Reorienting Orientalism [1 ed.] 0761934472, 9780761934479

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Reorienting Orientalism

Reorienting Orientalism

Editor

Chandreyee Niyogi

SAGE Publications New Delhi ™ Thousand Oaks ™ London

Copyright © Centre for Advanced Studies Programme, Department of English, Jadavpur University, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in Centre writing for fromAdvanced the publisher. Copyright © Studies Programme, Department of English, Jadavpur University, 2006 First published in 2006 by All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in Publications India PvtorLtd any formSAGE or by any means, mechanical, including photocopying, Sageelectronic Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area recording or by any information storageEnclave or retrieval system, without B-42, Panchsheel Mathura Road,from Newthe Delhi 110 044, India permission in writing Newpublisher. Delhi 110 017 www.sagepub.in www.indiasage.com SAGE Publications First published in 2006 by Inc Sage Publications Inc Sage Publications Ltd 2455 Teller Road Teller Road 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road Thousand2455 Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd Thousand Oaks, California 91320 London EC1Y 1SP B-42, SAGE Publications LtdPanchsheel Enclave NewRoad Delhi 110 017 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City www.indiasage.com Published by Tejeshwar Singh for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom in 10/12 Dutch809 BT by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi, and Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd Sage Publications Inc Sage Publications Ltd printed SAGE at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. 3 Church2455 Street Teller Road 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road #10-04 Hub Thousand Oaks,Samsung California 91320 London EC1Y 1SP Library Singapore of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 049483 Published byOrientalism/editor, Tejeshwar Singh for Sage Publications Reorienting Chandreyee Niyogi. India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10/12 p. Dutch809 BT by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi, and cm. printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Orientalism. 2. Orientalism—India. 3. Said, Edward W. I. Niyogi, Chandreyee. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DS61.85.R46 303.48'21821054—dc22 2006 2006001065 Reorienting Orientalism/editor, Chandreyee Niyogi. p. cm. ISBN: 0-7619-3447-2 (Hb) 81-7829-590-3 (India-Hb) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Orientalism. 2. Orientalism—India. 3. Said, Edward W. I. Niyogi, Chandreyee. Sage Production Team: Swati Sahi, Shweta Vachani, Sanjeev Sharma and Santosh Rawat DS61.85.R46 303.48'21821054—dc22 2006 2006001065 ISBN: 0-7619-3447-2 (Hb)(HB) 978-07-619-3447-9

81-7829-590-3 (India-Hb)

Sage Production Team: Swati Sahi, Shweta Vachani, Sanjeev Sharma and Santosh Rawat

To the memory of Edward Said, and the tradition he represented.

Contents List of Maps List of Abbreviations Foreword by Supriya Chaudhuri Preface Acknowledgements

9 10 11 14 34

1. Iskandar, Alexander: Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry Kitty Scoular Datta 2. ‘Oriental Gothic’: The Medieval Past in the Colonial Encounter Ananya Jahanara Kabir 3. The Limits of Orientalism: Classical Indian Dance and the Discourse of Heritage Pallabi Chakravorty 4. ‘Truth Is, at the Moment, Here’: Adrienne Rich and the Ghazal Sonali Barua 5. Two Occidental Heroines through Oriental Eyes Prodosh Bhattacharya 6. Orientalism and its Other(s): Re-reading Marx on India Chandreyee Niyogi 7. Reading ‘the Poverty of India’: A Critical Engagement with the Saidian Interpretation of Orientalism Sudeshna Banerjee 8. Imaging the Nature of the Orient: Some Contradictions behind Colonial Forest Policies in India Subhasis Biswas 9. Can We Cross the Chasm? Agency and Orientalist Discourse in the Colonial Tamil Context Perundevi Srinivasan

35

65 89 102 116 135 168 203 228

8 Reorienting Orientalism

10. The ‘Octopodal Idea’: Vincent Smith, Oxford University Press and the Histories of India Rimi B. Chatterjee 11. Undreamt by Tyrants and Orthodoxies: Edward Said, Orientalism and the Politics of Cyberspace David Ewick

245

About the Editor and Contributors Index

283 287

259

245

ndia

d Said,

259

List of Maps (between pages 64 and 65)

283 287

1.1 Map Containing the Eastern Division of the Grecian Colonies and Conquests 1.2 Alexandri Magni Macedonis Expeditio 1.3 World Map 1.4 Map of the South-East Part of Asia

List of Abbreviations CUP CWPBS

Cambridge University Press The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley DMK Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam EETS:OS Early English Texts Series: Original Series ENSO El Nino-Southern Oscillation FAIR Fairness and Accuracy Reporting FRI Forest Research Institute JBNHS Journal of Bombay Natural History Society JMS The Journals of Mary Shelley JYIMTA: ODPUSA Journal abbreviation, Year, Issue, Month, Title, Author: (American) Oriental Department Papers [of USA] (WQ Judge) 1st Series: 26 known; 2nd Series: 8 known KSJ Keats Shelley Journal MLB (Humphrey) Milford’s Letterbooks OCLC Online Computer Library Centre OUP Oxford University Press RES Review of English Studies UP United Provinces (in British India)/Uttar Pradesh (in independent India)

Foreword In an Afterword composed for the 1995 printing of Orientalism, nearly twenty years after its first publication in 1978, Edward Said noted the circumstances of textual dissemination, translation and critical reception which had made it, ‘in almost a Borgesian way’, several different books. This transformation confirmed for him, not a history of misreading, but rather a much-expanded sense of authorship that goes well beyond the egoism of the solitary beings we feel ourselves to be as we undertake a piece of work. For in all sorts of ways Orientalism now seems to be a collective book that I think supersedes me as its author more than I could have expected when I wrote it (Said 1995: 330). One consequence of the book that Said may equally have failed to foresee was its irremediable inflection of the term ‘Orientalism’ itself; he records Albert Hourani’s distress at the way in which it had unalterably become a term of abuse, impossible to restrict to ‘a limited, rather dull but valid discipline of scholarship’ (Said 1995: 342). Nevertheless, as Said went on to explain, this possibility was already compromised by the historical contexts of orientalism as a ‘discipline of scholarship’, and it was therefore unlikely that the term could have retained any neutral applications. In deciding to focus then on ‘Reorienting Orientalism’ as the theme of a conference held to honour the memory of Edward Said, our purpose was not to correct or redress any imagined bias in Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse, but to add fruitfully to the range of readings, reinterpretations and renovations that Orientalism itself and all of Said’s subsequent work provoked and inspired. The writings of a dead author (in a Barthesian as well as a material sense) make up an infinitely

12 Reorienting Orientalism

extensible corpus, inviting participation in that ‘collective’ mode of authorship, of which Said speaks when he reflects on the unanticipated consequences of his original act of writing. That this volume is a collective effort is an apt fulfilment of that process. Edward Said was himself particularly appreciative of the range and complexity of Indian historical, critical and literary writing that, not simply as a response to Orientalism, but prior to and after that work, both revealed the discursive traps that Orientalist writing had laid, and sought to establish the conditions within which other forms of representation might become possible. His own orientation as a scholar, as his enemies were quick to note, lay towards the Eurocentric disciplines of comparative philology within which he was trained, and the political issues of the Arab world, centrally the question of Palestine towards which his personal sympathies were directed. But one enduring consequence of his work was its cancelling out, as one might put it, of the illusion of neutrality or disinterestedness projected by most academic disciplines: that is, its laying bare of the fact of orientation, no less than the nature of orientalism. If scholarship, then, seeks to re-examine a discursive formation, it must do so by an act of conscious reorientation, a turning round, as it were, of the face of the phenomenon itself. The essays in this book, ably edited by Chandreyee Niyogi, bring a range of texts, issues and historical phenomena under the searching gaze of a scholarship that attempts to open up their discursive contexts to fresh examination. Most of them focus on Indian material, and in so doing, present one of the most sustained attempts to reconsider Saidian premises in the context of Indian literary and cultural history. Such an attempt was perhaps overdue. If it leads to further and fresh examinations of the literary territory thrown into dispute by disciplines like those of postcolonial studies (that Said is held responsible for having founded) this would be an immeasurable gain. The conference at which these papers were originally presented, before being revised and edited, was organized by the Centre for Advanced Studies in English at Jadavpur University. It was representative of the Centre’s principal research focus—the field of textuality and culture that Edward Said himself had done so much to uncover. In the course of one of his trips to Iran, Iraq and

Foreword 13

Egypt reported in Culture and Imperialism, Said was perhaps somewhat naïvely shocked at the decline of English departments in the universities he visited. They had: all but terminally consigned English to the level of a technical language stripped of expressive and aesthetic characteristics and denuded of any critical or self-conscious dimension. You learned English to use computers, respond to orders, transmit telexes, decipher manifests and so forth. That was all ... Since the language of Islam is Arabic, a language with considerable literary community and hieratic force, English has sunk to a low, uninteresting and attenuated level (Said 1994: 369–70). This was before the rise of the call centres and the medical transcription agencies, which might have shocked Said still further. If the situation is not quite so bleak in the Indian academy, this can only be because literary studies have been integrated within historical and cultural readings that address without illusion or equivocation the political and social investments the discipline has attracted, and produce a nuanced and critical evaluation of it. We see it as our function as a Department of English and a Centre of Advanced Studies to contribute to this critical revaluation. This volume may go some way towards achieving that purpose. Supriya Chaudhuri

References Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. ———. 1995. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Preface This volume is a collection of eleven original essays that re-evaluate the contestatory implications of Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism by interrogating the dominant postcolonial reading of Said’s book, Orientalism (1978), and its widely misconstrued thesis that Oriental Studies can be equated with Orientalism, both contributing to a repression of the voice of the ‘orient’. More than anything else, it emphasizes the need to move beyond the prejudices and stereotypes tied to the context of colonial exploitation. These essays are based on papers read at an International Conference held at Jadavpur University in August 2004, which was, in the first place, a tribute to the memory of the great scholar and activist Professor Edward Said as we approached the first anniversary of his death. Besides his commitment to Palestinian nationalism, Said was both lauded and castigated right up to his death for founding the area of academic discipline (or counterdiscipline) now called Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonial Studies purports to be a study of other cultures, but as innumerable scholars have noted, refuses to engage critically with western historicism, either dismissing it categorically or substituting it with alternative histories of other cultures that at best only parallel but do not interact with the West. So much so, that the postcolonial period of history and its founding politics seem to be the result of a complete rupture with its antecedents. Said himself is supposed to have initiated this trend in his seminal work Orientalism (1978), where he started out wanting to bridge the perennial divide between the West and the East, but ironically succeeded, as he himself later acknowledged, in widening the gap. Despite representing orientalism as a metahistorical discourse, Said preferred to epitomise it as a nineteenth century Anglo-French cultural enterprise deeply implicated with colonial ideologies of imperialism. Yet Orientalism remained a work indispensable to subsequent scholarship on other cultures, in that it

Preface 15

unalterably set the orientation on the part of the West to an apologetic stance, and on the part of the ‘oriental’ people to a hermeneutics of suspicion that Said recommended repeatedly. Reorienting Orientalism was a conference organized to initiate enquiry along the lines of remedying the notion that Said’s definition of Orientalism lends itself entirely to postcolonial interpretations, and to explore residual meanings of the terms ‘orient’ and ‘oriental’, both carrying associations of an earlier concept of orientalism from which Said seemed to have made a radical departure when he reformulated the term in his book.1 Said’s approach redefined orientalism as it was generally understood, for example in Indian nationalist historiography, as a scholarly and specialized knowledge of the ‘orient’, beginning in a collaborative effort of the late eighteenth century to rediscover specificities of ‘oriental civilisations’, but later codified through authoritative disciplines founded in the West and transformed into a discourse of domination. His reformulation of Orientalism as the dominant European discourse traceable from Aeschylus to modern US state documents—while it did not exclude the historically specific meaning—focused on the predominance of images, ideas and beliefs in the writings of all western authors which went towards perpetuating an ontological and epistemological distinction between the orient and the occident, and which could be strategically manipulated to retain the hegemonic superiority of the West over the East, especially in the context of colonial power relations. Said, however, agreed with Raymond Schwab’s view in The Oriental Renaissance that between 1770 and 1850 ‘the west’s image of the orient passes from primitive to actual, that is, from disruptive invigoration to condescending veneration’ (Said 1984: x). Reading Orientalism altogether decontextualized from Schwab’s approach to Oriental Studies would fail to establish the most crucial connection between orientalism as an epistemological will-to-truth and Orientalism as Said wished it to be understood—a text unravelling the will-to-power of western imperialistic knowledge formations and supplementing, rather than displacing the work of Raymond Schwab. But while Said deliberately emphasized the geopolitical agenda of Orientalism, the area that he left unexplored, and which has opened up in Romantic

16 Reorienting Orientalism

Studies since Said’s research, is concerned with interpreting late eighteenth and nineteenth century reconstructions of an imaginary history of the orient. This line of investigation seems particularly relevant in the context of Raymond Schwab’s reminder that orientalism was coeval with romanticism and German idealism. Said recommended Schwab’s book in the 1980s as providing ‘an occasion for theoretical orientation and self examination’ (Said 1984: xix), calling Schwab an orienteur rather than an orientaliste, because this man ‘of deeply transnational capacities’ was more interested ‘in generous awareness than in detached classification’ (Said 1984: ix). Schwab himself, who was writing in an earlier, but similar scenario where Oriental Studies was debunked after the two World Wars because there was nothing to be gained from it, pointed out that he was writing his book because ‘The truth is that, in seizing upon the treasures of the poor Orient, critics have grasped only superficial influences that conceal the real issues, which concerns the destiny of the intellect and the soul.’2 It seems very likely that Said too was drawing attention to this distinction that Schwab made between the superficiality of interpreting orientalism as a mass of publicly acknowledged ‘cultural influences’ and the ‘real’ historical issues at stake behind them. After all, not all of those whom Charles Kingsley had addressed as the collective ‘us who have rightly taken up (the) cause’ of the East in his 1854 Cambridge lecture Alexandria and Her Schools (Kingsley 1998 [1902]) were orientalists. To balance Said’s exclusive emphasis on geopolitics then, Kitty Scoular Datta’s essay in this volume is an exploration of the post-enlightenment interest and renewal of debates surrounding Alexander’s career of imperial expansion that culminated in his journey to India, which were concerned as much with the passionate imagination of Alexander as an activist–adventurer as with the transience of his earthly glory. Whether the conqueror was represented as ‘a thief and a robber of nations’ or a bestower of ‘humanity and beneficence’ to the Indian King Porus, beyond the conflicting accounts of his character the geography of Alexander’s eastward expansion remained a crucially important subject throughout the romantic age. A close study of Shelley’s Alastor— which imagines an archetypal journey of the poet in search of his anthropological origins following more or less the route of Alexander’s

Preface 17

travels—might enable us to understand it in the intertextual background of Shelley’s readings at that time, as ‘a troubled journey of ascesis3 from socially prevalent error, and a commitment of received history to oblivion’ in order to invent ‘his own narratives of conflict in a fictitious “eastern” world from Byzantium to the borders of India’ while traversing extensively an Islamic terrain. The postcolonial approach to Orientalism also loses sight of, as Ananya Jahanara Kabir suggests in the second Chapter, ‘the entire matrix of affective and ideological discourses that, from the late eighteenth century onwards, enmeshed antiquarianism together with orientalism’. In particular it is noticeable in a planned project of ‘imperial medievalism’ which it traces in Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, through which the pre-modern past of Europe was brought into a relation of equivalence with early nineteenth century India. The implementation of colonial administrative policies nevertheless depended upon the use of those equivalences initially intended for the benign purpose of overcoming ontological estrangement and difference, towards ‘practices perhaps less benign in outcome’. This essay, which reinserts the ‘temporal other’ in discussions of the ‘spatial other’ sparked off by Said’s Orientalism, observes that the two were conflated in Tod’s account of the feudal Hindu state of Rajasthan, imagined not only as a foil to the ‘enlightened self’ but also as the point of its own origin. Orientalism, as Said formulated it, fails to explain how such processes of ontological identification with the East were equally, if not more, conducive to imperialistic practice, particularly in delivering the Hindus from ‘the despotic Muslim yoke’ into the hands of a paternalistic system of British governance. Said himself was unwilling to explore the moments of rupture and discontinuity, accompanied with inevitable ideological reversals manifested in distinct phases of orientalism, which enabled or necessitated strategic variations to retain the authority of Orientalism, both as a discourse and as a discipline. His insistence on interpreting Orientalism as an ethnocentric discourse of superiority, essentially unsympathetic even when it was laudatory and flattering to the orient on occasions, seemed to have subverted his humanistic aims of erasing the ‘Manichean’ division between the West and the East. This was partly because of his excessive

18 Reorienting Orientalism

reliance on ‘sympathy’ as the redeeming feature of cultural studies, and his inability to historicize ‘sympathy’ itself as an eighteenth century political–economic ethic. Adam Smith described it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (2001 [1759]) as the meanest common principle for order in a society of merchants, even when it was characterized by the lack of genuine ‘love’.4 The beginnings of European orientalism in the eighteenth century are somewhat later than this. But a rhetoric of sympathy surfaced again in the early twentieth century nationalist discourse of orientalism in India, initiated, among others, by Havell and Nivedita after 1904, and endorsed even by Rabindranath Tagore quite vehemently against ‘justice’ in 1917,5 at a time when the earliest reaction against colonialist/imperialist representations of Indian society and culture was beginning to take shape. Late twentieth century postcolonial theory, apparently following in the footsteps of Said, overemphasizes the lack of sympathy in critical approaches to other cultures as a perpetual symptom of politically incorrect thinking, without always questioning the politics that was played out in the alternating reversals of sympathy and criticism, usually associated with liberal and socialist rhetoric. But as some postcolonial critics like Homi Bhabha have suggested, an account of orientalism needs to be more attentive to the mechanics of strategy revision (as well as orientalism’s complicity with other ideologies) by showing an awareness that ‘cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as knowledgeable, authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification’. As such it needs to be distinguished from cultural diversity—‘the recognition of pregiven cultural contents and customs; held in a time frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity’ (Bhabha 1994: 34). One important issue that such a distinction opens up is the need to reconsider the concept of oriental cultural ‘heritage’. Pallabi Chakravorty argues that the idea of cultural heritage should be redefined as not inevitably related to the construction of narratives of tradition and their selective assemblage to serve the ends of the history project of a nation-state; nor as a signifier of the ‘authentic identity’ of a national or racial community permissible within a framework of global multiculturalism. The multicultural alternative to Orientalism promotes ethnic identity by

