death, allowing her to hope that she may continue to roam as a spirit, a haunt of London: [D]id it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter

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survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling, all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so wide, her life, herself. (12)

In this remarkable passage, Clarissa contemplates death and its possibilities, evoking the same sorts of connections that Septimus will see, soon after, between himself and the world. While there are crucial distinctions between their notions of connectivity—Septimus, after all, can only seem to imagine being connected to trees and leaves, never people—the language of connection is similar in both passages. In Clarissa’s imagination the trees become a metaphor for those people around her, her self a simile for the mist that lies entwined in the numerous branches of people she has known, people she will never know. And though Clarissa’s desire for connection signals a desire for transcendence, a desire to defeat death, she is only carrying through on a sentiment that has informed her (as we will learn from Peter) since she was a young woman. While her desire to transcend becomes a projection of herself into the world around her, she feels that similar connections are part and parcel of being alive. Thus, in this early description of connection and connectivity in the novel, the reader is asked, through the similarities in language used to describe their sense of being connected, to forge a link between Septimus and Clarissa. Woolf ’s novel tries to address psychological gaps in Clarissa’s consciousness—discontinuities in memory and thought—by making connections through other characters. As I have noted, by the end of the novel, Clarissa’s transcendental theory, one she has professed since her youth, is validated. At her party, Clarissa responds to the news of Septimus’ death by recognizing in Dr. Bradshaw the horrible power of patriarchal authority that has indeed precipitated the suicide. Only through the privileged position of readership do we see the fulfillment of Clarissa’s youthful notion of connecting to the people and the world around her. It is a tragic and ironic connection and one of which she is not fully cognizant, but it is a connection none-the-less. Such fragile connectivity is produced through figures who have passed through the experiences of war and colonialism coming home (through the figures of Septimus and Peter successively): but this sense of connectivity is still ambivalent, filled with anxiety and doubt as to what will eventually come about as a result of continental aggressions and the end of formal colonialism.

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If the narrative structure of the novel brings to light an overlap in sensibility between two characters that will never meet, it also utilizes the service of a go-between, whose mobility (both physical and conceptual) will highlight the possibilities and impossibilities of connection. Peter Walsh, spurned suitor of Clarissa, returns to London after a five-year sojourn in British India: it is a London very different from that which he escaped years before. As Peter walks the streets of post-war London, he ruminates about the state of the heart of Empire. “AFTER INDIA”: THE SOLITARY TRAVELER BACK IN LONDON As we have seen in my previous two sections, Septimus and Clarissa display distinct parallels that are emphasized through Woolf ’s thematic, formal and stylistic choices. Peter Walsh acts as a critical intermediary who, by his thoughts and actions, theorizes connectivity but fails to act on his insights. Peter will eventually, through his own failures, highlight for the reader the way in which Clarissa will come to understand Septimus’ plight. One of his primary roles in the narrative is to return to, observe and ruminate on the imperial center after several years in the colonial hinterlands. Even though his insightful observations are often undercut by a simultaneous pattern of misreading the world around him—of which, we, the reader, are aware— Peter ultimately serves to further bridge Clarissa and Septimus. His comparative state of mind reflects upon an India that is constantly being evoked as a marker of difference, but is not allowed much direct presence in the story. It is indirectly, through Peter’s regular evocations of the India he has left behind, that Orientalist discourse brings to light the monistic core of empathy and affect that Woolf posits as a novelistic solution—where a variety of transcendental forms (in this case, the actual novel) makes possible the connections that humans cannot. From Peter Walsh’s perspective, India is behind him. But if India is the space where Kipling can counter the ironic disillusionment of the European novel, it no longer holds any such promise for Peter Walsh. Peter goes to India as a result of romantic disillusionment—he seeks to find his fortune after Clarissa decides to marry Richard. Unfortunately, his fleeing to colonial India only results in further travails. Hence when first evoked in the novel, India is identified as the location of Peter’s failure. For the most part, however, India rests at the fringes of the narrative, a place in name only. In fact, any details of India that emerge generally involve the thin stratum of AngloIndians who manage British India. The only indigenous Indians ever named are coolies, those standard markers of colonial representation who, more

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often than not, appear as a feature of landscape rather than actual sentient beings. To be sure, they appear in order to highlight Peter’s frustrations as a colonial manager. Thus, while Peter harshly criticizes Anglo-Indian society, the disagreeable noises and actions of the coolies provide further evidence of his disillusion—coolies who refuse to employ his agricultural innovations and beat their wives to boot. Though Peter’s memories of India that trickle back while he is in London are spare, Woolf ’s rendering of the imaginary possibilities of India marks, for the most part, a departure from the exotic characters and landscapes depicted by Kipling (see Chapter IV). If Kipling can locate a space free of Lukacsian disillusionment, Woolf appears to be unable or unwilling to do so. India is Peter’s failure and disillusionment. But India is also fundamental to the notion of Empire. And while India may only appear in brief, it appears in Peter’s thoughts as a contrast to the metropole of London, to which Peter has returned from his exile. As a named but otherwise relatively unrepresented place, India is relevant to the peculiar crisis that lies at the center of Mrs. Dalloway: namely, the thematic and structural play which informs Woolf ’s novelistic representations of early-twentieth-century urban British life, as well as the crisis of representing the peculiarities of such urban and cosmopolitan modes of living. This crisis of representing modern life, a crisis that begets high literary Modernist explorations, reverberates uneasily within the nexus of Woolf ’s London. The absent center of desired connectivity that informs Mrs. Dalloway, that is so crucial to the thematic and formal concerns of the novel, accommodates staid features arising out of Orientalist discourse on Asia. As we have seen in previous chapters, such debates were consistently informed by the professional discourses of Orientalism and Indology as they were present in various facets of British public life. It is within such conceptual schemes that I locate Woolf ’s repeated naming of an India that serves little explicit purpose in the novel. Within this named but unrepresented presence / absence, the crisis of representation occurring in England after World War I becomes framed. In order to provide further evidence of this function of India in the novel, I will turn to the role of Peter as flâneur. During an extended section in the middle of the novel, Peter observes the movement and ephemera of London, and as such serves as an intermediary commentator and theorist of the varieties and forms of connection and disconnection brought to light in the thoughts of Clarissa and Septimus. We meet Peter for the first time as he pays a visit to Clarissa, the woman he continues to love despite the many years that have passed since she spurned him. During their meeting Clarissa thinks of Peter as completely unchanged, still given to nervously toying with his pocketknife as he speaks.

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Of course, the knife, as a device for cutting, highlights the ways in which Peter can so easily disrupt Clarissa’s reveries. Moments after Peter’s unexpected arrival, Clarissa recalls her long-ago kiss with Sally Seton—a moment she describes as “the most exquisite . . . of her whole life,” and which Peter interrupts with an offhand comment. Clarissa describes this interruption as “running one’s face against a granite wall in the darkness” (53). Despite this quality, Peter is still a central character in Clarissa’s life, crucial to her thoughts and memories. His ability to disrupt her life is equal to his ability to enhance and sustain it. Soon after her memory of Peter’s disruptive qualities, she details her affections for him, her sense that Peter was crucial to her formation as a human being. She evokes him, as I have highlighted earlier, in the very first usage of internal monologue in the novel, collapsing him into her invocation of self. Indeed, this narrative marker immediately precedes Clarissa’s connective and affective theorization of self after death cited earlier in my analysis—a moment I am reading as an attempt to extend and connect the self with a larger world. Consequently Peter is, for Clarissa, capable of both forging and breaking apart her sense of connectivity, her sense of self.13 Though he has just returned from five years in India, it remains, nonetheless, an abstraction to him. But Peter’s recent experiences in India foreground his assessment of the civilization and modernity he sees around him in the metropole. He continually rehearses this case as he walks. India, despite being present only as a marker of the distance, suggestively functions as part of Peter’s metaphysical musings. Walking through the city, Peter’s thoughts continually foreground the possibilities of connection. In so doing, his ideas conform to the types of Orientalist discourse that, as I develop in earlier chapters, have had more than a century of history within the metropole. Again, this latent Orientalism lies within the kinds of distinctions Peter is making about the public and private, the individual and social. Peter traverses London, comparing the modern city to the colonial disappointments he has left behind. He evokes the immense geographical scale of his duties in India, where he was responsible for “a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had to come to alone—he, Peter Walsh” (72). Peter, coming from a family who, “for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent,” still expresses his distinct distaste for his current occupation, “disliking India, and empire, and army as he did” (82). In telling fashion, this dislike of empire is turned back toward an admiration for the metropole, despite his negative experiences in British India: “there were moments when civilization, even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England” (82). Peter’s perambulations produce a sense of awe and wonder within him. Yet, despite

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the awe-inspiring quality of the various monuments to civilization that surround him, he cannot seem to decide whether he detests or adores them. Peter leaves Clarissa and begins his walk, thinking, “All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera” (72). He considers the latest innovations in the motorcars he sees, and his mind returns to the non-compliant coolies. As he gets accustomed to the movement of walking in the city, his failures suddenly seem to be behind him. The “future of civilization” lies in the hands of young men, thinks Peter recalling his own idealistic youth, “with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas” (75-6). Yet, in thinking this he must also take into account the martial qualities of such a civilization; the disciplined boys carrying guns who march past him, moving faster than he can, crossing the street as the traffic gives way to them. Despite his dislike for war, Peter thinks, “one had to respect it,” these little soldiers. Though these young trainees represent, “life, with its varieties and irreticences . . . drugged into a stiff yet staring course by discipline,” Peter finds that he must concede to their modern quality: their strength, speed and efficiency (77). This mechanical quality, of social organization at a cost, is not refracted through Peter’s own situation in the colonies. Of course he does not imagine himself as an instrumentalized subject of imperial will, though he can readily understand as “necessary evil” the presence of modern military training within the seat of civilization. (Where does Peter think those young men are headed, one wonders?) This episode seems to “dis-Orient” Peter, and he loses his sense of location, wondering, “Where am I?” (78). Yet, he feels as if his sense of dislocation, of not having a distinct place to move from or toward, is a cause for pleasure, for endless opportunity for connection: And down his mind went flat like a marsh, and three great emotions bowled over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy; and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite delight; as if inside his brain by another hand, strings were pulled, shutter moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might wander. He had not felt so young in years. (78)

Interestingly enough, this passage precedes Peter’s imagined dalliance with the woman on the street, a longed-for connection that is nothing but fantasy, highlighting, once again, the abstract quality of Peter’s flaneurism (79). Indeed, to contemporary sensibilities, this scene—in which Peter actually follows the woman for several blocks—suggests something along the lines of

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what we might now call “stalking.” In light of this failed flight of fancy, he continues his reflection on how civilized London is after India. When Peter falls asleep in Regent’s Park he dreams of becoming the “solitary traveler” (85). In sleep, Peter ranges toward various positions, seeking out, in the guise of the solitary traveler, contrasting states of subjectivity. His dreaming-state offers something akin to religious bliss, despite being “[b]y conviction an atheist perhaps” (85). As we have seen before with Septimus and Clarissa, such a desired state of being indicates various desires for and possibilities of connectivity. In a moment of “extraordinary exultation,” Peter thinks: “Nothing outside exists except a state of mind . . . a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women” (85). Here we can recognize the solipsism that had earlier protected Septimus from the threat of annihilation by the crowd’s energy. The world is collapsed into self, but that self can determine that which does or does not enter into it, in effect producing the world. Moments later, we can see this notion of subjectivity inverted as the disappearance of self provides a sense of peace. The loss of self gives Peter: for substitute a general peace, as if . . . all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriad of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea . . . as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution. (86)

In this passage Peter imagines all the multiplicities of life, its innumerable complexities, merged into one—as we have already seen in the case of both Clarissa and Septimus, the image of branches once again serves to develop the idea that all things, sentient and non, are connected. As such, one’s consciousness of such connectivity becomes the basis for escaping the limitations of one’s particularity. I read such a move as positing alternatives to modern forms of being, understanding and affiliation. If ostensibly modern forms of power have come to technologize and fragment modern life, Woolf uses these transcendental, quasi-religious moments to challenge the disruptive mystification produced by the state and industry. The solitary traveler section once again highlights the sense of “absolute” connectivity in which the self gives way to the world: a notion, as we have seen, that both Septimus and Clarissa have already displayed in the novel. Peter becomes, in many ways, a theorist of connectivity, a fact highlighted by the metacommentary that Woolf inserts into Peter’s narration as

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he ruminates during the walk back from his visit with Clarissa: “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of existence, of turning it round, slowly, in the light” (119). I label this passage as metacommentary simply because, in a formal sense, Woolf does exactly the same thing with her novel as a whole. She relates a high degree of perspective variation through an omniscient narrator that jumps into and out of various characters visited by shared and common objective phenomena: a clear day in midJune 1923, the leaden peals of Big Ben, an airplane. The reader, following Peter’s visit to Clarissa, is allowed access to both of their reactions to the situation; we are asked to take hold of the situation and gauge either character’s responses in comparison and contrast to one another—a pattern that repeats over the course of the entire novel. Woolf once again links these three characters by allowing them to experience notions of the self in ways that are clearly similar. The pattern of these experiences, the move from inside to out, addresses a key problematic in the novel: how does one’s conception of self contend with other selves and other things in a radically transformed phenomenal world? The desire for such affective experience, to feel at “one-ness” in the world, had once been squarely in the provenance of religious experience. The problem the novel presents is to consider how to enact a critique of religion while simultaneously trying to recoup this particular aspect of religious belief. Such a desire to connect the self to its various “others,” while certainly depicted in a complex and problematic fashion, is a central component of the novel. As I pointed out earlier, Peter, for all his insight, seems unable to connect with others. This failure is displayed on a number of occasions in the novel but is perhaps best illustrated when Peter, still ruminating on London and civilization (after India), hears the ambulance that carries Septimus’ corpse to the hospital. Recall that neither Peter nor Clarissa actually ever meets Septimus. While Peter does see people the reader knows to be Septimus and Rezia “arguing” in Regent’s Park, he is simply the less direct of two novelistic conduits that bring Mrs. Dalloway and the “soul” of Septimus together at her party.14 Yet, unlike Clarissa’s intuited understanding of Septimus’ condition, earlier in the novel Peter regards the sound of the siren as proof of London’s civilization: One of the triumphs of civilizations, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of the triumphs of civilization, as the light high bell of the ambulance sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having picked up, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the head, struck

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Negotiating the Modern down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so ago at one of these crossings. That was civilisation. It struck him coming from the East—the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of London. (229)

Of course, neither character has access to what the reader knows to be happening. But it is precisely Clarissa’s ability to extend her sympathies beyond herself that allows for her, but not Peter, to achieve an understanding of conditions that are outside of the immediate realm of her experience and which the reader knows to be accurate. The tragic irony of Peter’s comment in the preceding passage is to positively attribute to civilization that which the reader knows to be one of its more brutal aspects. In this instance, speed and efficiency mask the violence that undergirds civilization. Peter manages to place India outside of civilization. Yet, as it turns out, the metaphysical urge of the novel, if I might phrase it this way, is to feel a sympathy and connection for a world toward which one has some sense of affect. This desire for affect, I would like to argue, emerges out of a failure of reason to displace God with Man: a project that is, in essence, the goal of the modern state. Woolf ’s critique of this failure is decidedly feminist and Orientalist—positing against reason a radical argument for affect, a dispelling of reason with feeling. Clarissa’s affect produces the thematic core, the moment of “connect,” in Mrs. Dalloway. So, despite Peter, the Orientalist India projected into various strata of discourse, arrives as the form of connectivity that has defined Clarissa, that has allowed her to connect others and connect with others. Clarissa enacts the affective core of the novel—the moment when the novel produces a supra-phenomenal connection between herself and Septimus. In this moment Woolf does not allow Peter’s earlier refrain, the “death of the soul,” to achieve fruition.15 The violence enacted by modern institutions upon the “self ” of Septimus kills the body but allows his “presence” to continue on.16 The cumulative effect of the state, the masses, and medical and technological innovation—of the overall society in modern Great Britain during the twenties—cannot fully exorcise his presence. Obviously, the effect of this transcendental connection is to facilitate a reader-critique of “modernity.” Omniscient narration and multiple limited perspectives allow the form of the novel to enact such reader-insight. By having access to information that the fictional characters in the novel do not, the reader is asked to participate in forming the connections that Clarissa, Septimus, and Peter all desire at various moments throughout the course of the story. We are asked to participate in the supra-phenomenal work of affect, of feeling, that marks

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Clarissa’s revelation at the party, that though she “knows nothing,” she can pierce through the surface of her reality and produce startling insight into the social condition. Her model of connectivity, established both formally and thematically, and centering upon personal affect that reflects the influence of Orientalist discourse, becomes the basis by which Mrs. Dalloway reaches out to that which both is and is not self.

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Epilogue

In seeking out traditional practice via textual “proof,” the Orientalists of the late eighteenth century pursued their work based on ethnocentric assumptions about writing as an index of civilization. Later, during the nineteenth century, at the height of competition for Empire amongst Europe’s industrializing nation-states, the archives of Sanskritic antiquity were made to depict an Indian past that was substantially mystical, spiritual, and Hindu. Throughout the century, scholars based in Europe documented the spiritual East authoritatively in numerous translations and commentaries. Early indigenous responses to such Orientalist-generated scholarship utilized and amended aspects of this discourse. Thus, the “Indian,” articulating himself and claiming certain forms of authenticity, was simultaneously connecting with, and sometimes providing a counterpoint to, the authorized narrative of scholars such as H.H. Wilson, Friedrich and August Schlegel and F. Max Muller. In the twentieth century, particularly following 1945, Orientalism, as a scholarly avenue for understanding the East, quickly ceded its explanatory authority. This phenomenon, as I have documented, can be explained (at least in part) as being a result of both the break-up of the British Empire and the growing authority of American social scientific models. That is not to say that cultural explanations for difference would not continue to be predicated upon Orientalist lines.The mystical East would not disappear entirely, but would reappear in popular cultural and New Age manifestations. However, the world-system emerging out of the World War II would adhere closely to empirical, economic, and scientifically instrumental views concerning the organization of, and relationships between, states. Avenues of “cultural” connection would become less crucial to the political and economic determinations being made between industrialized powers and their colonial zones of influence. 131

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Negotiating the Modern

Yet, Orientalism in and about India was not necessarily a stable, consistent, or even coherent, system. As I have tracked this phenomenon, Orientalist understandings of South Asia had already been deeply absorbed into aesthetic and imaginative discourses. Orientalism, in these latent manifestations, continued to retrace and rework earlier scholarly and theological theorization arising out of Sanskritic, “Eastern” antiquity. Certain components of Orientalist scholarship and “punditry” have proven themselves to be remarkably resilient over the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. The uses of Sanskritic antiquity in the nineteenth century, translated, commented upon, and circulated by European and Asian interlocutors, posited new possibilities in the search for human origins: in language, religion, and, as a corollary, in civilization as a modernizing entity. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Aryan ancestry was heralded as a common source for European and Indian antiquity. Links between various groups in South Asia and industrializing Europe and America were quite regular. In the 1880s Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement tied itself to Swami Dayananda’s Arya Samaj. Ten years later, toward the end of a nearly half century career as the preeminent Sanskritist in Europe, Max Muller was advocating a hybridized Christian-Vedanta. Several years earlier, in India, Keshub Chandra Sen, leader of the Brahmo movement in Bengal, carried with him at all times an edition of Muller’s translation of the Rig Veda, along with a copy of the Bible. In Chicago, at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, Swami Vivekananda would famously position India at the center of the heart of all religious belief and spirituality: an antecedent to, and solution for, the world’s competing orthodoxies of religion. All these claims were predicated on notions of Sanskritic antiquity and its relation to both Europe and Europe’s various Christianities. Such claims were no doubt catalyzed by the remarkable social transformations taking place in the industrializing nation-states and their colonies. The tension between religious and secular belief, as modulated by the state, was a central dynamic of nineteenth century nationalisms. In the context of Western-European imperial dominance, and the development of a “world” system rapidly conceiving of itself as a coherent whole, conceiving of an imperialist imagination in Europe was subject to both inner and external forces. If “Religion,” as a category, was being strenuously repositioned during the nineteenth century, then buttressing the universality of “religions” as consistent with a worldly (or global) future became a solution to the competing claims of multiple religious orthodoxies, in both the metropole and the colonies. If, in the 1820s and 1830s, a universal Unitarianism (primarily in great Britain but with important ties with the United States) saw itself

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as allied with lines of Sanskritic antiquity, then the “other,” appropriately armed with claims to an ancient past (consistent with European standards of evidence), could begin to intrude upon the imaginative consciousness of European and North American life-worlds. By the late nineteenth century, claims for Aryan and Sanskritic genealogies would coalesce along religious and spiritualist lines that moved through Europe, Asia and North America; Unitarianism, Christian-Vedanta, and Theosophy would all link India with Europe and the Americas. Yet, many of the claims of these various reformist, even radical, orientations were given credence through the work of scholarly textualists: those Orientalists whose attention to South Asian antiquity sometimes worked against the exigencies of eighteenth and nineteenth century Eurocentrism. Precipitated by scholarly Orientalism in the dynamic and unpredictable play between past and present, colony and metropole, Eurocentric reconstructions of Arya as the basis for a Teutonic myth of European origins would come to the fore in the twentieth century, with catastrophic results.

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Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. In a 1987 interview Said maintains, “Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent and I designed it that way.” 2. Consider, for example, the constructive engagement with Said that two opposing “schools” of South Asian historiography, the Cambridge and Subaltern, share. 3. Uday Mehta Singh’s Liberalism and Empire (1999) provides an excellent overview of “liberal” political theory and its coterminous development with modern British and European imperialism. Javed Majeed’s earlier 1992 work, Ungoverned Imaginings fashions a defense of the Utilitarians in relationship to early-nineteenth-century Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. Two early and influential studies that examined the relationship between British political thought and India are Eric Stokes’ 1959 The English Utilitarians and India and Ranajit Guha’s 1963 A Rule of Property for Bengal. 4. Many of Said’s interlocutors voice their concern that the concept of Orientalism contributes to a further reification of the “West.” One of the most polemic of these is voiced by Aijaz Ahmad in his In Theory (1992), when he attacks Said for drawing up a Mannichean binarism, along with the likes of Foucault and Derrida, “worthy of Nietzsche himself.” He writes, “For in one range of formulations, Said’s denunciation of the whole of Western civilization is as extreme and uncompromising as Foucault’s denunciations of the Western episteme or Derrida’s denunciations of the transhistorical Logos; nothing, nothing at all, exists outside epistemic Power, logocentric thought, Orientalist discourse—no class, no gender, not even history; no site of resistance,

135

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Notes to Chapter Two no accumulated projects of human liberation, since all is corruption— specifically Western corruption—and Orientalism always remains the same, only more so with the linear accumulations of time”(195). In an entire 1993 issue of Public Culture (Vol. 6, no.1), several respondents take Ahmad to task for his own ahistorical depiction of Marxist cultural analysis, the most comprehensive and devastating of these being Marjorie Levinson’s “News from Nowhere.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. The term Anglo-Indian has two distinct connotations. One refers to the general class of white, nineteenth and twentieth-century British citizens in India. The other, arising around the 1830s, refers to racially mixed offspring of Asians and Europeans. I would like to maintain both these connotations while suggesting a new, more theoretically nuanced valance: Anglo-Indian as the slippery, binary term that evolves from the “-Indian” being subordinated to a pattern of “collusion,” “collaboration,” or “native informancy” that might describe the first one hundred or so years of prolonged contact between these two groups in Bengal. “Indian,” as geographical and cultural marker, exists behind the privileged “Anglo,” to form a prescribed pattern of dominance and imperialism. I utilize this term, then, in order to trouble such patterning and re-invest in its destabilization. 2. The concept of civilization may be one of the most contested ideas of the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment period contributed heavily to the shaping of the term and, as Raymond Williams notes, during the late eighteenth-century, “civilization” came to be associated with “a specific combination of the ideas of a process and an achieved condition” (Keywords 58). 3. Enlightenment deployments of China and India as markers for nonEuropean antiquity have a fascinating history—See J.J. Clarke’s Oriental Enlightenment (1997), Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion (1999), and Wilhelm Halbfass’s India and Europe (1988). 4. After the Portuguese re-opened sea routes to India at the end of the fifteenth-century (in 1497 Vasco da Gama arrived in Calicut, a coastal town in present-day Kerala), merchants, missionaries and conquerors were the first to bring back bits and pieces of information about India’s cultural traditions. Halbfass notes that during the sixteenth century A. de Albuquerque, a Portuguese merchant, confirmed the existence of “a Brahmanic ‘scientific’ language analogous to Latin” (37). During the middle of the same century an Indian convert, Manoel d’Oliveira, translated excerpts from a Marathi adaptation of the Bhagavad-Gita into Portuguese. From that time, right up to the middle of the eighteenth century, missionaries provided most of the information relating to India. The most notable of these were the Jesuits,

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5.

6.

7.

8.