Preface 19

encouraging ‘a kind of auto-exoticisation’ of diasporic and immigrant communities on the basis of their heritage. Heritage should rather be seen as a collective tradition of experiential, embodied forms of knowledge functioning as traceless memory in such acts as a classical Indian dance performance. Its rituals are waiting to be rediscovered as commemoration by South Asian Indian communities settled elsewhere in the world, instead of being incorporated into ‘a new aesthetics that speak about a new cultural context where boundaries are blurred and porous’. The author— whose earlier work includes a study of dance patronage, as it moved from royal courts to the central government and now to the corporate sector—anticipates a frozen authenticity of cultural heritage if modernity continues to be narrated as a complete rupture from tradition and tradition itself is constructed as a discourse of modernity, thereby causing the multilayered rituals of a body praxis to be more and more diluted and circulated simply as commodities and identity-markers abstracted from the sociohistorical contexts of their oriental past. As Said approvingly observed in the ‘Afterword to the 1995 Printing’ of Orientalism, Masao Miyoshi had already raised questions about the ideology of cultural liberalism that Said seemed to have accepted without question and later incorporated naïvely in Culture and Imperialism. ‘It is impossible not to study the cultures of others’, wrote Miyoshi, ‘But that is merely a beginning.… What we need is a rigorous political and economic scrutiny rather than a gesture of pedagogic expediency’ (Miyoshi 1993: 751, quoted in Said 1995[1994]: 351). Said may not have agreed with Miyoshi’s proposal to erase ‘differences’, whether or not he meant by it ‘political and economic inequalities’ (Miyoshi 1993: 751), but it is important to read Orientalism without associating it with Said’s later uncritical acceptance of Matthew Arnold’s concept a common culture, the best that has been known and thought of in the world as apparently eliding over its Eurocentric and consolidating pedagogical function (Said 1993: xiii–xiv).6 It now seems relevant to raise the question that Pierre Bourdieu saw as all but banished from academic discourse. At present, wrote Bourdieu in the 1960s, it ‘is barbarism to ask what culture is for; to allow the hypothesis that culture might be devoid of intrinsic interest, and that interest in culture is not a natural property …

20 Reorienting Orientalism

but a simple social artifact, a particular form of fetishism’ (Bourdieu 1964: 250). Reorienting Orientalism brings under scrutiny the dominant liberal and multicultural paradigm of Cultural Studies that came into being ironically in the 1960s, and was associated at its inception with the Columbia University campus, insofar as it continues to maintain interest in other cultures as a social artifact. It also questions the assumption that the geopolitical imagination operating in Oriental Studies only served to segregate such cultures and undermine the oriental peoples’ capacity for self-formation. Sonali Barua’s essay, which deals with Adrienne Rich’s reading and imitation of the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib, focuses precisely on those questions that elude the emphasis on a liberal and multicultural reading of the otherness of cultures that underlines the fallibility of translating the writers of one hemisphere by those of another. It shifts attention away from Rich’s undoubtedly ‘mediated and distorted understanding of what (Ghalib) the poet stood for’, to her close identification with Ghalib’s choice of the ghazal form as a mode of woman-speaking-to-woman, a thematic that Rich was already developing in her radical feminist theory of the lesbian continuum. The author discusses the impact that Ghalib’s work had on Rich’s own growth as a poet, leading to the writing of English ghazals that reproduce her intense experience of western political life in the 1960s while remaining true to the spirit of Ghalib. This sense of solidarity founded upon an ‘oriental’ imaginary, cutting across the boundaries of centuries and continents, yet recognizing that not just cultures but ‘every existence speaks a language of its own’, would remain unexplored if orientalism, after Said, is seen essentially as a divisive discourse. Prodosh Bhattacharya’s essay shows how a similar perception of identity and difference between occidental and oriental women is worked out quite effortlessly in Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Bengali translation of Marie Corelli’s radical novel The Murder of Delicia in the 1920s. Kumaresh Ghosh, however, translating Corelli’s more conservative novel Thelma in the 1960s, resorts to an ideology of ‘orientalism-in-reverse’ to essentialise an unconditionally submissive ideal of ‘Hindu’ wifehood as a signifier of feminine obedience. Ghosh presents it as a virtue that was still retained by the truly superior occidental woman and therefore worthy of being imitated by the women of the East who

Preface 21

were on the verge of losing it. Ghosh’s choice of Thelma for a Bengali readership may have been motivated by a recent reprint of The Murder of Delicia from Mumbai in 1963. The choice of Corelli’s novels translated by the two Bengalis, and the translations themselves, read in the context of the translators’ differences in sex and their ideological perspectives on gender, would once again suggest that in the enmeshing of orientalism and the ideals of ‘Hindu’ femininity there were deeper historical issues at stake than simply raising a barrier between the East and the West in terms of assessing, either negatively or positively, the impact of ‘progress’ upon Indian women’s tradition of subservience. My essay which follows next is a reading between Said’s postcolonial critique and Aijaz Ahmad’s orthodox Marxist interpretation of Marx’s dispatches on India to show how the semiotics of religion, especially of Hinduism and Christianity, played a significant role in revolutionary socialist discourses of the nineteenth century. Allusions to these religions were deployed within an orientalist discursive framework in the texts of Marx and his nineteenth-century revolutionist contemporaries to suggest a divide, not only between the history of Hindu civilization and the British empire’s suspicion of its own evangelical missions to India, but also between early and later phases of Christianity, questioning the relation between tradition and modernity as a linear scheme of progress. Marx especially relates the future results of British rule in India with an interrogation of the dominant enlightenment image of progress that had come to resemble ‘the hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain’, and assume, like its worshippers, an inevitable necessity of human sacrifice towards attaining it. Apart from their emphasis on religious beliefs as the fundamental bases of cultures, Marx and his contemporaries like Comte and Engels were also concerned about studying the ‘ideal types’ of a culture rather than its stereotypes, which differentiated their approach to knowledge from the postcolonial approach supposedly initiated by Said. In addition to Said’s materialist emphasis on identifying orientalism as an imperialistic discourse, the cultural idealism that went into the making of both orientalist and nationalist discourses around India still needs to be studied in relation to post-Enlightenment debates about selfhood and female sexuality that received considerable attention in the texts of an early twentieth-century

22 Reorienting Orientalism

radical Hinduism, but have been lost subsequently to public knowledge. Sudeshna Banerjee’s essay focuses on a late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourse of ‘the poverty of India’ as distinct from general debates concerning poverty in India as well as India’s recent ‘impoverishment’ to determine the relative responsibility of the British state and the Indian people in contributing to India’s poverty. It draws attention to a reiterative strain in the discourse that in India, and perhaps somewhat exceptionally, poverty was inextricably connected with questions of culture and environment. The poverty of India was represented as ‘age-old’ and ‘endemic’, allegedly fostered by a Hindu religion too preoccupied with the next world than material progress in the present, and the overall atmosphere of conservatism sustained by almost every religion in this country. As ‘poverty of India’, it was beyond the power or even the jurisdiction of the colonial state to change, and different from the ‘present poverty of India’ which the nationalists and members of the Anti-Imperialist League like Reverend Jabez Sunderland (who coined this phrase) attributed to British rule. Apologists of the British empire like Lord Curzon claimed to have it only marginally mitigated. The particular term for ‘the poverty of India’ that was used since 1797 by early British authors of this discourse like Charles Grant was ‘misery’. Also attributed to the Indians’ inability to exploit ‘natural advantages’ ‘calculated to promote the prosperity of its inhabitants’, the poverty of India was represented in this discourse as a ‘natural’ and transhistorical phenomenon in which natural calamities like famines could not possibly be controlled by state intervention. Orientalist images of India’s ‘medieval’ village economy coalesced, without any contradiction, with references to its ‘primitive methods of agricultural and industrial production’ in this discourse. The author attributes this representation of India’s poverty as ‘too structural to be preventable’ to a counter-discursive urge to justify British rule against the Indian nationalists’ claim that the British state was potentially able but practically unwilling to prevent India’s present poverty. She concludes that in trying to negotiate class politics within the domestic economy, the same discourse of power that endorsed the view that English working-class poverty was socially changeable also emphasized that poverty in England

Preface 23

was somehow different from ‘the poverty of India’. It thus produced two different constructions of the working class and the colonized ‘other’ to effectively foreclose any empathy between the metropolitan and the colonial poor. Drawing attention to Said’s neglect of the class and gender interface with race in Orientalist constructs, the author also goes on to show that the difference between metropolitan poverty and ‘the poverty of India’ was further reinforced by a gendered representation of the inscrutable ‘femininity’ of India’s monsoon. It functioned almost as a transcendental signifier of environmental unpredictability that made the ‘poverty of India’ an ineradicable state of ‘effeminate’ mental submission to nature in contrast with the masculine ethic of enterprise and selfimprovement upheld in other imperialist discourses on poverty. This nevertheless failed to account for the British empire’s inability to remove the poverty of India—a poverty that Curzon felt compelled to describe as amenable only to the equally inscrutable will of God. Timothy Brennan, in an article published after Said’s death in September 2003, tried to relieve Said of the paternity of postcolonialism by insisting that Orientalism, even twenty-five years after its birth, remained the most misunderstood book of Said. Many critics agree that it was his best, not so much for the admirable humanism which permeated it despite his choice of a Foucauldian method of discourse analysis, but, as Brennan pointed out, because it was not sufficiently recognized that the book is ‘primarily about how humanities intellectuals create and legitimate state policies, how scholarship and the terminologies that intellectuals devise create state policies’ (Brennan 2004b). A reoriented reading of Orientalism now needs to grapple with the problem of the slippage that occurs between the two senses of the term representation. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pointed out long ago, one is political, operating within state formation and law; the other aesthetic–philosophical, constituting the process of subject predication (Spivak 1993: 66). Representation as process of subject predication was a concern that Said refused to undertake in his Orientalism, partly as a symptom of his positionality, but also, I believe, quite consciously as a refusal to transgress the boundaries of his time and location. If orientalism is to be reoriented from an oriental location, it has to engage with this