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Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) and Heinrich Roth (1620–1668). The latter, whose hand-written works have only recently been re-discovered, collected what appears to be the first European grammar of Sanskrit. See Halbfass, Chapter 3. During the middle and late eighteenth century, explorations of Hinduism were undertaken by a number of Europeans. Three figures are particularly notable: J.Z. Holwell, Alexander Dow, and Abraham Anquetil-Duperron. The first two were in India as employees of the British East India Company. Both published tracts on Hinduism towards the latter part of the 1760s and their works circulated throughout Europe (Marshall “Introduction” pp. 4– 9). Dow would play an important role in championing the Permanent Settlement of 1793, an act that formally gentrified Bengali landholders (Guha A Rule of Property for Bengal). Anquetil-Duperron was, along with Jones, a key figure in early Indology. In India between 1754 and 1762, he gained a working knowledge of Persian, though not of Sanskrit. He produced a French translation of the Old Persian Zend Avesta (1771), on Zoroastrianism, as well as Oupenek’hat (1801), a Latin translation from the Persian version of 50 Upanishads that deeply influenced the work of Schopenhauer. Jones was familiar with the work of Anquetil-Duperron and seemed to have had some ill feelings towards him. He spoke poorly of the Frenchman in a number of personal letters written during the early 1770s, as well as in his “Annual Discourse” delivered to the Asiatic Society in 1789 (Jones Works, Vol. 1 pp. 184–192). I have excluded these figures from my discussion because, for one, they were not part of the close coterie of Indians and Englishmen who were working in a concerted fashion on behalf of Warren Hastings and the British East India Company, and because none of them exhibited a working knowledge of Sanskrit. See Schwab, Chapter 3, for an extended discussion on India, Orientalism and the Humanities—with a special emphasis on what would eventually become the field of linguistics. Chapter 23 of Halbfass’s India and Europe, “India and the Comparative Method,” is particularly helpful in documenting the relationship between India and the growth of comparative methods and studies in linguistics, literature, religion and mythology. This was the very same Charles Cornwallis who had five years earlier, in 1781, been defeated by George Washington in the American colonies. During his seven-year stay he further consolidated British rule on the subcontinent, defeating the powerful sultan of Mysore, Tipu Sahib. He went on to be an active foreign-policy agent for Britain, quelling the 1798 Irish rebellion and later negotiating one of the “endings” of the Napoleonic Wars. He returned to India in 1805 to resume his previous position and (we must assume, to his chagrin) died there soon after arriving. The Battle of Plassey (or Palashi, a town about a hundred miles north of present-day Calcutta) marked a moment when troops of the British East India

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Company helped cement a level of control in Bengal that would make the region around the town of Hugli the center of subsequent enterprises on the subcontinent. A small military force led by Clive defeated the Mughal Subadar (military deputy of the Emperor). The structure of rule in Bengal involved two primary representatives of the Emperor—the Subadar and the Diwan. The Subadar was responsible for “law and order and military security,” while the Diwan “collected the revenue and controlled the civil administration and the courts of criminal and civil justice” (Griffiths 98). After Plassey the British installed their own Subadar. During the early 1760s, when their appointee made some rulings unfavorable to them, the British took action against him. They attacked and defeated the Subadar’s forces at the Battle of Buxar in 1764. Griffiths notes that following this victory: “The Company was left in effective control of Bengal, and a little later a succession to the Subadarship was only recognized on condition that the Subadar should delegate all authority to the Company’s nominee as Deputy Subabdar” (Griffiths 98). Thankappan Nair provides a detailed account of the early British / Mughal interaction in Bengal, especially in the period that preceded the Company’s procurement of trading rights from the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb reigned through the early eighteenth century. His rule was marked by religious intolerance and some historians consider this a factor in the “transfer of power” occurring in Bengal during the seventeenth century. Also, see Griffiths A License to Trade. Britain was not, however, the only European presence in Bengal. The town of Hugli, nineteen miles north of Calcutta, was the location of a Portuguese factory (trading post) until 1632, one of the earliest European enclaves in India; Hugli-Chunchura (Chinsura), the next town south, was the Dutch post until 1825 and is today the location of one of India’s top agricultural research stations; the next town, Shrirampur (Serampore), was the Danish post until 1845; and Chandarnagar remained in French hands until 1949. In 1772 the Directors of the Company asked the noted political economist, Sir James Steuart, to examine the monetary situation in Bengal in order to recommend reforms. His report, released later that same year, The Principles of Money Applied to the Present State of Coin in Bengal, addressed the issue of personal trade. William Barber points out that Steuart was “sharp in his criticism” of Company men who repatriated their “proceeds from ‘moonlighting’ in private trade in India” on the grounds that this was “an unfair form of competition with local traders,” as well a drain on coinage in the region (79). “[T]he Company did not exercise its Diwani jurisdiction, but delegated its authority to the same individual whom it had nominated as Deputy Subadar” (Griffiths 98). Both Rocher and Halbfass comment upon this key obstacle to British conceptualizations of Hindu religious law. Ronald Inden provides a detailed, and critical, account of how British assumptions and misconceptions about

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

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Hinduism plague Indology to the present day. See Chapter Three of Inden’s Imagining India. In “Weaving Knowledge,” Rocher provides some of the most detailed reconstructions to date of this early period in Anglo-Indian Orientalism. Her article explores the recruitment and collaborative activities through which various Indian scholars were drawn into the Orientalist circle. The British investigators would remunerate their Indian assistants—a financial boon for many of them. A select few even received Company pensions after prolonged service (70). Caste divisions were themselves not at all simple as they also functioned according to the specificities of local conditions. Contemporary estimates of caste divisions in India range between two and three thousand. Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind addresses these complexities as well as the changing Western scholarly approaches to caste during the early, late and post-colonial periods. He concludes that, “Orientalist versions of India’s essence and anthropological representations of the centrality of caste have conspired to deny Indians their history and historicity” (76). Kejariwal has done an entire study on the formation of The Asiatic Society of Bengal. The book is an excellent sourcebook, though written from a sympathetic, if not fawning, point of view. The term “liberal-imperialist” seems to be adopted by Majeed via Mukherjee. Though Jones’s attitudes certainly foreshadow a common nineteenth century sentiment, it seems idiosyncratic to apply the term to Jones himself. It should be reiterated that, during Jones’s lifetime, Imperialism was not yet an ideological certainty in connection with the Indian context. The six traditional schools of Vedic learning are, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, the following: “(1) Samkhya (distinctionists), (2) Yoga (mind-stilling theorists), (3) Nyaya (logicians), (4) Vaisesika (atomists), (5) Mimamsa (ritualists), and (6) Vedanta (hermeneutists)” (403). “The object of Mimansa is to establish the cogency of precepts contained in scripture; and, for the same purpose, rules of reasoning, from which a system of logic is deducible” (Colebrooke, 90). His interest in Sanskritic antiquity was not limited to religion. Jones offered some of the first English translations of classical Indian literature: the prime example being Kalidasa’s fourth-century drama Sakuntala, which garnered tremendous attention, subsequently being translated into a number of other European languages and eventually influencing Goethe’s version of Faust. Jones also began the process of mapping out a connection between the history and mythology of Classical antiquity and Indian antiquity. See Schwab for an excellent discussion regarding the influence of Sakuntala upon Goethe in particular, and the German Romantic movement in general, pp. 57–64. See Trautman for insight on the connection between the Mosaic account of history and Jones’s work. For details on Teignmouth’s connection to Britain’s

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evangelical revival, as well as his key role in the Clapham sect, see Stokes, pp. 26–31. 22. Eric Stokes’s The English Utilitarians in India (1959) remains the classic, authoritative study on the subject. Javed Majeed provides a staunch defense of Utilitarian attitudes towards India and the Orientalists in his Ungoverned Imaginings (1992). Both works provide a thorough accounting of the relationship between the philosophical systems of the Utilitarians and the relevance of the colonies to their social theorization. The founder of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham and the “Father of Modern India” Rammohun Ray, developed an interesting correspondence during the 1820s though they never actually met when Ray came to England. Robertson points out that in 1831 Bentham “took an active part in forming the Parliamentary Candidate Society, which proposed Rammohun as a representative for British India” (48). 23. Note the remarkable similarity (in both language and sentiment) between Mill’s assessment of European superiority and Macauley’s infamous remarks from his Minutes on Indian Education, 2nd of February, 1835: “I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1.

I am using the term “Godhood” as a form of shorthand for a wide-ranging debate over the concept of “prime mover”—the nature and purpose, “culturally” speaking, of defining divine authority, cosmology and origins. This set of questions, of course, led directly to the comparative religious studies of the late nineteenth century. 2. M.J. Franklin points out the differences amongst the early Orientalists regarding the issue of divinity and Indian antiquity. In contrasting Halhed and Jones, Franklin notes, “[w]hereas Halhed, looking back to a pristine, monotheistic, and classical Hinduism, had subscribed to the contemporary prejudice against popular Hinduism, Jones appreciated that this theory of historical deterioration was somewhat simplistic,” in M.J. Franklin, “Cultural Possession, Imperial Control and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed,” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 32, 2002, p. 9. 3. Schwab’s work, now a half-century old, exhaustively documents the impact of Asian antiquity on European thinkers during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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4. Recently scholars have questioned the cohesiveness of “Hinduism” as a religious body, suggesting that this categorization and grouping occurs as a result of European ideas and expectations as to what “religion” was supposed to be. Both Inden and King address this topic. Chapter Five of King’s Orientalism and Religion, “The Modern Myth of Hinduism” is a particularly useful overview, linking the rise of Hinduism to the nineteenth-century advent of comparative religious studies. 5. The transcendental concept of “brahman’” is not to be confused with the social group of the same name. To differentiate between the two, I will indicate the latter without italics and with the spelling “brahmin.” 6. The entrenchment of colonialism—the show of European dominance on a worldwide scale—depended heavily upon isolating and defining local conditions. Within the larger project of gathering knowledge, of codifying, accumulating, addressing and debating the varieties of lives “on the ground,” the Orientalists sought an immediate and linguistic solution to the question of cultural precedent—thus the reliance upon key texts such as The Laws of Manu and the Upanisads. With time, a more present-oriented view of indigenous culture would emerge. The process of “cataloging” culture encouraged the advent of what we now call ethnology and anthropology. See Nicholas Dirks, “Castes of Mind”(1992) and David Ludden’s “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge” (1993). 7. It can certainly be argued, as some scholars have, that Ray’s “reason” is constructed more through the Persian and Mughal traditions than that of the Enlightenment. See note 17. 8. Martin Bernal’s controversial work, Black Athena, locates this construction, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe, as a Greco-Latinate-Christian secularizing humanism. William Jones is the perfect example of someone shaped by this amorphous and contradictory formation. He was rooted, simultaneously, in deep religiosity, deep empiricism and deep skepticism—simultaneously seeking empirical textual sources on the nature of the “Divine,” yet always careful to pull his insights back into the safe harbor of a particular brand of Christian faith in the Bible. Macauley illustrates the kinds of anxiety displaced onto this “constructed” genealogy of Western civilization in his now infamous Minutes on Indian Education. 9. Sheldon Pollock’s “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj” (1993) examines the connections between Indology and National Socialism. Pollock offers up this startling and provocative proposition: “in the case of German Indology we might conceive of [the vector of European colonial power] as potentially directed inward—towards the colonization and domination of Europe itself.” (77) 10. Dermot Killingley, in the opening of his 1990 Teape Lectures, also remarks on the romanization of Ray’s name in the nineteenth century. This instability and contestation continue through to the present day as evinced in

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Notes to Chapter Three recent critical work, see Robertson and Zastoupil. Killingley’s collected and expanded version of the Teape Lectures addresses the multivalent qualities of Ray’s writings and influence. See D. Killingley, Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition, Newcastle upon Tyne: Grevatt and Grevatt, 1993, p.1. Killingley offers up a comprehensive, detailed and subtle comparative study of Ray and his multiple (and multiplicitous) engagements. As he puts it, “[t]o follow the sources used by Rammohun himself, and what has been written on him by his contemporaries and later, requires a knowledge of English, French, Sanskrit, Bengali, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian” p. xii. In assessing these works, he provides a useful methodology for gauging the issue of Ray’s authorship, p. 13. This question of authorship was of regular concern throughout the early history of all emergent print cultures and is itself a continuing problematic for several fields of study, particularly in light of this emergent digital phase of human media history. A staid xenophobic feature of brahminical orthodoxy during the period—in order to remain uncontaminated by foreigners, brahmins were not allowed to cross the open ocean. Robertson’s excellent study begins with a discussion of Ray’s biographies and other miscellaneous documents that give evidence of his life and work. During his lifetime, Ray made occasional mention of personal history in his writings (particularly in his schooling as a vedantin, as orthodox brahmins were attacking his scholarly credentials). In addition, there exists a controversial autobiographical letter published posthumously in the English Athenaeum. See Robertson (1–9). Concessions of this sort, to competing structures of power, were an extremely common feature in Bengali life during Mughal rule. The behavioral mores of those in power all too often translated to the “ground”—consider the upper caste Bengali ghenna (disgust) for pork, almost certainly adopted in deference to Islamic customs and tastes. My thanks to Dipesh Chakrabarty for suggesting the term “comparatist” in reference to Rammohan Ray. The term came up in a brief conversation we had and his suggestion began to resonate in my thought. Ray’s influence was felt throughout India. He also published tracts in Hindustani that circulated via the developing vernacular print discourse, as well as the various English-language newspapers and journals circulating within and around British centers of power (in and outside India). The history of print in Bengal is a fascinating study unto itself and Ray plays a large role in its development. See Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal’s The Bengali Press and Literary Writing 1818–31(1977), Smarajit Chakraborti’s The Bengali Press 1818–68 (1978) and Mrinal K. Chanda’s History of the English Press in Bengal 1780–1857 (1987). Indeed, the controversial land reform of 1793, The Permanent Settlement Act, instituted by Lord Cornwallis (and the subject of Ranajit Guha’s

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famous 1963 study, A Rule of Property for Bengal), was likely adding to speculation and corruption rather than alleviating them. The new system was modeled after English property laws. Under the Mughal zamindari system, the zamindar not only collected taxes on the land but also functioned as the magistrate for the area. With this new system, revenue collection was often auctioned off to the highest bidder. Often the person buying the rights to the land had little knowledge of local conditions. Speculative practices under such conditions became even more prevalent as absentee landlordism became widespread. See note xxxiii. 17. Persian, as the old language of privilege in Mughal India, was rapidly being displaced by the English medium. This was, in many ways, an event engineered by British Orientalists, administrators and evangelists. The Orientalists were providing a view of Hinduism that privileged the later texts and commentaries of the Vedic tradition; the written records and commentary based upon the manuscript records were maintained by, and primarily circulated within, the brahminical caste. The combination of print technology, British incursions into Vedic texts, and the growth of vernacular all catalyzed the nascent Hindu / English collaborative efforts. With the changing face of British control in India, the efforts would eventually turn antagonistic towards the British dominion exercised over the entire subcontinent for the next 150 years. 18. A number of Ray scholars have argued that his rationalism is rooted in Islam, utilizing his arguments in the Tohfat to evince their claims. Abid U. Ghazi argues that Ray’s writing displays characteristic Islamic training. See his 1976 article, “Raja Rammohun Roy’s Response to Muslim India,” in Studies in Islam, II, 1- 38. Ghazi writes: “He uses Persian couplets, Qur’anic verses and Arabic and Persian idioms to embellish his expression. Such would be acquired over years of study training and acquaintance with all aspects of Muslim culture . . . he uses the entire armory of Islamic logic to support his ideas, which themselves are ultimately turned against the tenet of all established religions, especially Islam” (quoted in Robertson 26–7). Sumit Sarkar, in A Critique of Colonial India, laments the diminished attention paid to Ray’s Islamic background by most scholars of the Bengali nineteenth-century intelligentsia. He points out that “the uniqueness of Rammohun’s rationalism cannot be taken as finally settled till much more is known than at present about the intellectual history of eighteenth-century India and particularly perhaps its Islamic components” (5). 19. This quote evinces a trait that, over the nineteenth century, has increasingly come to be associated with India and Hinduism; namely, the syncretic quality of Indian tradition. One hundred and one years earlier, H. T. Colebrooke’s characterization of the Vedas emphasizes a similar point. In the monograph, On the Vedas,

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Colebrooke points out that even “the writings of the heretical sects exhibit quotations from the Vedas” (91). This observation is made in a discussion on the intertextual nature of Vedic scripture and Indian scientific developments, particularly astronomy and medicine. The simple gist of the passage is that Vedic scriptural authority permeates India’s multiple religious communities. Yet, he argues, scripture is attuned to the historical and scientific developments of the present, even if such developments are at odds with scripture’s motives. Towards the latter period of Great Britain’s colonial involvement in India, Nehru and Gandhi, as two chief architects of Indian nationalism, will both echo the cultural syncreticism of Indian religious tradition and authority. See Chapter IV. 20. The term “bhadralok’” refers to the upper-middle class Bengali elites who emerged under British colonialism. 21. The full title of the text leaves no doubt as to its argumentative aims: “Translation of an Abridgement of The Vedant, or The Resolution of All the Veds, the Most Celebrated and Revered Work of Brahmanical Theology; Establishing the Unity of the Supreme Being; and that He Alone is the Object of Propitiation and Worship.” 22. The circulation of the Upanisads in European languages is a relatively recent occurrence. The first appearance in Europe of a portion of the Upanisads appears to be the work of A.H. Anquetil-Duperron. He published four Upanisads in France in 1787. But Anquetil-Duperron relied on a Persian translation, the 1657 Persian language Sirr-i Akbar (“The Great Secret”) commissioned by Dara Shukoh, grandson of Emperor Akbar and son of Shah Jahan. In 1801 and 1802, Duperron published the influential Oupnek’hat, which included the entire fifty-one Upanisads of the Sirr-i Akbar. This became a primary source on India for the German Romantic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, amongst others. Yet, most scholars of Sanskrit consider the translation deeply flawed. Robertson declares that this “first collection of the Upanisads available in Europe was an imprecise Latin translation of an imprecise Persian version of the fifty-one Sanskrit texts” (60). Nathaniel Brassey Halhed also translated Sirr-i Akbar in 1787 but the manuscript remained unpublished. Jones’s Isa-Upanisad was the first direct translation of an Upanisad into a Western language. It did not appear in print until the posthumous 1799 edition of his works. Colebrooke’s 1805 translation and treatise, On the Vedas, was a source of long-standing authority in Europe on the Vedanta. Ray’s translation, a decade later, was also regularly cited. Indeed, he was, for years, the only Indian whose work was referred to in Europe. Robertson points out that although “the Calcutta pandit establishment shunned him, the eminent British Indologist H.H Wilson and H.T. Colebrooke quoted him on the subject of advaita vedanta, the only living vedantin whose authority they acknowledged” (23). In 1840, H.H. Wilson, who had at that point become Boden Professor of Sanskrit,

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23.

24. 25.

26.

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delivered two important lectures on Hinduism at Oxford which relied heavily on the works of Colebrooke and Ray. It must be kept in mind that, during this period of early colonial rule, the British were very careful to maintain a certain degree of indigenous cultural autonomy. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the work of the British Orientalists was a concession to a system of rule in accordance with the standards of indigenous practice. Ray’s own financial interests were deeply tied to British activities and his increased property holdings between 1799 and 1810 supports this notion. The British were “in favour of the growth of a new class of zamindars in the country that would safeguard its interests . . . Rammohan thus came to be bound with British Imperialism” (Dhar 45). In essence the British were reshaping the older structures of land ownership (the Mughal zamindari system), in order to consolidate an indigenous body sympathetic to company power. Ranajit Guha’s seminal 1963 study, A Rule of Property for Bengal, tracks the development of the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in order to show how the anti-feudal sentiments expressed in that act instead became crucial to the development of a neo-feudal organization of property in colonial Bengal. In her article “Weaving Knowledge,” Rosane Rocher points out that the British interest in Vedanta catalyzed Advaita and other Vedantic schools of interpretation in Bengal. Halbfass: “Rammohun had tried to produce religious and soteriological egalitarianism. Now he sought sanction for it in the authoritative texts of Hinduism . . . especially in Sankara’s writings. In doing so he was forced to deal very selectively with these texts; the very explicit and emphatic passages in Sankara’s commentary on the Brahmasutras which support the restrictions of the adhikara were passed over in silence” (206). “The idea of ‘absolute’ truth can thus be made available to everybody, and that ‘mass education’ and social progress can bridge the gap between the different levels of understanding and qualification, is one of Rammohan’s most radical deviations from traditional Hindu thought, and more especially, from Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta” (Halbfass 212). In The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Indian Mind, David Kopf argues that Ray’s reformist positions were a consequence of European influence, a reliance on preexistent Western modes of thought. Certainly such influence was present. The concepts of reason and egalitarianism, concepts which Ray champions, can be linked to the European Enlightenment. However Robertson, Halbfass, Dhar, Subsobhan Sarker and others believe that the assessment of Ray’s thought as derivative of European conceptual models is incorrect. I concur with the opinion put forth by such scholars and others that Ray’s unique position between and amongst cultures became the constitutive force behind Ray’s thought: “The hermeneutic situation which is expressed in Rammohan Ray’s ‘multilingualism,’ his cross-cultural horizon of self-understanding

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and appeal, his position between receptivity and self-assertion, ‘Westernization’ and ‘Hindu revivalism,’ forms the background and basic conditions of Hindu thinking and self-understanding” (Halbfass 217). 27. David Kopf, in his study of the Brahmo Samaj, forwards the notion that this movement is unidirectional, moving out of early Unitarian writings and into Ray’s. However, he does not document this claim convincingly. The overlap between those early Unitarian writings and Ray’s own is less than a decade. Advaita Vedanta provides an indigenous theology that parallels the Unitarian idea of universal monotheism. Indeed, both of Kopf ’s longer studies relating to Bengal assume that modernization is the exclusive domain of the West. While universal theology may have arisen in the context of a Christian theological debate arising in Europe, Vedanta provides an indigenous Indian textual solution to the dictates of that European conflict. As such, the “discovery” of Vedanta becomes a subject for various reformminded Christians who view its antiquity as evidence for an “original” theism. Joseph Priestley, the British scientist who revolutionized the study of chemistry and who later became a key Unitarian theologian, referred to the Vedanta in such a manner in his 1799 A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses. His assessment of Vedanta relied heavily on the work of the early British Orientalists discussed in chapter two, including Jones, Wilkins and Halhed. 28. Charles Wilkins writes in his 1784 “Translator’s Preface” to The Bhagvat-Geeta: “The most learned Brahmans of the present times are Unitarians according to the doctrines of Kreeshna; but, at the same time that they believe in but one God, an universal spirit, they so far comply with the prejudices of the vulgar, as outwardly to perform all the ceremonies inculcated by the Veds, such as sacrifices, absolutions, etc. They do this probably for the support of their own consequence, which could only arise from the great ignorance of the people . . . this ignorance, and these ceremonies, are as much the bread of the Brahmans, as the superstition of the vulgar is the support of the priesthood in many other countries” (Wilkins 194). 29. While most studies of American Transcendentalism have noted the peripheral influence of Sanskritic antiquity (particularly on Emerson) little has been made of the actual transnational engagement occurring amongst Unitarians in the United States, England and India. In addition, a study of British Unitarian ties to India exists but places most of its emphasis on Unitarian activities in Britian. See The Unitarians and India and The Orient in American Transcendentalism (1963). Unfortunately no sustained treatment of the India / America connection currently exists. Ray corresponded with American Unitarians during the last eight years of his life. In Bristol he met with a prominent American Unitarian and mapped out a trip to the United States. Unfortunately Ray died before his plans could reach fruition.

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30. Interestingly, after the Tohfat Ray kept most of his theological exposition limited to the Bible and the Vedas. The notable exception to this is his use of the Koran in the Second Appeal to the Christian Public (1822). While I have not found an adequate explanation for this lack of Islamic representation in Ray’s post-Calcutta writings, the absence could easily be explained by a variety of factors—chief amongst them the missionary antagonism towards Islam. One would have to consider also the residual antagonisms felt by brahmins towards the previous Islamic rulers. Ray was attempting to address brahminical reform through Vedanta to the current power in Bengal—as such it seems that the logical rhetorical move would be to address those powers directly, thereby leaving Islam out. Of course, the subsequent lionization of Ray himself amongst Hindus probably owes much to the absence of Islam from his core writings. Yet future scholarship must take further account of the powerful impact Islam had on Ray, as the Tohfat clearly shows. In his classic study of the Bengal Renaissance, A Critique of Colonial India (1983), the subaltern historiographer Sumit Sarkar discusses the distancing of nineteenth-century Bengali intellectuals from the Islamic past: “If the culture of the Bengal Renaissance was highly elitist in character, it soon became also overwhelmingly and increasingly alienated from the Islamic heritage” (9). Of Ray he writes, “[y]et already in Rammohun there are also strong traces of the concept of Muslim tyranny—and of British rule as a deliverance from it and hence fundamentally acceptable—which soon became a central assumption of virtually every section of our intelligentsia, conservative, reformist and radical alike”(9). 31. L. Zastoupil. “Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians,” Victorian Studies, 2002, vol. 44, 215–243. In doing so, both Kopf and Zastoupil risk minimizing the complexities of colonial exchange. As noted earlier, Kopf ’s work has consistently supported a developmental model of modernity, where ideas flow from the centre to the periphery. This is a major methodological issue not just in the historiography of South Asia, but historiography in general. And, of course, such a model has been deeply problematic in recent years. Zastoupil’s recent work on Ray, while wonderfully detailed in providing the context for Unitarian theology, and Ray’s engagement with it, also ends up being in this mold. While he articulates the case for a non-binaristic approach to the study of colonial history, his emphasis on Ray’s “derivative” discourse seems to reify rather than complicate the categories of so-called “colonizer” and “colonized.” 32. Certain issues that would have been less amenable to a European audience are given lesser treatment in the English language translations as opposed to his Bengali writings. Particular distinctions such as those dealing with om, metempsychosis and reincarnation are not avoided in the English translations, though they are “less conspicuous here than in the corresponding portions of the original texts or the Bengali versions” (Halbfass 208). In

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addition, the English language texts often deliberately frame themes in language that is reminiscent of the Bible’s. 33. Whether or not Ray is the first Indian Orientalist can certainly be debated. See Chapter One. There are several other Indian names that come to mind as far as the collaboration between European and Indian scholars is concerned. However, none was as involved or as prolific as Ray in the print discourses of the day with the prolific regularity of Ray. The debates between pandit Mrutnajay Vidyalanker and Ray (during the period between 1815 and 1819) vividly illustrate the battles amongst brahmin vedantins as to the correct precedents to follow when it came to religious authority. Vidyalanker was the chief pandit under William Carey at Fort William. His reputation as a vedantin of the highest order is reiterated in virtually every account of the period. Yet he has definitely been given a second-order status in many histories since his English language writings were not very extensive. See Rocher’s “Weaving Knowledge” (1993). 34. In this sense, Ray’s logic evokes the presentist stance of Area Studies proponents in the 1940s and 50s. See Chapter One. 35. The Sati Act was passed on December 4, 1829. Ray was, in all probability, a key factor in its passage. Governor-General Bentinck cites Ray’s discussion of sati in his introductory remarks to Regulation XVII of the Bengal Code. The debate on sati in Bengal was a complicated and prolonged affair, highlighting the complex and often contradictory nature of colonial and indigenous interactions. There are several studies on sati. Lata Mani’s book-length study on the subject is excellent, providing detailed historical context. See Chapters One and Two of Contentious Traditions (1998); pages 48–72 provide a detailed discussion of Ray’s role in these debates. See also Sakuntal Narasimhan’s Sati, Widow Burning in India (Sati: 1992) and Mulk Raj Anand’s convenient collection of Ray’s anti-sati writings, Sati: Dialogues by Ram Mohan Ray (1989).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. As it happens, Macmillan and Company was also Rudyard Kipling’s publisher. The Macmillan Brothers’ publishing house was, by the turn of the nineteenth century, one of the most influential in the English-reading world. Along with Tagore and Kipling, Macmillan published W. B. Yeats. Yeats was instrumental in the reception of Tagore’s poetry in Europe, championing Gitanjali and writing the introduction for the English-language translation. 2. Tibetan Buddhism takes root sometime in the eighth century, arriving from India. Considered to be a variation of Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism (also called Lamaism) relies heavily on ritualistic tantra, an approach that utilizes yoga and mantric chants. 3. During the eighteenth century, East India Company officials (including Hastings) attempted to encroach upon weakening Chinese presence in the