24 Reorienting Orientalism

concern as Said had hoped and desired, but not without a constant reference to the other sense, as Said’s own work has taught us. The chapter by Subhasis Biswas is partly an attempt to explore the possibilities of a different meaning of representation in the private conflicts surrounding the development of public identity, which subsist as blatant self-contradiction in the personal papers of some officers appointed to represent and implement the British government’s forest policy in the later years of the Raj. A classic case of the post-enlightenment division between private and public uses of reason, these personal memoirs never criticize the existing forest policy but manage to convey to their readers the British government’s urgency to maximize the exploitation of India’s forest resources, although it is compelled to recognize environmentalist requirements for the preservation of ‘nature’. The image of nature, paradoxically, becomes more ‘mystical’ in the orient than in the West, leading to a discriminatory dependence on methods of natural regeneration to the exclusion of scientific research for enriching the forests. The officers also observe tacitly that most of the times the environmentalist policies of the government would go against the traditional rights of the native inhabitants of the forest, rather than the interests of the European or aristocratic Indian hunters on the one hand, and the contractors and local timber merchants on the other, who benefited most from the forest resources. Having undergone training in ‘superior’ European methods of forest preservation before their employment in the colonial government, many of these writers record the tragic paradox of beginning their careers as forest officers, ideally committed to taking the same care of forests no matter where they are stationed, but dwindling at the end of their often successful careers to mere public servants, as Canning observed ironically about himself. A more detailed analysis of the question of self-division within the orientalist discourse surrounding the formation of any authentic Indian identity is presented in Perundevi Srinivasan’s essay that deals with the ‘structured attitude of producing others’ inherent in the discourse of Tamil nationalism. It seems to replicate the Orientalist divide within India, this time through an anticolonial emphasis on defining a linguistically and culturally deprived ‘South Indian’ or ‘Dravidian’ native identity against the invading North Indian Brahminical culture of ‘Aryan’ colonialists.

Preface 25

Essentially derived from and contingent upon the divisive strategy of Christian missionary discourse, this ‘missionary orientalism’ was utilized by dominant non-Brahmins in the South to address local power structures against the ‘hegemonic orientalism’ of the Calcutta school, reinforcing a Dravidian/non-Dravidian dichotomy that included other dichotomies, such as Sanskrit/Tamil, North/South, Saivism/Vaishnavism and Brahmin/non-Brahmin. It thus ignored the multiplicity inherent in the local culture, the overlaps and interconnections between these dichotomous categories and, above all, such ‘hard facts’ as the contribution that Tamil Brahmins had made to the cause of retrieving artifacts of non-Brahminical culture in the process of defining an Indian nationalist identity against the colonizing West. The chapter, which does not deny the political expediency of such a division within the orientalist discourse in India for the purpose of challenging Brahminical domination in the South, also points out that what was lost foremost in this process ‘was the broader comparative cultural framework that recognised and accommodated the heterogeneity of the Other as well as heterogeneous Others’ to which an earlier Tamil textual tradition had always been particularly attentive. Rimi B. Chatterjee also seems to trace the replication of an Orientalist divide in Indian scholarship through the history of publication of Vincent Smith’s Early History of India in 1904 and the subsequent plans of the Oxford University Press to bring out ‘a family of histories based on the original for different levels of the Indian education system’, superseding W. W. Hunter’s A Brief History of the Indian Peoples on the one hand, and the two Histories of India written in Bengali by Nilmoni Basak and Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay on the other. Other notable Indian scholars were already at work ‘quietly and diligently to rediscover India’s material past’. Smith’s history books made use of the findings of eminent Indian historians but interpreted them with a twist intended to expose the ‘octopus’ of Hinduism and an overt display of imperialistic contempt towards ‘native’ Indians. Remarkably popular in spite of their racism, Smith’s textbooks were continually sought to be revised by the press before marketing, even though the sales remained unhampered. Behind the commercial success of Smith’s history textbooks, the press discovered an insidious prejudice in favour of English language textbooks

26 Reorienting Orientalism

and the prestige of British over native Indian scholarship among Bengalis. This was prevalent even during the years when an Indian nationalist readership had already begun to raise questions about what should be taught and how, and an Indianization of the colonial education system had begun with W. W. Hunter’s education commission in the 1880s, intended to ‘sweep away the last vestiges of Macaulay’s influence on Indian education.’ What these two chapters show, in effect, is that the Orientalist divide between the West and the East had already been replicated within colonial culture itself, in the aftermath of the Macaulayan policy of anglicization displacing an earlier orientalist policy of ‘reverse acculturation’ between the colonizer and the colonized in India. Gauri Viswanathan discusses this in detail in Masks of Conquest.7 Perundevi’s essay emphasizes the division based on vernacular/Sanskrit dichotomy that was more pronounced than in any other regional context in the discourse of Dravidian Tamil nationalism, deriving its anti-Brahminical thrust from Christian missionary discourse. Rimi’s essay suggests that a similar linguistic division was visible in the English/Bengali dichotomy of rewriting the history of India in colonial Bengal, split over a nascent challenge to Macaulay’s agenda of anglicization in Hunter’s education commission as well as in the early Bengali scholars’ attempts to rewrite the history of India. A disparity between the serious attention being given to native scholarship in vernacular languages and internationally acclaimed academic works written in English still continues into the dominant attitude of the postcolonial community of readers across the world. The same Orientalist divide between English and Indian languages, and currently between ‘colonising’ vernacular languages and local dialects, is traceable through the linguistic identity politics of post-independence India. More importantly, the Orientalist divide in the Orient seems to have led to the present impassé of a mutual distrust between postcolonial scholars trained in English Studies and a postmodern academic idiom, and traditionalist scholars in the so-called classical ‘oriental languages’ both inside and outside the colonial university system, whom Said had somewhat perfunctorily dismissed as ‘nativist’ in his early formulation of Orientalism. Following the pattern of the discourse of Dravidian Tamil nationalism, vernacular scholarship in modern Bengal also seems to be more

Preface 27

interested in reproducing the ideology that Said calls Orientalist, in attributing an inherent superiority to European civilization and scholarship on the ‘orient’ without attempting to access directly the remnants of a pre-colonial past.8 No serious effort towards recovering oriental cultures (whether or not as invented traditions circulated by the West) can be made without an increasing mutual interest and cooperation between the two communities, that of the English scholars with a postcolonial orientation and the vernacular writers whose respect they command on the one hand, and the scholars of the ‘Oriental Languages’ and their vernacular followers committed to vindicating the precolonial content of oriental cultures on the other. Least of all, is it possible through this divide to historicize the continuities and discontinuities between precolonial pasts and the postcolonial present. Having written Orientalism with much the same objective in addressing the Islamic orient, Said was increasingly disillusioned when his book failed to retract its Arab readership from claiming a perpetual victim status in relation to the West, and was interpreted as a sanction to this sentiment. David Ewick’s article at the end of this volume, which traces the disillusionment in Said’s movement beyond the stance of his 1978 Orientalism also returns us to the virtual impossibility of dispensing with the technological innovations to be accepted in the stride of modernity, whether mechanical or intellectual, even by those researchers of ‘tradition’ who are looking for a readership beyond their language and community. Said was compelled to acknowledge the ‘libertarian functions of online print’ in the last years of his life, though he had resisted earlier the ‘easier’ and ‘disposable’ method of writing that was encouraged by the electronic order. It promised to be a re-emergent public sphere towards the creation of shared meaning in ways previously ‘undreamt by tyrants and orthodoxies’ and helped Said to transform Orientalism into an inclusive discourse beyond his initial addresses to Arab readers when he began to advocate online for the sake of ‘truth and reconciliation’, the idea of a binational state of Palestine. But while Said, in his combined identity of ‘traveller and migrant’ was reaching across borders to a transnational audience, his Arab identity and the right to represent the cause of Palestine were being called into question in propaganda articles which appeared first in the print media, and

28 Reorienting Orientalism

online soon after, alerting Said to the fact that the electronic media was not an unmixed blessing. It also caused Said to appear for the first time as a writer in the online journal Counterpunch, indicating that his Palestine had become ‘a multivocal sign, a chord resolved into many keys, both in the listening and in the playing, contrapuntally’. Ewick goes on to show that while Said’s 1978 Orientalism had refused to engage with the orient-in-itself and rejected the notion that his book was concerned with the idea of ‘fixed identities battling across a permanent divide’, Orientalism re-emerged as a concern in Said’s last writings online, saturated with precisely the ‘lives, histories, and customs’ of the orientals that the book did not attempt or intend to address. In online articles like ‘A Vision to Lift the Spirit’ (October 2001), Said located in the failure of Arab governments, intellectuals and others to have set forth ‘an adequate representation of culture, tradition and contemporary society’ through the continuing possibility of representing ‘Arabs and Muslims’ as violent and fanatical. The ethical politics implicit in Said’s critique of Orientalism was now perceived as a need to move beyond the ostensible objects of Orientalist discourse to ‘a conception of agency that transcends a simple opposition between Orientalists and intellectuals and others who would resist them’. Said’s earlier oppositional representation of Orientalism, articulated through the central metaphor of his own identity as ‘exile’, was increasingly acknowledged by him as exclusionary in its rhetoric and methodology. What Said had moved beyond between Orientalism and its twenty-fifth anniversary preface shortly before his death, was the idea that cultural and political interaction is necessarily dialectic. On the other hand, what many critics of Said considered a monologic and one-sided approach (e.g., Pathak 1991 cited by Moore-Gilbert 1997: 51) to the problem of the relation between the West and the East in his 1978 Orientalism can be read as a strategic stand, rather than a desire to ignore past dialogues or to inspire a counter-hegemonic discourse to orientalism, which he was clearly at a loss to imagine. Said was, after all, never in two minds about ‘the one human history uniting humanity’ which ‘either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe, or the west’ (Said 1986: 223) taking no account of the