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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region. In 1790 the Tibetans held off a Nepalese invasion supported by the British. Resultant Tibetan resentment against the British may have contributed to the lack of British incursions into the region during the nineteenth century. The Younghusband expedition was sent to ward off reported Russian encroachments in the area—Tibet was very much a location for imperial anxiety. This use of contemporary historical elements in Kipling’s fiction (aside from displaying the author’s journalistic acuity), exhibits the importance of fiction to actual events. Those who had read Kim in England prior to the English invasion of Tibet would have been supplied with a number of humanistic reasons for supporting such actions on the basis of Kipling’s representation of the lama’s beliefs and interests. Recall that, at the very beginning of the novel, Kim’s heritage (and predicament) are clearly delineated. The son of an Irish subaltern and a “nursemaid in a Colonel’s family” (50), Kim becomes an orphan after his mother dies and his father, as a result, drinks and opiates himself to death. The young Kim (through the threat of the “powerful” magic of Freemasonry) is told by his father to never lose his birth. In Hinduism and Buddhism a mantra is defined as a mystical syllable or phrase used in ritual and meditation. Mantras are believed to have a deep affinity with particular deities or spiritual forces that they represent; by chanting them, a devotee is believed enabled to establish a link with such forces. In Uday Singh Mehta’s recent study, Liberalism and Empire (1999), he notes that in response to fierce attacks against Indian thought made by those such as Mill in the early nineteenth century, Indians responded by asserting themselves via thought: “Mill’s emphasis on the backwardness of the Indian ‘mind’ anticipates and prepares the way for what becomes the Indian response to this claim. It is to associate the modern not with the social or the political, but rather to index it to thought, especially philosophic thought” (90). The goal of spiritual sadhana was very important to Tagore’s thinking. Not only did he edit an influential Bengali journal of the same name (during the early 1890’s), but Tagore also delivered a series of lectures at Harvard in 1914 that focused on the concept. Macmillan also published those lectures, entitled Sadhana or the Realization of Life in 1916. The concept of sadhana emphasizes a realization of self that highlights the contingent nature of reality: “reality” instead being defined as a recognition of the “absolute.” Such a concept of “self ” realization is predicated upon loosing the constraints of one’s individual reality to partake in what has been variously referred to as “sadhana,” “Brahman,” “divinity,” or “god” (or however else one might name this “unnameable” metaphysical union between self and universe; see chapter two).

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10. Issues of domesticity, gender and the construction of national consciousness are examined at length in Sangeeta Ray’s recent work, En-gendering India (2000).

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. In Culture and Imperialism Said points out the change taking place in European attitudes toward the cultures of the people they had colonized: “It was as if having for centuries comprehended empire as a fact of national destiny to be taken for granted or celebrated, consolidated, and enhanced, members of the dominant European cultures now began to look abroad with the skepticism and confusion of people surprised, perhaps even shocked by what they saw. . . . [B]y the beginning of the twentieth century, they [cultural texts of the colonies] were used to convey an ironic sense of how vulnerable Europe was, and how—in Conrad’s phrase—‘this has also been one of the dark places on the earth’” (188). 2. “Forster had written that in A Passage to India he had tried ‘to indicate the human predicament in a universe which is not, so far, comprehensible to our minds’” (Parry 188). The inscrutable Orient, impenetrable to the rational Western mind, was (and continues to be) a core feature of European Orientalisms. 3. Most of the critical work on Woolf’s relationship to colonialism addresses her first and most conventionally written novel, The Voyage Out. While some recent work addresses Woolf’s progressive tendencies in relationship to the social issues of the day, little has been written regarding colonial politics and their influence on her thought. There exists a number of works on Leonard Woolf’s contributions to discourse on colonialism and imperialism between the world wars. A paper delivered at the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf at Pace University in 2000 by Steven Putzel (and published as part of the conference proceedings) addresses some Orientalist influences in her work but does so in a brief sketch rather than an extended study. 4. It should be noted that Peter, who does not know that he had encountered Septimus, also conveys the spirit of Septimus to the party. However, this is knowledge to which only the reader is privy. 5. The word “connectivity” is recent according to the OED. While “connect” has a long and varied history in the English language, the word “connectivity” dates to the very end of the nineteenth century. It has connotations arising out of the discourses of science, particularly mathematics. As such, connectivity, or the act of connecting, provides a particularly interesting scientific register to the Forsterian credo of “Only connect . . .” After all, this credo adheres to a particular critique of a scientificized Europe, where new technologies have fragmented the social order. The OED describes Forster’s use of “connect” as related to the following meanings: “To fit together or cohere

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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(in logical sequence or agreement); to be practically related or associated. Also in extended uses: to “get across,” to “click,” to be meaningful.” It goes on to point out that Forster’s phrase “Only connect” “is frequently used allusively” and provides the following passages from Howard’s End: “She would only point out the salvation that was latent . . . in the soul of every man. Only connect!” (183); and “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die” (184). This last use of connect is particularly relevant to my reading and I will return to it later in the chapter. We need to keep in mind that the Modernists, the first group of artists to enter into the era of mass mechanical reproduction and distribution, were radically reworking the boundaries between art, politics and commodity. However, as I would hope my reading attests, the presence / absence of India in Mrs. Dalloway (after all, “India” is the geographical proper noun most repeated in this novel; London is a distant second) is crucial to the disorientation of affect— the failed connectivities, that establish the key theme of Mrs. Dalloway. Part of Mrs. Dalloway’s experimentation with form is to eschew the use of chapters. Minimal emphasis is placed on the “breaks” in the novel and the different sections are simply denoted with a space separating one from the next. The idea personal time is a very influential one for the High Modernists. Henri Bergson’s concept of duration (or subjective time, as opposed to the linear time of science and chronology) is illustrated rather vividly in the opening section of Mrs. Dalloway. However, that larger claim is not my concern in the present piece. I take it as a given that “High” literature in this period is always problematizing itself as both art and commodity, the two polarities which define the artist’s relationship to artistic production in an industrializing society. Gillian Beer provides an excellent reading of the role of technology in Mrs. Dalloway. See “The Island and the Aeroplane: the Case of Virginia Woolf” in Nation and Narration (1990). The dispersal, even loss, of self to the spiritual unity underlying the phenomenal world is a characteristic feature of Advaita Vedanta, the Yoga traditions and the Madhyamaka and Yogacara schools of Mahayana Buddhism (King 5). A characteristic feature of English Romanticism, though the impact of Indology on the German Romantics (and thus Coleridge) has yet to be fully assessed. See Chapter I. This is highlighted in the very same section when, after Peter leaves, Clarissa thinks, “He has left me; I am alone forever” (70). The other is, of course, Sir William Bradshaw—the man that both we the reader and Clarissa realize has precipitated Septimus’ suicide. After hearing of Septimus’ death Clarissa thinks, “[I]f this young man had gone to him and Sir William had impressed him like that, with his power, might he

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not then have said . . . Life is made intolerable; they make life intolerable men like that” (281). 15. During the “solitary traveler” passage, the phrase is repeated and Peter awakens uttering these words. 16. Perhaps one reading of the novel would be along the lines of just such a “materialist” ghosting—where social conditions that could not be cognizant to any single individual consciousness continue to make their presence felt.

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Index

A

Abdel-Malek, Anouar: “Orientalism in Crisis,” 22–24 Abridgement of the Vedanta (Ray), 70, 71; see also Vedantasara Academic Orientalism, see also Orientalism in the 20th century, 9–10 decline of, 2, 9, 11–12, 26 essentializations, 25 instrumental function (ruling the native), 11 negotiations of East and West, 12 at odds with business practices, 18 the “other,” 10 policy intellectuals as taking up the work of academic Orientalism, 20–22 reflecting assumptions of Enlightenment-era textualists, 1 as a source of conflict for political interests in England, 6 as the study of the “east” via its linguistic and textual artifacts, 32 shift from textual to technical imperative, 20 shift to social sciences, 25 in training of civil, diplomatic, and military servants, 19 Adam, William, 72 Adorno, Theodor, 93 Advaita Vedanta, see also Shankaran Vedanta; Vedanta Brahmo Samaj and, 76

as catalyzed by British interests, 145n24 codified by Shankara, 59 compared to Buddhism, 59 compared to Islam, 59 compared to Sikhism, 59 conception of divinity, 59 dispersal of self, 151n11 egalitarian version developed by Ray, 77 Müller and, 59 parallels to Unitarian idea of monotheism, 146n27 Ray’s deviation from, 145n26 Ray’s role in the revival of, 76 Ray’s reliance on, 61 Vivekananda, Swami, and 59 Ahmad, Aijaz: In Theory, 135–136n4 Akbar, Emperor, 49, 144n22 Akbar Shah II, 63 Albuquerque, Affonso de, 136n4 Alexander the Great, 80 Alman II, Shah, 29 American Protestantism, 72 Anand, Mulk Raj: Sati: Dialogues by Ram Mohan Ray, 148n35 Ancient Greece, 15, 47, 62 Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities, 86 Anglican Christians, 45 Anglicists, 47 Anglicization, 31, 39, 50, 52, 77 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham H., 137n5, 144n22 Anthropology, 141n6

173

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174 Antiquity, 41, 47, 48, 60; see also Hindu antiquity; Indian antiquity; Sanskritic antiquity Appeal to the King in Council (Ray), 75 Appeals to the Christian Public (Ray), 71 Appiah, K. Anthony, 107 Arberry, A.J., 13, 16, 20–21 Oriental Essays, 11–12 Area Studies, 20–22, 23–24, 25, 148n34 Arian heresy, 71, 72 Aristotle, 43 Arnold, Matthew, 25 Arya Samaj, 61, 132 Aryans, 61, 62, 82, 132, 133 Asiatic Researches or Asiatick Researches, 46, 72 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 38, 42, 45–46, 139n16 Atman, 59 Aurangzeb (Mughal Emperor), 29, 138n9

B

Bacon, Francis, 43 Baptists, 61, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74 Barber, William, 138n11 Battle of Buxar, 138n8 Battle of Plassey, 32–34, 137–138n8 Beer, Gillian: “The Island and the Aeroplane,” 151n10 Behdad, Ali, 2, 4 Belated Travelers, 2 Belated Travelers (Ali), 2 Bengal Renaissance, 147n30 Bengali Press 1818–68, The (Chakraborti), 142n15 Bengali Press and Literary Writing 1818–31, The (Kamal), 142n15 Bentham, Jeremy, 51, 140n22; see also Utilitarianism Bentinck, Governor-General, 148n35 Bergson, Henri, 151n8 Bernal, Martin: Black Athena, 141n8 Berque, Jacques, 22 Bhabha, Homi: Nation and Narration, 151n10 Bhagavad Gita, 30, 41, 136n4, 146n28

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Index Black Athena (Bernal), 141n8 Blavatsky, Madame, 132 Bloomsbury group, 108 Brahman, 47, 59, 69, 74, 149n9 Brahmasutras, 66, 145n25 Brahmins administering religious customs, 37 antagonism towards previous Islamic rulers, 147n30 battles regarding precedents for religious authority, 148n33 Christian criticism of, 67 control of sacred texts, 68 Islamic criticism of, 67 as landholders in Bengal, 38, 49 laws 35, 36 maintaining Vedic texts, 143n17 Manu Smitri as most revered text, 39 Ray’s attempts at reforming, 147n30 Ray’s criticism of, 65, 66, 67–68 , 69–70, 75 Ray’s effort to de-sanctify, 77 Ray’s transgression of orthodox practices, 61 reform-minded, 60, 72 restrictions on overseas travel, 63 social accommodation to Mughal rule, 64 Brahmo movement, 132 Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Indian Mind (Kopf), 145n26 Brahmo Samaj, 57, 61, 72, 75, 76, 77, 146n27; see also British Indian Unitarian Association; Calcutta Unitarian Association; Calcutta Unitarian Committee Brahmunical Magazine, The, 73 Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females (Ray), 75–76 British East India Company, see East India Company; see also East India Company employees British Indian Unitarian Association, 76; see also Brahmo Samaj; Calcutta Unitarian Association; Calcutta Unitarian Committee

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Index British Discovery of Hinduism, The (Marshall), 55 Burke, Edmund, 42

C

Calcutta Baptist Mission Press, 70 Calcutta Gazette, 69 Calcutta Unitarian Association, 57; see also Brahmo Samaj; British Indian Unitarian Association; Calcutta Unitarian Committee Calcutta Unitarian Committee, 72, 76; see also Brahmo Samaj; British Indian Unitarian Association; Calcutta Unitarian Association Calvinism, 72 Carey, William, 148n33 Caste, 36, 139n15 Castes of Mind (Dirks), 139n15, 141n6 Chakrabarty, Dinesh, 142n14 Chakraborti, Smarajit, 71 The Bengali Press 1818–68, 142n15 Chanda, Mrinal K.: History of the English Press in Bengal 1780–1857, 142n15 Chatterjee, Partha, 93 China, 22, 44, 60 Christianity Christian bent in early Orientalists, 62 Christian condemnation of Ray, 64, 70 claims of creation and origin compared to ancient civilizations of China, 60 claims of creation and origin compared to ancient civilizations of India, 60 conception of “God” compared to monism, 59 consubstantiality between Father and Son, 73 cosmology, 48 criticism of brahminical behavior, 67 as depicted in Mrs. Dalloway, 114 Hindus converting to, 56 Islam as a challenger to, 38, 49 indigenous responses to, 62