Preface 29

‘orientals’ ordering of themselves’. To the end Said proclaimed himself a humanist, unwilling to enter into sophisticated debates with the postmodernist questioning of the category, but convinced only that humanism means ‘to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding’. Humanism, he also thought, was ‘the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history’ (Said 2003). Yet what anti-humanists like Foucault were troubled about resurrecting humanism and authorship was their unresolved relation with death, as the first article in this volume— as different from the postmodernist approach to texts as can be— traces in Shelley’s Alastor. Said too, before his death, was already on his way to being erased as a failure, in his inability to explain the East and the West to each other (Hitchens 2003), but as Said’s own words emphasize, ability does not always match up to being able to do what one has in mind. What Orientalism had succeeded in suggesting, after Foucault, was that for the Orient, as indeed for humanity, being and becoming had always seemed irretrievably discontinuous. Timothy Brennan also draws attention to an apparent disparity between Said’s painstaking description in Orientalism of a process that shows how ‘no one could counter the dominant European view and this lamentable hegemony gave way to the view, backed up by otherwise sensitive scholarship, that no one need question it’ and his later concern with the more important question as to why the subjects of orientalism have ‘never been given … permission to narrate’. This, as Brennan suggests, is related to the other question, ‘Why is one only an “Oriental” in the West, but never in the Orient itself?’ (Brennan 2004a).9 Said had observed even in 1978 that Orientalism, insofar as it evolved as an academic discipline in the West, should refrain from making any extrapolations about the ‘reality’ of the orient. After all, Said’s message to the oriental reader was the word of caution that ‘what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroachments’ (Said 1986: 216), and it was Said’s somewhat utopian10 dream that those gaps in history would stand revealed. Committed since his 1978 Orientalism to spurring up the agency of the ‘orient’, Said is still unjustly criticized for not exploring oriental scholarship on the orient, with a merry disregard of the way in which

30 Reorienting Orientalism

Said’s work problematized the very idea of an Orient, even while it remained deferential to the need for the ‘orientals’ to represent themselves, evolving new techniques of evading marginalization and misrepresentation. All of these can be seen as inextricably bound with the project of effecting the ‘permission to narrate’ that was beyond the purview of Said’s materialist attention to the worldliness of texts, which nevertheless offered a methodology that will prove indispensable to Oriental Studies. Chandreyee Niyogi January 2006

Notes 1. As indicated in this paragraph, I have used ‘Orientalism’ to refer to Said’s formulation of this concept and the word ‘orientalism’ to imply any other kind of use of the concept. Said’s book is of course referred to as Orientalism throughout this volume. 2. For details see Raymond Schwab, ‘The Reason for this Book’ in The Oriental Renaissance. 3. On the significance of this term as a technique of parrhesia or ‘the art of telling the truth’ related to the ‘technologies of self’, or the difference between the Greek concept of ‘askesis’ and the Christian ideal of asceticism see Foucault, ‘Techniques of Parrhesia’ in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia. 4. Smith wrote, ‘Though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection, the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by a mercenary exchange of good offices according to an agreed valuation.’ See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, part II, section II, chapter 3, ‘Of the Utility of this Constitution of Nature’. 5. See Tagore’s Introduction, dated 21 October 1917 to the 1918 edition of Sister Nivedita’s The Web of Indian Life, where he writes about the passing away of the ‘golden illusion’ of India that had once stormed the imagination of the West, ‘leaving the ragged poverty of India open to public inspection, charitable or otherwise’. He insists that ‘human beings, as we are, justice is not the chief thing we claim from our rulers. We need sympathy as well, in order to feel that we have human relationship with them and thus retain as much of our self-respect as may be possible.’

Preface 31 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Bart Moore-Gilbert points out that ‘Arnold’s scheme in practice largely reaffirmed the cultural and ideological authority of the center through its choice of texts and definition of what culture was’ in ‘Edward Said: Orientalism and Beyond’, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, 72. For a more detailed discussion of Said’s unconscious endorsement of Arnold’s pedagogical scheme, and its earlier adoption in a cultural politics of ‘race equality’ enunciated in 1911, see Chandreyee Niyogi, ‘The Expanding Intertext of Said’s Orientalism’ in Reading the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lahiri Choudhury, 116–132. See Gauri Viswanathan, ‘The Beginnings of English Literary Study’ in Masks of Conquest (pp. 23–44), where she suggests that Orientalism began to lose ground to Anglicism on the question of how the ‘Indian character’ could best be molded to suit British administrative needs (p. 35). Whereas initially the necessity to justify British action in the education of Indians, beyond the limits of an early orientalist cultural policy, was based upon a critique of the depredations of the East India Company’s administrative officials in India. Both reformist attitudes, however, were founded upon an anxiety concerning the durability of British rule in India. See my discussion of Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of Edward Said’s attitude to Marx’s orientalism later in this volume, questioning Ahmad’s assumption that our knowledge of the past must necessarily be critical and filtered through a reading of the ‘cultural archive we have inherited from our colonial past’. Ahmad’s suspicion for the structuralist anthropologist’s attitude of ‘respect’ for all cultures seems to have overlooked Marx’s near veneration for Hindu culture and ‘civilisation’ in the second dispatch entitled ‘Future Results of British Rule in India’, which balances his critical attitude to the modern Indians’ lack of access to their own history as their greatest calamity even while he seems to apologise for the material gains of colonial rule in the first dispatch entitled ‘British Rule in India’. However unfortunate it may seem to Brennan, an ‘oriental’ does of course risk being stigmatized as an ‘orientalist’ in the orient since Said’s Orientalism and it is precisely that ideological hangover which this volume attempts to address. My use of this word is not intended to draw attention to Said’s own doubts about being able to produce non-coercive knowledge or write a non- or postimperial history that is not naïvely utopian, an agenda that he himself calls a ‘methodological and metahistorical aporia’ in Culture and Imperialism, but to remind the reader that the utopia has consistently occupied a voluminous space in western narrative tradition, despite its problematic relation with ‘reality’. In The Seeds of Time Frederic Jameson refers to an anti-utopian ‘celebration of late capitalism’ and the ‘Utopian discourse’ that it presses into service (Jameson 1994 cited by Foley 1997), but that Said’s utopian dream could not be located in the Utopian discourse was already evident in Orientalism.

32 Reorienting Orientalism

References Books Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre.1964. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Tr. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Said, Edward W. 1979[1978]. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Schwab, Raymond. 1984[1950]. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1990[1989]. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. London: Faber and Faber [New York: Columbia University Press].

Articles and Chapters Miyoshi, Masao. 1993. ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State’, Critical Inquiry 19, Summer, pp. 727–51. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 1997. ‘Edward Said: Orientalism and Beyond’ in Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, pp. 35–73. Niyogi, Chandreyee.1996. ‘The Expanding Intertext of Said’s Orientalism’ in Sheila Lahiri Choudhury (ed.), Reading the Nineteenth Century. Calcutta: Papyrus, pp.116–32. Pathak, Zakia with Saswati Sengupta and Sharmila Purkayastha. 1991. ‘The Prisonhouse of Orientalism’, Textual Practice, Summer Volume, 5(2), pp. 195–218. Said, Edward W. 1984. Foreword to Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 [1950]. ———. 1986. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory. London: Methuen, pp. 210–29. ———. 1995[1994]. ‘Afterword to the 1995 Printing’ in Orientalism. London: Penguin, pp. 329–54. [Afterword to the 1994 edition, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books] Schwab, Raymond. 1984[1950]. ‘The Reason for this Book’ in The Oriental Renaissance. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester, pp. 66–111. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1988[1918]. Appendix: Intoduction … to the 1918 edition of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), ‘The Web of Indian Life’ [1st edition published in 1904] in The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, Vol. II, 3rd edition. Ed. Pravrajika Atmaprana. Calcutta: Adwaita Ashrama, pp. 244–46.

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Online Resources Brennan, Timothy. 2004a. ‘Scholars and Pretenders’, Amitava Kumar and Michael Ryan (ed.), Politics and Culture, 1. http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/ page.cfm?key=316. ———. 2004b. ‘Edward’, Politics and Culture, 1. http://aspen.conncoll.edu/ politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=317. Foley, Barbara. 1997. Review of Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time. Originally published in Modern Philology, February 1997, 94, (3), pp. 422–26. http:// victorian.fortunecity.com/holbein/439/bf/review_of_jameson.html. Foucault, Michel. 1983. ‘Techniques of Parrhesia’, in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (Six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, October–November 1983). http://foucault. info/documents/parrhesia/Lecture-06/01.techniques.html. Hitchens, Christopher. 2003. ‘Where the Twain Should Have Met’, Atlantic Unbound, September. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200309/hitchens. Kingsley, Charles. 1998[1902]. Preface to Alexandria and Her Schools. Project Gutenberg Etext no. 1275, alxsc 10.txt. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1275 [Etext prepared from 1902 Macmillan and Co. edition of Historical Lectures and Essays by Richard Price]. Said, Edward W. 2003. ‘Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism Versus the Empire Builders’, CounterPunch, 5 August. http://www.counterpunch. org/said08052003.html. Smith, Adam. 2001[1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part II, Of Merit and Demerit; or, of the Objects of Reward and Punishment Consisting of Three Parts; Section II, Of Justice and Beneficence; Chapter III, ‘Of the Utility of this Constitution of Nature’. © Adam Smith Institute. http://www. adamsmith. org/smith/tms/tms-p2-s2-c3.htm. [All sites were last accessed on 11 July 2005]

Acknowledgements This book owes itself to the initiative of Professor Supriya Chaudhuri, the present coordinator at the Centre for Advanced Studies in English at Jadavpur University, and the support of Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, the former coordinator of the Department of Special Assistance Programme (sponsored by the University Grants Commission). My thanks are also due to our former Head, Professor Sajni Mukherjee, the present Head, Professor Swapan Chakravorty and my other colleagues at the English department who entrusted me with the coordination of the conference ‘Rereading Orientalism’ and the editing of this volume. It must be reiterated that from the beginning I was the appointed coordinator and not the organizer of the conference. I am indebted to all my colleagues in the Conference Committee— Professor Nilanjana Gupta, Dr Abhijit Gupta, Dr Paromita Chakravarty and Smt Nilanjana Deb—without whose help the conference would never have been the success that it was. That also goes for our extraordinarily helpful student volunteers who do most of the work behind the scenes. I am grateful to all participants in the conference for their enriching views and involved presentations, and I apologize, as editor of this volume, for not being able to offer the reader many interesting papers on account of its limited scope. Finally, a special note of thanks to all the members of my family, including my domestic assistants, whose understanding and cooperation saw me sail smoothly through this work.

Chapter One

Iskandar, Alexander: Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry Kitty Scoular Datta Alexander’s links with the modern western world of imperial expansion have their own complexity. This is an example of territorial ambition arousing renewed post-Enlightenment debate and a range of English literary references, incidental or central, direct or oblique. As the occasion of reflections on the fragility of earthly glory and the need to anticipate death, he entered medieval Europe through a mixture of Jewish, Islamic and Christian sources: ‘And wher is Alisaundir that conquerid al?’ runs a lyric by Lydgate (Lydgate 1934: 783). Medieval romance-material was attracting particular interest around early nineteenth century. The bibliophile Francis Douce collected examples of apocryphal works on the eastern philosophers who advised Alexander; William Ouseley wrote to Douce in a letter of 19 September 1797, ‘I am at work on the romantick History of Alexander (from Persian authorities)’; and Douce’s young friend Henry Weber did an edition of the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder (1810), indebted to Douce for his literary history of Alexander material (Douce 1797; Weber 1810, vol. I).1

Post-Enlightenment Interpretations of Alexander Narratives Douce owned a copy of the folio volume Oriental Antiquities and General View of the Othoman Customs, Laws and Ceremonies (1788), translated from the French volume written by Mauradja d’Ohsson, ‘Secretary to the King of Sweden, formerly his

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Interpreter and Charge d’Affaires at the Court of Constantinople’ (Mauradja d’Ohsson 1788: 95), in which appears a letter sent by the Ottoman ruler Selim I challenging to battle Shah Ismail of Persia in May 1514. He wrote of himself as ‘master of all the valiant heroes of his time, who equals Feridoun in strength and power, Alexander the Great in majesty and glory, and Kai Kusrau in equity and clemency’ and of Ismail as ‘the Dara of our days’, that is, the Persian ruler on India’s borders whom Alexander vanquished.2 This comparison of an Ottoman ruler with Alexander is more than a literary flourish. It acknowledged the ancient Greek as a model for expansive rule, long celebrated in Persian and Turkish literary epic and mathnawi (rhyming couplets in Persian) that mythologized Alexander’s exploits in powerful terms, making much of his wall built to keep back the savage forces of the wild Gog and Magog (representing tribal forces from the northern steppes), as also of his meeting with Indian sages, his mountain travels—topics of brilliant manuscript illustration. One of the notable Persian additions of Firdausi to the Alexander story, elaborated at length by Nizami, and highlighted by the Ottoman poet Ahmadi, concerns Iskandar’s quest for the Fountain of Life in the company of the sage Khidr [Turkish Hizir], associated with both the cave chapter of the Qur’an and classical accounts and post-classical elaborations of Alexander’s meeting with Indian ascetics, one of whom tells him, ‘That he whose name now filled the world, must soon be confined within the narrow grave’3 (Gillies 1786, vol. I: 667). In the Persian account it is the mysterious figure Khidr who attains the Fountain of Life, whereas Iskandar is still too occupied with worldly exploits to be yet ready. Alexander’s journey into India had attracted particular attention among classical historians and cartographers from the seventeenth century onwards, as they compared details of terrain with ancient accounts. By the late eighteenth century, the interpretation of the Greek leader’s career of expansion had become an intellectual issue which entered editions and translations of the classical Alexander–narratives. So A Critical Enquiry into the Life of Alexander the Great, by the Ancient Historians: From the French of the Baron de St. Croix (1793), translated by Sir Richard Clayton from the 1772 Paris edition, along with a map, ‘The Marches of Alexander the Great, from Monsr. D’Anvil’, preferred Arrian to Quintus Curtius’s ‘insatiable fondness for

Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry 37

descriptions’, but also drew on Strabo and Diodorus Siculus and showed awareness of Persian Iskandar–narrative as well as Rennell’s geographical inquiries into location. Earlier in the century, ‘Mr. Rooke’ in his English version of Arrian’s History of Alexander’s Expedition ... With Notes Historical, Geographical and Critical (1729) included the Dutch scholar Jean Le Clerc’s ‘Criticism Upon Quintus Curtius’ (1696). The latter argued that some vices mask themselves as virtues, particularly ‘that insatiable thirst of Sovereignty, which spurr’d Alexander on, to risk War, not only against the Persians [who had attacked Macedonia], but a vast number of other Nations, who had never injured him, nay, who had hardly heard of him before.’4 The debate over Alexander had been a classical one, for, apart from Lucan, Seneca in De Beneficiis I.13 had presented him as ‘a Thief and Robber of nations’, whose invocation of ‘Liberty’ had a false ring. This view carried over into Thomas Pennant’s The View of Hindoostan (1798) quoting Lucan’s Pharsalia X, and matched his own scattered critical remarks on imperial violence, as ‘cruel, bloody and unnatural acts … accidental judgments, casual slaughters’ (Hamlet IV. 2: 334–35), quoting Horatio in Hamlet.5 Against criticism, the most notable positive defence of Alexander in late eighteenth century Britain was in William Robertson’s An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India: As amidst the hurry of war, and the rage of conquest, he never lost sight of his pacific and commercial schemes, the destination of this fleet was to sail down the Indus to the ocean, and from its mouth to proceed to the Persian Gulf, that a communication by sea might be opened with India and the centre of his dominions. The ancient Greek leader here becomes a model for British dealings with the East. Alexander saw that ‘to render his authority secure and permanent, it must be established in the affection of the nations which he had subdued, and maintained by their arms’. European and Asian subjects, he thought, must obey ‘the same laws’ and adopt ‘the same manners, institutions and discipline’. The Indian king Porus was the recipient of his ‘humanity and beneficence’, and he encouraged racial intermarriage; Aristotle in contrast discriminated between Greek and barbarian. The chain

38 Kitty Scoular Datta

of cities across his empire were ‘places of strength, to curb and overawe’, with Greeks in charge of armies (Robertson 1794: 21, 28–30, 31, 32).6 John Gillies’s The History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies and Conquests was an imposing and readable work by the Scot who succeeded Robertson as Scottish historiographer–royal, and took a similar position on Greek expansion. By just views of policy, rather than the madness of ambition, Alexander was carried to the rugged banks of the Oxus and the Iaxartes. The fierce nations of these inhospitable regions had, in ancient times, repeatedly over-run the more wealthy and more civilised provinces of Asia. Without diffusing through the Scythian plains the terror of his name, the conqueror would not have securely enjoyed the splendour of Susa and Babylon; nor without the assistance of numerous and warlike levies, raised in those barbarous countries, could he have prudently undertaken his Indian expedition (Gillies 1786, vol. I: 636). It is not hard to hear the justification of more contemporary European advance within this rhetoric. Following Montesquieu and Voltaire as apologists, Gillies nevertheless agreed that Alexander’s resentful burning of Persepolis ‘afforded the first indication of his being overcome by too much prosperity’. Yet his defeat of the Scythians had ‘security’ as its main aim.7 The ideology of imperial expansion, its conciliation of local rulers, its reform of barbarian tribes (an idea taken from Plutarch), its establishment of cities on commercial routes, are all discovered in his example.

Radical Romantic Poetry and Shelley’s Readings on Alexander The poem Alexanders Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Indian Ocean, composed in 1792 and illustrated with woodcuts of Indian life and landscape, referred to Robertson’s work. Its writer, Dr. John Beddoes, Bristol physician to both Coleridge and Southey, like them, subscribed to Charles Fox’s Ahmed Ardebeili poems in 1797.8 In 1792 he had lost his Oxford

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lectureship in chemistry because of his revolutionary politics and religious skepticism, indiscreetly expressed, and moved to Bristol. The poem is a peculiar self-contradictory work, based on a wellcharted episode in classical accounts of Alexander’s advance through Indian territory. It is enthusiastic in favour of Alexander the activist-adventurer and driven by the sort of ‘imagination as much needed for science as poetry’, whose ‘passionate excesses’ were due to his ‘exquisite sensibility’. Yet on the other hand, Beddoes’ work incorporated a verse–condemnation of martial poetry, and in its prose notes and accompanying essays directed fierce criticism against the recent expansionist wars of the East India Company about which he had been reading accounts by critical participants.9 The kind of argument he later used in his Bristol practice— of what would now be called ‘social medicine’—to explain disorder among the impoverished in urban Britain was here used to explain eastern passivity or violence. ‘An unhappy people, degraded by oppression’ will be turbulent or indolent unless their conditions are changed, and their ‘merciless tyrants from Europe’ removed. This contrasts with his embarrassingly buoyant interpretation of Alexander as a passionate explorer aroused by rumours of India: Tales of this romantic cast are admirably calculated to influence a susceptible imagination. In every age the effect of such a misty and magnified view of distant objects has been powerfully felt (Beddoes 1792: 2n). This matches his description of Alexander’s exultation on seeing the Indian landscape, longing to invade the ‘closely-tufted’ forest, to lie under chequered shades where whispering branches play, with infant eagerness, to chace/The bright-plumed rivals of the insect race—/Soft, soothing scenes! You lulled to short repose/An heart where ever-restless ardour glows (lines 131–38). This excitement belongs also to his vigorous descent of the river Indus, ‘Where cataracts thunder down the shattered steep/… Forth from their secret glooms and rugged soil, the voice of Uproar calls the Sons of spoil’, and ‘prodigious whirlpools’ are formed