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 175

175 question of the Trinity, 72 Ray’s part in debates over, 58 being reconceived throughout Europe, 76–77 reform, 146n27 setting up comparisons between religions and cultures, 66 as superior to Hinduism according to Halhed, 40 threat of non-Western ancient texts to orthodoxy, 60 Christy, Arthur, The Orient in American Transcendentalism, 146n29 Civilization and Imperialism (Woolf ), 108 Civilization Asiatic origins of, 44 concept rooted in battle over texts, 61 connecting early European to Asian, 52 debates over, 30 as defined by Raymond Williams, 136n2 European conception of, 58 European discourses of, 59–62 influence of Enlightenment on term, 136n2 as a modernizing entity, 132 Western notions in line with Indian theology and “tradition,” 68 Clapham sect, 140n21 Clark, J.J.: Oriental Enlightenment, 136n3 Clifford, James, 4 Clive, Robert, 29, 32–35 Code of Gentoo Law, A (Halhed), 39–41, 49: see also Gentoos Colebrooke, H.T., 67, 74 On the Vedas, 56, 143–144n19, 144– 145n22 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 151n12 Collected Works of Sir William Jones, The (ed. John Shore), 48 College of Fort William, 67 Comparison of the Institutions of Moses, A (Priestley), 146n27 Conrad, Joseph, 150n1 Contentious Traditions (Mani), 148n35 Cornwallis, Lord, 31, 50, 137n7, 142– 143n16

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176 Critique of Colonial India, A (Sarkar), 143n18, 147n30 “Cultural Possession, Imperial Control and Comparative Religion” (Franklin), 140n2 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 6, 150n1

D

d’Alviella, Count Goblet, 66 Dayananda, Swami, 132 Deep Orientalism (Pollock), 141n8 Defence of Hindu Theism, A (Ray), 70 Defense of the Deity and Atonement of Jesus Christ in Reply to Rammohun Roy, A (Marshman), 71 “Defining Christians, Making Britons” (Zastoupil), 147n31 Delusions and Discoveries (Parry), 107 Derrida, Jacques, 135n4 Dhar, Niranjan, 66, 145n26 Dharmasastra, 44–45 Digby, John, 66–67 Digdarsan, 70–71 Dirks, Nicholas: Castes of Mind, 139n15, 141n6 Diwan, 29, 35, 138n8, 138n12 d’Oliveira, Manoel, 136n4 Dow, Alexander, 137n5

E

East India Company, see also East India Company employees cementing control of Bengal, 137–138n8 compared to Spaniards in Peru, 34 famine of 1769 as a catalyst for reform of company practices, 34 first British government intervention in company affairs, 35 granting of “Diwani rights” by Shah Alman II, 29 Hastings as chief official, 30 As influenced by Mill’s The History of British India, 50 interaction between administrators and Indian informants, 64 laws, 36 Lord North, and, 35

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 176

Index in Orissa, 29 permission from Aurangzeb to establish a trading base, 29 public awareness of shortcomings of, 71 Ray, and, 63, 65, 67 Regulating Act, 36 as ruling India, 43 Tibet and, 148–149n3 transfer of power to Raj, 32 under supervision of British government, 36 use of indigenous textual body as a source of social authority, 30 use of Mughal infrastructure and systems, 29 East India Company employees acquiring fortunes through personal agricultural speculation, 33 acquiring indigenous linguistic and cultural skills, 37 arguing against idolatry, 68 arguing against polytheism, 68 corrupted by British power in India, 43 corruption among, 34, 65, 138n11 exploration of Hinduism, 137n5 familiarity with South Asian languages, 31 obstacles to policy of acculturation, 50 “Orientalizing” of, 77 receiving loans from Bengali landholders, 65 relationship with zamindari landholders, 33–34 religious convictions of, 68 Eden, Anthony, 11–12 Eliot, T.S., 105 “The Wasteland,” 108 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 146n28 En-gendering India (Ray), 150n10 English Romanticism, 151n12 English Utilitarians in India, The (Stokes), 140n22 Enlightenment anti-clerical thinkers, 60 arguments about status of antiquity, 45 concept of egalitarianism, 145n26 concept of reason, 46–47, 145n26 debates over “knowledge,” 43

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Index deployments of China and India as markers of non-European antiquity, 136n3 as emblematic for the ideologies that fostered and justified colonial rule, 93 as an influence on Jones, 43, 45 as influencing debate over relevance of non-European traditions, 30 as first wave of non-European cultural assessment and utilization, 106 in reference to modernizing Europe, 85 in relation to Orientalism, 13–14 in relation to themes in The Home and the World, 96, 100 shaping of the term “civilization,” 136n2 textualists, 1 use of Asian culture during, 72 Ethnology, 141n6

F

Fabians, 108 Faust (Goethe), 139n20 Forster, E.M., 105 Howard’s End, 151n5 Passage to India, A, 106, 107–108 Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 113, 135n4 France ceding to British might in India, 29 as chief European rival of Britain in South Asia, 33 colonization in Africa, 22–23 French Orientalism and paternalism, 22 French presence in Bengal, 33, 138n10 study of Sanskrit in universities, 46 Frankfurt school, 93 Franklin, Benjamin, 42 Franklin, M.J.: “Cultural Possession, Imperial Control and Comparative Religion,” 140n2

G

Gama, Vasco da, 136n4 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 109, 144n19 Genette, Gerard, 93 Gentoos, 36, 43; see also A Code of Gentoo Laws

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 177

177 German Romanticism, 139n20, 144n22, 151n12 Germany, 32, 46 Ghare Baire (Tagore), 93–94; see also The Home and the World Ghazi, Abid U.: “Raja Rammohun Roy’s response to Muslim India,” 143n18 Ghose, Jogendra, 66 Gibb, H.A.R., 24 Gibbon, Edward, 42, 43 Gitanjali (Tagore), 148n1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust, 139n20 Gospels, the, 64, 70–72 Greece, 43 Griffiths, Percival Joseph: A License to Trade, 138n9 Guha, Ranajit: A Rule of Property for Bengal, 142–143n16, 145n23

H

Halbfass, Wilhelm, 69, 74, 75, 136n3, 136n4, 138n13, 14n25 India and Europe, 137n6 Halhed, Nathanial Brassey Bengali grammar primer, 39 Code of Gentoo Law, A, 39–41, 49 in contrast to Jones, 140n2 cultural relativism and, 40 employed by Hastings, 37 first translation of Hindu law, 39 influence on Priestley, 146n27 translation of Sirr-i Akbar, 144n22 Hastings, Warren accumulation of personal wealth, 33 acquiring first-hand knowledge of local languages, 33 application of local customs, 37 attempts to move into Tibet, 148–149n3 in Bengal, 6, 33 as chief official of the British East India Company, 30 courting Hindu elites, 38 displacement of aspects of Islamic law, 38 employing of Halhed, 37 employing of Wilkins, 37 end of dual system of government, 35

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178 first Governor-General of India, 31, 50 fostering Orientalism, 35 humanism and, 41, 42 increased power extending to Delhi and Madras, 36 introduction for A Code of Gentoo Law, 39–40 Judicial Plan of 1772, 35 promotion of Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, 41 prompting translations of Sanskrit writings, 30–31 relationship with missionaries, 31 reversing Islamic policies, 49 supporting translations of indigenous texts, 31, 37–38 textual approach to antiquity, 50–51 transition to greater state control of power, 32 use of indigenous practices to implement stable British rule, 31 use of indigenous texts, 30 Hayter report, 23–24 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 16 “High Culture,” 105–106 Hindu antiquity, 38–39, 48, 55–56; see also Antiquity; Indian antiquity; Sanskritic antiquity Hindu College, 57 Hindu law, 35, 37, 39, 44, 138n13 Hinduism being explained for a British audience, 40 British Orientalists’ understanding of, 55–56 colonial roots of textual Hinduism, 60 debate over “invention of,” 58 as a default category for all non-Muslim religions in India, 38 “discovery of,” 77 division between “popular” and “philosophical” reinforced by British, 55 East India Company employees, 137n5 idolatry as a criticism by Christians, 55–56 “Godhood” as understood by British Orientalists, 55

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 178

Index as lacking textual authority of Christianity and Islam, 36–37 mantra, 149n6 as a medium for combating Islam, 38–39 “modern,” 61 as “mystical,” 56 monism, 56 monotheism, 70 polytheism as a criticism by Christians, 55–56, 73 as poorly defined in European imagination compared to Islam, 38 in relation to Christianity, 55–56, 73 as repressed by Islamic rule, 49 syncretic quality of Indian tradition, 143–144n19 traditions as variable from region to region, 37 as understood by Jones, 55 Vedanta as core of, 56, 58 in view of Anglicists, 55–56 Western conception of, 67 History of British India, The (Mill), 26–27, 50–53 History of the English Press in Bengal 1780– 1857 (Chanda), 142n15 History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia, The (trans. Jones), 42 Hindus civil liberty, 47 condemnation of Ray, 64, 70 conversion to Christianity, 56 courted by Hastings, 38 culture embraced by European scholars and academics, 50 English as a medium for education for the elites, 77 identity, 37, 75 landholders in Bengal, 64 lionizing of Ray, 147n30 religious reformers, 61 rule over Muslim workers by elites, 49 Vedanta as showing equality with Europeans/Christians, 61 Holland, 29 Holwell, J.Z., 137n5

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Index Home and the World, The (Tagore), 94–100, 101; see also Ghare Baire Bimala as figure of the nation, 95 Bimala compared to Kipling’s lama, 100 Bimala’s attraction to Sandip, 95, 96–97 Bimala’s transformation from maiden to mother within the context of the nation, 99 construction of an appropriate form of Bengali identity, 95 domestic space as space of the mind, 94 Enlightenment, 96, 100 grafting together of Enlightenment reason and Indian mysticism, 100 home as symbol for the nation and the world, 94 hybridity, 97 issues of gender, 94 the “modern,” 97 nationalism, 94, 95, 98–99 negotiation between self and community, 96 Nikhil’s desire for Bimala to venture into the world, 95, 97, 98 reason, 96, 99–100, 101 representation of “woman,” 95, 99–100 Sandip as living in the “world” of imperialism, 98 Swadeshi, 95–97, 98 zenana, 95, 97, 98, 100 Howard’s End (Forster), 151n5 Humanism Hastings and, 41, 42 Christian humanism, 61 fostered by early Orientalists, 53 Greco-Latinate-Christian secularizing humanism, 141n8 in late Academic Orientalism, 25–26 Orientalists comparing cultures of Orient and Occident, 52 Orientalist humanism, 32 in relation to colonial domination, 14–15 Huxley, Aldous, 108

I

Idolatry, 58, 67

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 179

179 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 86 In Theory (Ahmad), 135–136n4 Inden, Ronald B., 138n13, 141n4 India and Europe (Halbfass), 137n6 Indian antiquity, see also Antiquity; Hindu antiquity; Sanskritic antiquity Aryan ancestry as connecting it to European antiquity, 132, 133 Asiatic Antiquity, 46 compared to classical Greece, 47 compared to classical Rome, 47 connection to classical antiquity, 139n20 as a contemporary of and precursor to European antiquity, 42 “discovery” and debates over, 32 European intellectual fervor for, 42 Europeanizing of, 58 as a foil to Christian claims of creation and origin, 60 German study of, 32 Hastings’ promotion of, 31, 35, 41 linguistic connection to European antiquity, 46 Mill’s claim of Orientalists having an exaggerated appreciation for, 51 Müller’s championing of, 52 use in addressing contemporary cultural issues in Europe, 72 in “The Wasteland,” 108 Wilson’s championing of, 52 Indian National Congress, 77, 109 Indian nationalism, 49, 63, 93, 144n19; see also Nationalism Indo-European linguistic category, 62 Indology, see also Orientalism as a branch of Orientalism, 10 beginnings of, 6–7, 26 connection with National Socialism, 141n9 early Indology, 137n5 effect of British misconceptions of Hinduism on, 139n13 effect on German Romantics, 151n12 focus on Sanskritic antiquity, 30 as a textualist project, 10 Isherwood, Christopher, 108

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180 Islam as an antithesis to Christianity, 49 compared to Advaita Vedanta, 59 conception of “God” compared to monism, 59 criticism of brahminical behavior, 67 as a cultural and ideological challenger to European Christianity, 38 discredited by British, 49 Jones’ confrontation with African Muslims, 49 monotheism, 62 as a relatively secularized and tolerant version practiced by the late Mughals, 38 as represented in academic media in U.S., 25 as repressing Hinduism, 49 as tyrannical, 48–49 valorized by British, 49 in a weakened state in India, 38 Islamic law, 35, 36–37, 38 “Island and the Aeroplane, The” (Beer), 151n10 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 26

J

Jahan, Shah, 144n22 Jains, 38 Johnson, Samuel, 42 Jones, William advocating property rights for Indians, 44 announcement regarding Sanskrit’s linguistic relationship to Latin and Greek, 58 attacking Islamic conquest of Hindus, 49 attitude of absolute power and knowledge regarding India, 41–42 Christianity and 48, 141n8 confrontation with African Muslims, 49 in contrast to Halhed, 140n2 critique by Mill, 52 as an employee of British East India Company, 43 Hinduism and, 48, 55 in India, 6–7, 21, 31

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 180

Index influence on Priestley, 146n27 learning Sanskrit, 45 legacy of, 48 reception of work in Europe, 48 recognition of linguistic overlap between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, 5 relationship with work of Anquetil-Duperron, 137n5 reliance on translators, 44 as a scholar, 43–44 textual approach to antiquity, 50–51 translation of The History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia, 42 translation of Sakuntala, 139n20 Judicial Act, 38 Judicial Plan of 1772, 35