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‘at the meeting of two rivers’, with ‘recoil’, ‘foam and roar’ (lines 14–20). Like Southey and Shelley after him, he visualized his oriental trees as ‘dark pavilions’ (line 97). Southey explained the flaws of his writing in terms of his enthusiastic temper: ‘[B]ecause Beddoes’ mind was so rapidly progressive, so quick in outgrowing error, and so indefatigable in the acquirement of facts, that his books become imperfect representations of their author’s opinions and knowledge’ (Southey 1986, vol. I: 497). Yet some perilous details of the riverine descent in Thalaba may owe something to his example. Beddoes displays in acute form the dilemma of thinking radicals on how to relate their apprehension of imperial expansion to their strong views on the need for basic social change, opposition to political and religious conservatism, and abhorrence of violence. Beddoes’ thinking about ancient and modern empire became most confused through his dependence on Robertson, as quoted in his footnotes, as well as on Alexander Dow and William Fullarton—Scots who contradicted what one scholar has recently called Robertson’s ‘imperial complacencies’ (O’Brien in Brown 1997: 91). Among English poets, the most significant student of the geography of Alexander’s eastward expansion was Shelley, as the place–names of Alastor (1816) imply. It would be clearer to Shelley’s classically-educated contemporaries than to his postmodern readers that the Poet’s eastward itinerary in Alastor is related to Alexander the Great’s eastern campaign, moving from Athens to ‘the fallen towers of Babylon, the eternal pyramids, Memphis and Thebes’ (lines 110–11) through ‘Dark Aethiopia’, ‘Arabie,/And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste’, and ‘O’er the aerial mountains which pour down/Indus and Oxus from their icy caves’ (lines 140–42) to the ‘vale of Cashmire’ (line 146); then ‘Till vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep/Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud,/Through Balk, and where the desolate tombs/Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind/Their wasting dust’, and on to the ‘Lone Chorasmian shore … a wild and melancholy waste of putrid marshes’ (lines 272, 274–75) to the east of the Caspian, and across the sea to ‘the ethereal cliffs’ and ‘base of Caucasus’ (lines 353, 377). The order of the Poet’s final movements is different, but the places he touches, apart from ‘Cashmire’, (about which there was some doubt) were on Alexander’s known itinerary, besides marking even more ancient imperial centres.

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The journey has often been read as beginning in the spirit of an educational tour, in Shelley’s own terms: ‘To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands’, ‘memorials of the world’s youth’, ‘the thrilling secrets of the birth of time’, later crossed by ‘lofty hopes of divine liberty’, raised by a feminine voice ‘like the voice of his own soul/Heard in the calm of thought’, turning to rhapsodic song as his dream woman becomes ever more disturbingly embodied and sexual in her promptings. From then on, the poem’s imagined landscape has the kind of pressing intensity which calls for an allegorical reading—as an inner journey through an agony of absence that displaces all other perceptions except the realization of its shifting scenery as a process of dying. But what has the poet-figure’s tracing of places on Alexander’s itinerary to do with the poem’s meaning? Since James Chandler’s freshly construed argument in England in 1819 (1998), in favour of regarding Shelley along with Hazlitt as the British romantic writers who most powerfully challenged representations of both present and past, in terms of either conservatively dominant or democratically representative public personalities, the ‘case of Alexander’, embedded in the geography of Alastor through Shelley’s inclusion of his places of past occupation, asks for a reconsideration (Chandler 1998: ch 3). If undoubtedly 1819 is a crucial year for Shelley, and more widely for the understanding of cultural change, it may be argued that emerging problems of cultural representation had already fed into the originality of Shelley’s earlier poetic experiments as modes of dissidence from established stylistic norms and ways of perceiving the world. Shelley would not have met the Greek or Latin accounts of Alexander as part of the official Eton classical curriculum. So significantly, between 1812 and 1815, he ordered from the London booksellers Clio Richman, Thomas Hookham, and Lackington, Allen and Co a number of books relating to Alexander’s campaigns— the Latin account of Quintus Curtius Rufus with ‘the supplements of Freinshemius’, as well as John Gillies’s The History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies, and Conquests (London, 1786), and William Robertson’s An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India (2nd edition, London, 1794), both with maps.10 In 1812, Shelley’s friend Hogg noted that Harriet Shelley was studying a bilingual copy of

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Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and in 1813 Volney’s Ruins was a book (Volney 1807) which she used to read aloud ‘for our instruction and edification’ (Hogg 1858, vol. II: 177, 183). This orientalising of philosophical romance, juxtaposing a radical secular interpretation of human history up to the French revolution with prospects for a rational humanitarian future, included a ‘map’ of the world’s famous ruins representing the traveller–narrator’s transcendental vision—from beyond its middle-eastern setting at Palmyra under the tuition of his instructing Genius, its marked spots ranging from the Nile, Ethiopia, Thebes, Memphis, Tyre, Sidon, Persepolis, Ecbatana and Babylon across to ‘Cashmire’, several of them observed by the narrator to be on the main middle-eastern trade route. In 1812, Hookham sent Shelley a copy of T. L. Peacock’s early poems which he had published, including ‘Palmyra’, a Pindaric ode lamenting the fall of these cities, Volney’s ruins of empire, with a conclusion that was admired by Shelley, and reflections on the place of historical amnesia. ‘His mantle dark Oblivion flings/Around the monuments of kings/Who once to conquest shouting myriads bore’ (White 1947, vol. I: 241).11 By mid-August 1814 Shelley had read another French middleeastern romance, Delisle de Sales Izouard’s Le vieux de la Montagne (1799), supposedly translated from the manuscript of ‘An Arab of the Great Desert’, a fictional version of the activities in Lebanon of the Isma’ili sect, interpreted as assassins of despots yet themselves corrupted by a power damaging to their earlier idealism. Its strange leader–sage Orondate, from the vantage of his mountain grotto studies a vast map of the world, and through a magic instrument surveys the history of rising and falling empires. Like Volney, Delisle de Sales was a post-Revolution French parliamentarian using exotic fictional forms to comment on aspects of revolutionary hopes and fears, and a member of the learned Institut de France. His imaginary narrator explains the gaps in his narrative and its inconclusive conclusion in the word ‘for …’ by attributing this uncertain future to Bonaparte, the new ‘Alexander of Asia and Africa’ who was campaigning in Egypt (Malandain 1982, vol. I: 409–15).12 By the time Shelley began his own short unfinished prose-romance of 1814, The Assassins (indebted to the French romance’s vivid oriental landscape and plot) the events

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of the Napoleonic Wars had cast doubt on Bonaparte’s far-flung imperial ambitions, rivalling Britain’s. Besides transcribing it, Mary Shelley in December 1814 recorded reading with Shelley Pennant’s View of Hindoostan, another work with maps.13 The map as index of conflict and disaster as well as expansion of power was at the forefront of national attention, as women in particular were painfully aware. In her poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Mrs. Barbauld wrote of the woman who scans the daily news, To learn the fate of husband, brothers, friends,/Or the spread map with anxious eye explores,/Its dotted boundaries and pencilled shores,/Asks where the spot that wrecked her bliss is found,/And learns the name but to detest the sound. Britain by her island position, may expect ‘To sport in wars, while danger keeps aloof/… but, Britain, know,/Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe.’14 Another classical text that Shelley studied with admiration in late 1815 was Lucan’s Pharsalia, with its dark estimate of the wrongs of war and of Alexander, a man who was born to teach this evil lesson to the world that so many lands may obey one lord … he rushed through the peoples of Asia, mowing down mankind … he was a pestilence to the earth … But Death stood in his way and Nature alone was able to bring his mad reign to its end [X: 30–42]. Shelley chose some powerful lines from Pharsalia as epigraph to The Daemon of the World, on the Delphic priestess forced to bear witness to the future [V: 176–78]: ‘Nor may the prophetess divulge, as much as she knows: all time comes crowding upon her, and so many centuries weigh upon her unhappy breast’. Her burdensome vatic message is inescapable; yet Shelley in his 1815 correspondence with Hogg confessed to a different kind of struggle, rather to keep the dominant attitudes around him from impinging too heavily on his mind and preventing his ‘dispassionate’ observation: ‘In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to

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consider them as already historical. This is difficult.’15 Among such pressures, the relation of Shelley’s books and readings with his effort to be an independent observer of his age calls for further appraisal.