K

Kalidasa: Sakuntala, 139n20 Kali-yuga, 47 Kamal, Abu Hena Mustafa: The Bengali Press and Literary Writing 1818–31, 142n15 Kashmir, 44 Kejariwal, O.P., 139n16 Killingley, Dermot: Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition: The Teape Lectures, 141– 142n10 Kim (Kipling), 80–93 affiliation between the British and the natives, 84 British imperial “Way of the Great Game,” 81–82, 87, 90, 91, 92 the Buddha, 90 Buddhist “Way of the Middle Path,” 81–82 Buddhist tradition, 85, 86 the cannon as representing military force, 83 the curator’s humanist perspective, 86 democracy of India, 82 distinguishing between the good colonial and the bad colonial, 84–85 East meets West, 89 education, 87

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Index Enlightenment, 89, 91 epistemological battle over knowing “India,” 83 essentialized notions of ethnicity, 83 essentialized notions of nation, 83 essentialized notions of race, 83 Eurocentric notions of civilization, 83 Eurocentric notions of progress, 83 expanding scope of empire into the realm of the spirit, 91 Freemasonry, 149n5 the gift of spectacles, 86 humanist endeavors of “true” colonists, 85 humanist tone, 81 identity, 81, 89–90 bringing together imperialist ambition and indigenous traditions, 81–82 influencing British impressions of Tibet, 149n4 indigenous traditions, 81 institution of the Tibetan monastery, 84 Kim as the “good” colonist, 87 Kim’s formal education, 88–89 Kim’s hybrid identity, 89 Kim’s racial inheritance, 87–88 Kipling’s imperialist ideology, 83 knowledge as part of British rule, 83 lack of nationalists, 82 the lama compared to Tagore’s Bimala, 100 Lamaism, 148n2 the lama’s attempt to escape from corrupt religious institutions, 84 the lama’s enlightenment, 90–91 logic, 81–82, 89 logical grid of mathematics, 89 logical structure of Kim’s faith in his prophecy, 88 Mahayana Buddhism, 148n2 Masonry, 80 municipal areas constituted by British colonial rulers, 83 the museum, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87 mysticism, 92–93 narrative of empire, 86, 93

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 181

181 portrayal of the empire, 84 portrayal of the lama, 91–92 reason, 81–82, 89 relationship between the natives and the colonial rulers as beneficial, 85 spiritual enlightenment, 81–82 Tantric Buddhism, 83, 89, 92 Tibetan Buddhism, 148n2 triumph of logic over magic, 89 Western practices of knowledge, 85–86 Western practices of scholarship, 85–86 King, Richard: Orientalism and Religion, 136n3, 141n4 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 92 Kipling, Rudyard compared to Tagore, 93, 102 East versus West as mysticism versus reason, 102 essentialized East and West coming together, 107 hubris of imperial ambition, 80 India as a space for countering the ironic disillusionment of the European novel, 122 Kim, 80–93, see main entry Kim (Kipling) “The Man Who Would be King,” 80, 81, 92, 93 Nobel Prize in Literature, 79 Plain Tales from the Hills, 81 in relation to Orientalist representations of East, 27 relationship to the colony, 81 representations of India compared to Woolf, 123 as a universal humanist, 92 view of East and West, 93 Knowledge Area Studies and, 23 crossing geographical boundaries, 17 Foucault and, 4 geographical and cultural cross-fertilizations, 15 imperial power and, 3 as an instrumental necessity instead of a key to cultural understanding, 20

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182 re-inscription of the West as source of knowledge, 7 rhetoric of “Western epistemology” needing to interact with “Eastern” modes of knowledge, 16 reuniting the globe through, 10 rhetoric of, 16 in service to colonialist aims, 7 Kopf, David, 73, 146n27 The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Indian Mind, 145n26

L

Latent Orientalism, 109, 111–112, 124, 132; see also Orientalism Lavan, Spencer: The Unitarians and India, 146n29 Laws of Manu, 141n6 Letter on English Education, A (Ray), 75 Levinson, Marjorie: “News from Nowhere,” 136n4 Liberalism and Empire (Mehta), 149n7 License to Trade, A (Griffiths), 138n9 Linguistics, 46 Literary modernism, 105–107, 113, 123; see also Modernism Lowe, Lisa, 4 Ludden, David: Orientalist Empiricism, 141n6 Lukacs, Georg, 123

M

Macauley, Thomas Babington, 27, 32, 51, 140n8, 140n23 Minutes on Indian Education, 140n23, 141n8 MacKenzie, John, 4 Macmillan publishers, 79 Madras Courier, 69 Mahabharata, 41 Majeed, Javed, 51, 139n17, 140n22 Ungoverned Imaginings, 140n22 “Man Who Would be King, The” (Kipling), 80, 81, 92, 93 Mani, Lata: Contentious Traditions, 148n35 Mannichean binary, 135n4 Manu Smriti, 39

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 182

Index Marshall, Peter J., 5 The British Discovery of Hinduism, 55 Marshman, Joshua C., 70 A Defense of the Deity and Atonement of Jesus Christ in Reply to Rammohun Roy, 71 Marxism, 136n4 Maulvis, 36 Mehta, Uday Singh: Liberalism and Empire, 149n7 Meta-Orientalist studies, 6 Mill, James, 31–32, 51, 52, 129n7 The History of British India, 26–27, 50–53 Minutes on Indian Education (Macauley), 140n23, 141n8 Missionaries antagonism towards Islam, 147n30 argument against idolatry, 68 argument against polytheism, 68, 73 attacks on Indian religious traditions, 58 Baptist attacks on indigenous “civilization,” 61 bringing knowledge of India to Europe, 31 censure of Ray, 69, 70 “civilizing” projects in India, 31 criticism of the Vedas, 73 Modernism, 105–107, 110, 151n8; see also Literary Modernism Mohanty, Satya P., 91–92 Monism, 59, 74 Monotheism, 61, 62, 72, 74, 146n27 Moulavies, 36 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 108–129 “absolute” connectivity in which the self gives way to the world, 126 advertising, 115 “affective connectivity,” 111 the airplane, 115 attempts at forging connection, 5, 109 backfiring of motorcar, 113–114, 117 Buddhist notions of self, 111, 151n11 civilization, 125–126, 127–128 Clarissa’s attempt to connect the self with a larger world, 124 Clarissa’s desire for connection, 121

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Index Clarissa’s fear of death, 111, 120–121 Clarissa’s metaphysical inclinations, 110 Clarissa’s “transcendental” theory about the nature of existence, 110, 121 conception of connection owing much to the rise of the “spiritual” East, 111 connectivity, 111, 129, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129 coolies, 122–123, 125 crisis of representing modern life, 123 critique of governmental power, 114 depiction of institutionalized religion, 114, 115–116 depiction of proselytizing Christianity, 114 desire for religious revelation as farce, 115 displacement of religion as a symbolic authority in public life, 114–115 displacing modes of religiosity into emerging forms of state and commercial enterprise, 116 dissolution of self as transcendent joy, 120 distinctions between public and private, 113, 120, 124 facilitating a reader-critique of “modernity,” 128 failure of reason to displace God with Man, 128 formal connection between Septimus and Clarissa, 116 human inter-subjectivity, 109 idea of self being reconfigured by developments of post-Great War Europe, 119 imperialism, 115 India, 122–125 India as outside civilization, 128 India as Peter’s failure and disillusionment, 123 India evoked as a marker of difference, 122 Indology, 123 inter-subjective experience of modernity, 120 latent Orientalism, 110, 111, 124

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 183

183 link between Septimus and Clarissa, 121 loss of subjectivity, 118–119 mass connectivity, 115 the masses, 113, 119, 128 modern state power intruding upon the sphere of religious belief, 113–114 modern urban life as a crisis of faith, 115 mystical East, 27 nationalism, 115 notions of self, 127 omniscient narration, 127, 128 Orientalism, 108, 109, 110, 123, 129 personal pronoun “I,” 116–117 Peter as a theorist for connectivity, 126–127 Peter as flâneur, 123–125 Peter as unable to connect with others, 127 Peter’s contrasting states of subjectivity, 126 Peter’s influence on Clarissa, 117 Peter’s longing for connection, 125 Peter’s loss of self, 126 Peter’s return to London from India, 122–125 possibilities and impossibilities of connection, 122 power of the state displaying a destructive influence upon the self, 119 reason, 128 representation of India compared to Kipling, 123 representing passage from modern to postmodern, 115 second-person omniscient voice, 116 Septimus as a formal and thematic counterpoint to Clarissa, 114 Septimus feeling connected to the world, 120, 121 Septimus’s sense of self as keeping the world in order, 118 Septimus’s suicide, 110–111, 120, 121, 151–152n14 technological innovations, 115 tension between public and private, 120 use of sections instead of chapters, 112

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184 Vedantic notions of self, 111, 151n11 Woolf as feminist, 128 Woolf as Orientalist, 128 Muftis, 36 Mukherjee, S.N., 44, 139n17 Müller, F. Max, 52, 59, 65, 131, 132

N

Nair, Thankappan, 138n9 Narasimhan, Sakuntal: Sati, Widow Burning in India, 148n35 Nation and Narration (ed. Bhabha), 151n10 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 23 National Socialism, 141n9 Nationalism, 14, 56, 76, 77, 132, see also Indian Nationalism “Nationalism in the West” (Tagore), 100–101 Naturalism, 105 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 144n19 New Age, 26, 131 “News from Nowhere” (Levinson), 136n4 Newspapers, 57, 70, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 135n4 Nobili, Roberto, 136–137n4 North, Lord, 35 Nyaya (logic), 44

O

On the Vedas (Colebrooke), 56, 143–144n19, 144n22 Orient in American Transcendentalism, The (Christy), 146n29 Oriental Essays (Arberry), 11–12 Orientalism, see also Academic Orientalism 18th century textualism, 10 administering colonial rule, 8 Anglo-Indian Orientalism, 30, 31, 139n14 audience for consumption, 8–9 as a basis for administering British power, 5 beginning of, 6–8 beginning of multiculturalism, 9 “benefit to native,” 5 British and French “high” culture, 4 Cold War, 21, 25 colonial domination, 5

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Index comparatist “discovery” and “debate,” 1 conjecture on links between Europe and Asia Minor, 30 in contemporary American context, 3 continued pervasiveness of tropes, 26 cosmopolitanism, 16 as creating a space for critiques of industrial capitalism, imperialism, and “liberal” political theory, 32 cultural miscegenation, 17 decline of, 6, 11 as defined by Said, 3, 7–8 defined for purposes of this study, 32 didactic engagement with object of study, 9 different national approaches (British, French, America), 22 as a discourse, 3, 12 earliest South Asian incarnation, 1 as an effort to produce knowledge, 8 as emissary of East/West negotiations, 10 empowering constituents of colonial society, 9 “enlightened” domination, 7 epistemological category, 12 essentializations, 1, 7 Eurocentricism, 8, 62 evolving from textualist to instrumental, 50–51 fostered by Hastings, 35 French Orientalism and paternalism, 22 as fueling other burgeoning academic fields, 31, 137n6 “humanistic” knowledge, 8 instrumental function (ruling the native), 11 Israeli-Palestinian conflict as represented in U.S. media, 26 lack of currency of term, 3 lack of governmental and public interest in, 20–21 latent form, 109, 111–112, 124, 132 Laws of Manu, 141n6 as a monolithic essentialism reinforcing divisions of East and West, 4 Neo-Orientalism in France and Britain, 22–23

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Index New Age mysticism, 26 problems with scale, 4 producing the East for Western consumption as a production force for indigenous groups, 3 as providing Europe’s access to the Orient, 1 in relation to Enlightenment, 13–14 in relation to function of government, 21, 7 recruiting of Indian scholars, 139n14 relationship between power and knowledge, 44 representation of the “other,” 9, 24 as a response to the exigencies of British administrations, 50 self and other intertwined, 5 self-reflexivity and self-assessment, 24–25 as a site for promoting national interests, 13 skepticism in Europe, 48 social sciences, 22, 23 study of textuality as means of authority, 11 as a style of thought, 3 textual excavations, 8 textually-oriented scholarship, 1 as a tradition complicit with colonialism, 22 after World War II, 5, 9 Orientalism (Said), 2–12, 25 criticism of, 2, 3–4, 9 debate about, 2 distorted representations of Middle East and Asia, 25 impact of, 2 “high” British and French culture, 2 on knowledge, 2 on power, 2 on representation, 2 theoretical framework, 4 Orientalism and Religion (King), 136n3, 141n4 “Orientalism in Crisis” (Abdel-Malek), 22–24 Orientalist binary, 7, 14, 15, 17, 79, 80

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 185

185 Orientalist Empiricism (Ludden), 141n6 Orientalists bringing a new level of accuracy to discussions about non-Western antiquity, 60 concession to a system of rule in accordance with standards of indigenous practices, 145n23 crisis of identity and power, 9 delving into India’s textual antiquity, 50 discounting of their work, 48 early indigenous responses to, 131 ethnocentric assumptions about writing as an index of civilization, 131 interpretations of religious texts, 57 reversing Islamic policies, 49 “Oriental Renaissance,” 41 Oriental Renaissance, The (Schwab), 57 Oupenek’hat, 137n5, 144n22

P

Parry, Benita: Delusions and Discoveries, 107 Parsis, 38 Passage to India, A (Forster), 106, 107–108 Permanent Settlement Act, 137n5, 142– 143n16, 145n23 Picasso, Pablo, 105 Plain Tales from the Hills (Kipling), 81 Plato, 43 Pollock, Sheldon: Deep Orientalism, 141n8 Polytheism, 55, 56, 58, 67, 68, 73 Portuguese, 138n10 Postructuralism, 4 Pound, Ezra, 105 Precepts of Jesus, The Guide to Peace and Happiness (Ray), 70, 71, 75 Priestley, Joseph: A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses, 146n27 Principles of Money Applied to the Present State of Coinage in Bengal, The (Steuart), 138n11 Print technology, 57, 58, 68, 69, 77, 142n15 Property rights, 39, 44 Pundits, 44–45 “Puppet Nawabs,” 34 Putzel, Steven, 150n3

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186 R

Raj, 32 “Raja Rammohun Roy’s response to Muslim India,” (Ghazi), 143n18 Raja, The, see Ray, Rammohan Rajas, 47, 83 Rammohun Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition: The Teape Lectures (Killingley), 141–142n10 Ray, Rammohan, 55–77 Abridgement of the Vedanta, 70, 71 Advaita Vedanta, 59, 61, 69, 76, 77 Anglicization as a utilitarian tool, 77 Appeal to the King in Council, 75 appeal to reason, 65–66, 145n26 Appeals to the Christian Public, 71 applications of Islam, 71 association with East India Company, 67 Baptists and, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74 as a Brahmin, 63 brahminical heritage, 73 brahminical reform, 147n30 Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females, 75–76 Christianity and, 66, 73 circulation of voice in Bengal, 64 circulation of voice in England, 64 as a comparatist, 66 comparitist bent, 64 correspondence with American Unitarians, 146n29 correspondence with Jeremy Bentham, 140n22 criticism by Sastri, 69 criticism of all religions, 66 criticism of brahmins, 66, 67–68, 69–70, 75, 77 criticism of caste-based “qualifications” for Vedic study, 69 criticism of faith without reason, 65–66 criticism of treatment of foreigners, 69 criticism of treatment of lower castes, 69 criticism of treatment of women, 69

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Index debates with Mrutnajay Vidyalanker, 148n33 A Defence of Hindu Theism, 70 as Digby’s munshi, 66–67 differences between English-language translations and Bengali-language translations, 74 early life, 63 edition of the Gospels, 64, 70–72 English and, 58, 66, 69 essential monotheism of all religious beliefs, 65 financial interests, 145n23 first Indian Orientalist, 148n33 first Indian to write in English on Indian antiquity, 27 founder of Calcutta Unitarian Association, 57 gauging reception of various language communities to his ideas, 74 Greek and, 58 Hebrew and, 58 Hinduism and, 56–57, 66 Hindustani and, 58 historic visit to England, 76 Indian nationalism, 63 interpreter of Sanskrit, 64 Islam and, 65, 66, 67, 73, 143n18 lack of Islamic representation in postCacutta writings, 147n30 Latin and, 58 learning languages, 58, 63, 64 Letter on English Education, A, 75 lionization amongst Hindus, 147n30 living under British colonization and rule, 37 missionaries’ censure of, 69, 70 mixing in bhadralok communities, 67 as a modernizer, 75 monism and, 68 monotheism and, 68 opposition to idolatry, 67 opposition to polytheism, 67 opposition to sati, 58, 66, 69, 75–76 opposition to unfair treatment of women, 75 Persian and, 58, 64, 65, 66

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Index personal contact with religious reformers in the West, 76 Precepts of Jesus, The Guide to Peace and Happiness, 70 print culture as a means for circulating his views, 69, 77 question of authorship, 142n10 reason, 65–66, 68, 145n26 references to Christian texts, 73 references to Hindu texts, 73 references to Koran, 66 reformist positions as a consequence of European influence, 145n26 role in history of print in Bengal, 142n15 Romanization of spelling of name, 63 Second Appeal to the Christian Public, 147n30 Shankara and, 69 Shankaran Vedanta and, 73–74 social accommodation to the Islamo-Persian influence of Mughal rule, 63–64 sponsoring political agitations, 71 stance on English-language education, 66 stance on widow remarriage, 66 study of Brahmasutras, 66 title of “Raja,” 63 Tohfatu ‘l-muwahiddin, 65–67. 147n30 transgression of orthodox brahminical practices, 61 translating the Upanisads, 66–67 traveling to England, 63 Unitarians, 72–73, 74 use of Vedanta, 56–57, 66, 67–68, 70, 71, 73, 147n30, use of Vedas to initiate reform, 76 using language in his English writings reminiscent of the Bible’s, 148n33 utilizing Islamic terms, 66 Vedantasara, 67–68, as a Vedantin, 64 as Woodforde’s munshi, 65 writing in various languages, 64 Ray, Sangeeta: En-gendering India, 150n10 Realism, 105

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 187

187 Reason discourse of Enlightenment and, 46–47 evolutionary progression categorized as “Western” by Arberry, 16 in The Home and the World, 96, 99– 100, 101 Jones’s view of “just” law as founded on, 43 in Kim, 81–82, 89 in Mrs. Dalloway, 128 as prerogative of European minds according to Jones, 47 Ray’s appeal to, 65–66, 68, 145n26 as residing in the West according to Kipling and Tagore, 102 rise of concept in 18th century, 1 “Reay Report” of 1909, 18 Reformation, The, 41, 72 Regulating Act, 36 Renan, Ernest, 16 Reynolds, Joshua, 42 Rhetoric of English India, The (Suleri), 91 Rig Veda, 132 Robertson, Bruce Carlisle, 63, 67, 73–74, 140n22, 142n10, 142n12, 144n22, 145n26 Rocher, Rosane, 36, 37, 44, 45, 138n13 “Weaving Knowledge,” 139n14, 145n24, 148n33 Roman Christendom, 62 Rome, 43 Roth, Heinrich, 136–137n4 Roy, Rammohan, see Ray, Rammohan Rule of Property for Bengal, A (Guha), 142– 143n16, 145n23

S

Sadhana or the Realization of Life (Tagore), 149n7 Said, Edward, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 16–17, 48, 82, 92 Culture and Imperialism, 6, 150n1 Orientalism, see main entry Orientalism (Said) Sakuntala (Kalidasa), 139n20 Samachar Darpan, 70–71 Sankara, see Shankara

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188 Sanskritic antiquity, 30–31, 52, 131, 132– 133; see also Antiquity; Hindu antiquity; Indian antiquity Sanskritic texts English translations prompted by Hastings, 30 European exploration of, 57–58 influence of translations on theories of relationship between Europe and Asia, 30 interpretations, 45 as judged within a Biblical framework, 55 purpose of translating, 31 Sanskrit British “discovery” of, 26 British interest in, 30 compared to Greek, 5, 42, 46, 58 compared to Latin, 5, 42, 45, 46, 58, 136n4 first European grammar of, 137n4 historical development of, 48 as an indigenous source of textual authority, 30 institutionalized in a European model of education, 46 Jones and, 44, 45 as a medium for education, 75 Ray and, 58 as a repository for greatness of previous civilization, 45 as a subject of study in Europe’s universities, 30, 46 as used by colonial administration to oversee functions in Bengal, 32 Sarkar, Sumit: A Critique of Colonial India, 143n18, 147n30 Sarker, Subsobhan, 145n26 Sastri, Sankara, 69 Sati: Dialogues by Ram Mohan Ray (Anand), 148n35 Sati, Widow Burning in India (Narasimhan), 148n35 Sati Act, 148n35 Satya-yuga, 47 Scarbrough, Lord, 11–12 Scarbrough report, 11–12, 13–15, 17–20, 23 Schlegel, August, 131

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 188

Index Schlegel, Friedrich, 131 Schoolbook Society, 70 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 137n5, 144n22 Schwab, Raymond, 41, 137n6, 139n20 The Oriental Renaissance, 57 Second Appeal to the Christian Public (Ray), 147n30 Sen, Keshub Chandra, 132 Serampore Press, 68, 70, 73 Shankara, 59, 68, 69, 74, 145n25, 145n26 Shankaran Vedanta 59, 69, 73–74, 145n24; see also Advaita Vedanta; Vedanta Shaster, 36, 39 Shastras, 37 Shore, John, 49, 56 The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, 48 Shukoh, Dara, 67, 144n22 Sikhism, 59 Sikhs, 38 Sirr-i Akbar, 144n22 Skeptical rationalism, 93 Social sciences, 2, 22, 23, 25, 131 Steuart, Sir James: The Principles of Money Applied to the Present State of Coinage in Bengal, 138n11 Stokes, Eric, 140n21 The English Utilitarians in India, 140n22 Subadar, 138n8 Suleri, Sara: The Rhetoric of English India, 91 Sultans of Delhi, 47 Supreme Court, 44

T

Tagore, Dwarkanath, 72 Tagore, Rabindranath appeal to ancient Hindu traditionalism, 80 attacks on nationalism and industrialization, 32 compared to Kipling, 93, 102 critique of modernity as man becoming the machine, 101 definition of the nation, 101 denunciation of excesses of Nationalism, 101

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Index East versus West as spirituality versus science, 102 essentialized East and West coming together, 107 excesses of Western scientific materialism, 80 Ghare Baire, 93–94; see also main entry The Home and the World (Tagore) Gitanjali, 148n1 greed of Western nations, 101 The Home and the World, 94–100,101; see main entry The Home and the World (Tagore) India’s history of negotiating racial difference, 101–102 Indian nationalism, 94 man’s reason, 101 model for humanism as uniquely Eastern, 102 the nation as an imperial phenomenon, 101 nationalism as an imperial phenomenon, 101 “Nationalism in the West,” 100–101 Nobel Prize in Literature, 79 Orient/Occident binary, 101 Orientalist underpinnings of his critique, 101 plea for humanism, 102 in relation to Orientalist representations of East, 27 results of applied knowledge, 101 sadhana, 94, 100, 149n8, 149n9 Sadhana or the Realization of Life, 149n7 Vedas, 102 view of East and West similar to Kipling’s, 93 Tagore, Surendranath, 94 Teape Lectures (Killingley), 141–142n10 Teignmouth, Lord, 48, 49, 56 Teuton, 133 Theosophy movement, 132, 133 Tibet, 44, 84, 148–149n3, 149n4 Tipu Sahib, 137n7 Tohfatu ‘l-muwahiddin (Ray), 65–67, 147n30 Toleration Act of 1689, 72 Transcendentalism, 72

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 189

189 Trautman, Thomas, 139n21 Tribals, 38 Trinitarian consubstantiality, 58, 73, 77

U

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 13, 26 Ungoverned Imaginings (Majeed), 140n22 Unitarian Press, 73 Unitarianism, 58, 62, 71–73, 74, 132–133, 146n27, 146n28 Unitarians and India, The (Lavan), 146n29 United States Department of Defense, 22 Universal humanism, see Humanism Universal theology, 76 Upanisads Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of, 144n22 Bengali translations of, 67 Colebrooke’s commentary on, 56 Oupenek’hat, 137n5, 144n22 Ray’s translation of, 64, 66–67, 69, 70, 74 reliance on text by Orientalists, 141n6 Vedanta and, 59 Utilitarianism, 47, 51; see also Bentham, Jeremy

V

Vedanta College, 75 Vedanta, see also Advaita Vedanta; Shankaran Vedanta coming to the fore because of print technology, 58 as contributing to proto-nationalist Indian sentiment, 56 as core of Hinduism, 56, 58 defined, 59 “discovery” of, 146n27 hybridized Christian-Vedanta, 132, 133 idealized through the lens of “reason,” 61 as influenced by other religions in subcontinent, 62 mind/body problem, 59 modern version shaped by Trinitarian/ Unitarian controversy, 58

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190 monotheism, 61 notion of community, 94 notion of the mind, 94 as a precedent for Indian self-assertion, 76 Ray and, 56–57, 66, 67–68, 70, 71, 73, 147n30 in relation to European notions of “civilization,” 61–62 role in construction of Indian Modernity, 61 role in Western presumption of a mystical faith system in the entire Orient, 59 role of print technology in popularizing, 58 schools for, 139n18 as shared discourse between Orientalists and Bengali religious reformers, 60 as a “textual” solution to European-conceived problematic of “civilization,” 60 transnational debate over the unity of divinity, 62 use by elite indigenous modernizers in social transformation, 61 as used by Indians seeking to represent themselves to the West, 59 as a vehicle for reform, 74 as a vehicle for self-assertion in the face of the West, 74 Western uses of, 59 Vedantasara (Ray), 67–68; see also Abridgement of the Vedanta Vedas Baptist opposition to divine origin of Vedas, 68 Colebrooke’s commentary on, 56 Colebrooke’s translation of, 67 permeating India’s multiple religious communities, 143–144n19 Ray as scholar of, 64 Ray’s translation of, 67–68, 76

101766_Ray_3rd pgs_11_17_.indd 190

Index scripture’s relationship with Indian scientific development, 144n19 Shankara’s interpretation, 68, 69 as textual core of Hinduism, 58 Upanisads and, 59 Vidyalanker, Mrutnajay, 148n33 Vivekananda, Swami, 59, 132 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 60 Voyage Out, The (Woolf), 150n3

W

Walpole, Horace, 34 Washington, George, 137n7 “Wasteland, The” (Eliot), 108 “Weaving Knowledge” (Rocher), 139n14, 145n25, 148n33 Whigs, 43 Wilkins, Charles, 37, 41, 146n27, 146n28 Williams, Raymond, 136n2 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 52, 131, 144– 145n22 Woodforde, Thomas, 65 Woolf, Leonard, 108, 150n3 Civilization and Imperialism, 108 Woolf, Virginia experimentations with form, 108 modernist resurrection of Orientalist mysticism, 103 Mrs. Dalloway, 27, 108–129; see main entry Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) Voyage Out, The, 150n3 World’s Parliament of Religions, 132

Y

Yeats, William Butler, 148n1 Younghusband, Colonel Francis, 84

Z

Zamindars, 33–34, 143n16, 145n23 Zastoupil, Lynn, 73, 142n10 “Defining Christians, Making Britons,” 147n31 Zend Avesta, 137n5 Zoroastrianism, 137n5

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