The Geography of Alexander’s Conquests in Alastor Some recent readings of Alastor focus not so much on the poem’s locations as on its solipsistic strangeness, its ‘vacancy’—from Tilottama Rajan’s fine account of its generic ambivalence between narrative and lyric, with a strong note of the elegiac in its movement across shifting natural scenes increasingly denuded of human contact (Rajan 1994 [1991]: 27–51 [85–107]), to Saree Makdisi’s more adversarial postcolonial perception of a troubled search for the Eastern origins of the West, which obliterates the present population and makes the landscape a ‘cleaned-out slate’ for a westernizing modernization (Makdisi 1998: 137–53). Yet these readings themselves bypass some important contexts and invite three sorts of intertextual considerations. The first is in terms of the need to read the Alastor volume of 1816 as a whole, with The Daemon of the World accompanying Alastor and other elegiac poems; the second is in terms of early nineteenth-century interest in other orientalist variations on the wandering-poet theme in an Islamic setting; and a third is in terms of the Enlightenment discussion in favour or disfavour of Alexander and his eastward campaign. These areas will be examined one by one. Alastor’s generic fluctuation as described by Rajan avoids comment on its almost entire omission of the didactic social polemic which had so powerfully charged Queen Mab (1813), Shelley’s earlier cosmic visionary poem, cut down and tempered in the 1816 volume as the Daemon of the World, A Fragment, with its epigraph from Pharsalia. This retains the essence of his diatribe against empires, international commerce, and the imposition of religious and political tyranny as a grotesque nightmare which the Daemon transcends when it is perceived by the imagination within a sublime vision of the setting sun, becoming a natural

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temple of Life. In contrast, the vacancy of Alastor may be read as a mournful expression of the sense of social ruin and lack of any hopeful meaning in the present already polemicized in its companion-poem. The volume’s shorter poems represent disappointment over the apparent retreat from social radicalism by the era’s great writers (‘To Wordsworth’, and the splendid ‘Oh! There are spirits in the air’, which Mary believed to be connected with Coleridge) and the militarism of the times (‘Feelings of a Republican on the fall of Bonaparte’ – ‘I hated thee, fallen tyrant!’), as well as reflection on personal change and mortality (‘Mutability’, ‘Death’, ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard’), probably related to the eruption of pulmonary symptoms mentioned in Mary’s annotation, not to speak of the collapse of his first marriage (Holmes 1994 [1974]: 307–11).16 Yet there are spurts of controlled radical passion, for instance in his realization that though ‘Thou and France are in the dust’, ‘Virtue owns a more eternal foe/ Than Force or Fraud’, since the old European establishment and its ‘legal crime’ remain (cf. Holmes). In Alastor itself, so prepossessed throughout half its length with the gradual process towards the isolation of death ‘in mystic sympathy/With nature’s ebb and flow’ (lines 652–53, in contrast to a more traditional preoccupation with heaven and hell), there is an anguished reversal of ‘How wonderful is death!’ (the opening line of The Daemon of the World as of Queen Mab). O, storm of death!/Whose sightless speed divides this sudden night:/And thou, colossal skeleton. There is a vision of its kingship from the red field/Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, / The patriot’s sacred couch, the snowy bed/Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne yet with a hint at the future abolition of tyranny in church or state, after which death will be simpler, Nor ever more offer at thy dark shrine/The unheeded tribute of a broken heart (lines 109–24).

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James Chandler, in his reading of 1815–16 as a time of ‘retrospective stocktaking after the astounding era through which most of Europe had recently passed’, has considered Alastor to ‘seemingly expose Wordsworth from within’. He was aware of earlier critics who related the poem to The Excursion, with its play of sceptical solitude and wish for death against divine presence in Nature and traditional religious observance (Chandler 1998: 518n).17 Yet the poem seems even more closely to interrogate the solutions offered to queries of disappointment in Coleridge’s poems, including France, An Ode, which Shelley read aloud to Mary on 6 January 1815 (JMS, vol. I: 90).18 In this poem, duplicitous public life gives way to the powers of Nature as Liberty’s real dwelling-place, whereas in ‘Fears in Solitude’ indignation at the Government’s ‘deep delusion’, the dealing out of ‘slavery and pangs’ abroad, and national warmongering, ‘the desolation and the agony/Of our doings’, gives place to religiose devotion to the ‘Mother Isle’ as a natural ‘temple’. In another of this group of poems, ‘The Picture’, the beloved’s reflection in a pool simply appears and vanishes, but she is traced, beyond the ‘mad loveyearning by the vacant brook’, up the stream to her cottage door. If the mobile delicacy of detail in Alastor’s terrain may recall the vitality of Coleridgean landscape, it is viewed in a mood that recognizes the dependence of both joy and depression on the mind in Coleridge’s Dejection, An Ode, though loss is experienced in a distant and imagined traveller’s world, its damsel and fiend as ominous as Coleridge’s.19 If both mind and Nature be ‘organic harps’, like ‘that simplest lute’ of ‘The Aeolian harp’, Alastor (compare its ‘long-forgotten lyre’, line 42) signals the mortality of ‘that fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings/The breath of heaven did wander’ (lines 666–67), ‘voiceless earth and vacant air’ mirroring the cold emptiness of human death (lines 660–72). The Poet’s return to Nature, as vision fails to materialize, asks to be read otherwise than as mere solitary retreat into scenic variation, more as a troubled journey of ascesis from socially prevalent error and a commitment of received history to oblivion. In the philosophical essay ‘On Life’ (1817), Shelley was to consider the consequence of revising popular habits of mind and expressions in such a way. Innovative thinking ‘destroys error, and the roots of error. It leaves, what it is too often the duty of the reformer in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy.’20

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So Alastor, by naming historical sites while omitting their past rulers or public heroes, or even directly mourning their ruins, suggests rather the failure of that absent history—either personal or social—to relieve recognition of the inevitable deathward journey. And so it acts out a state of cultural crisis, which the universal yet intimate ‘Mother of the unfathomable world’, Nature, relieves in the only way known to her—in death. Nor is she a replacement for the melancholy failure of political dreams. John Donovan’s study of ‘Lethean joy’ in Laon and Cythna (1817), reading the poem in terms of an interplay of memory and amnesia in the effort towards radical human renewal recognizes Shelley’s continuing preoccupation with the theme (Donovan 1996: 132–51; Ferber 2002: 145–73). One may also see Alastor as a preliminary without much social hope to the progression of Shelley’s powerful sonnet England in 1819, where dynastic rulers are ‘mud from a muddy spring’ and institutions are ‘graves’, from which Liberty as ‘a glorious phantom’ has yet to burst. Shelley’s second-cousin Thomas Medwin, in his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1847), describes the poem in some such terms: As one who has returned from the valley of the dolorous abyss, the reader hears the voice of lamentation wailing for the world’s wrong, in accents wild and sweet, but incommunicably strange (Medwin 1847, vol. I: 234–35). But why should Alastor’s Poet die in the Caucasian woods of Azerbaijan after his stormy journey across the Caspian? There are several possible kinds of answer. In 1812, Shelley had ordered from his bookseller Hookham Sir William Jones’s Works, which included his ‘Anniversary Discourses’ delivered to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, considering distinctive and common features of Hindus, Arabs, Tartars, Persians, Chinese, and ‘Borderers’ and ‘The Origins and Families of Nations’. Discussing the Persians (1789), Jones noted the current scholarly contention ‘that both the Irish and the old British proceeded severally from the borders of the Caspian’, and argued for Iraq–Iran as ‘the true centre’ of civilization, a theme repeated in 1792—the stretch of country ‘between the Oxus and the Euphrates, the mountains of Caucasus, and the borders of India’ must have been the primal human site (Jones 1799, vol. I: 93, 136). Geographically, what

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may now confuse the issue of location is knowledge of Shelley’s later siting of Prometheus’s cave in the Indian, not the Caspian Caucasus. Yet the question of a search for anthropological origins, however inexact, is less crucial to Alastor than a question left unresolved amongst Shelley’s previous rhetorical denunciation of judicatory religion—does the individual life have a spiritual significance within and through its material base, a source ‘inaccessibly profound’? ‘Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?’ (lines 503–4). By framing his own prefatory interpretation of the poem in terms of solitude and love, Shelley deflected attention away from his anxiety over the process of dying and the nature of any afterlife, as deep as his sexual and relational anxiety, and equally present in the poem. There the Poet’s quiet death at the back of beyond has a liminal quality, as the culmination of a carefully tracked progress in acceptance, fear giving way to a perception of a share in the earth’s ambiguous impermanence of life, but without any admission of supernatural consolation (Butter 1954: 51–54). Southey’s narrative poem Thalaba the Destroyer, called (by Mary) Shelley’s ‘favourite poem’ in 1815, is important for Alastor in several ways and yet radically different, though both concern Asian journeys. Typical of its contrast is the hero Thalaba’s protective talisman, the crystal ring of Abdaldar, described as the powerful gem in which ‘condensed/Primeval dews, that upon Caucasus/Felt the first winter’s frost’, taken by his sorcerer– opponent to be tempered by the ‘Eternal Fire’ which gushed like water from ‘a channel’d rock’—the hell fire which would eventually engulf the universe (ii: 235–61). The poem’s setting of conflict, given an Islamic supernatural colouring, placed between Mount Caucasus and the sea-caves of Domdaniel, centre of the arch-demon Eblis’s dark powers, was drawn from the dualist fantasy world of the Arabian Tales of Denis Chavis and Jacques Cazotte that Shelley was apparently reading early in 1815 along with Weber’s Tales of the East (Edinburgh, 1812).21 Its stories range from the Tunisian Atlas mountains, entrance to the realm of demonic magic ‘Dom-Daniel’, across Yemen to Baghdad and ‘Mount Caucasus’, where the treasure of Solomon’s arms lies hidden, and to southeast Asian lands. These are narratives of the middle-eastern world’s own exotic ‘orientalism’, for which Europe had become a late eighteenth century dependent customer. This

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was hardly Shelley’s closest imaginative world, though his interests impinged on it, nor is there direct evidence (as there is with Southey) of his knowledge of Persian translations or manuscripts, especially in the circle of Charles Fox. Instead he continued, in a vein set up by French revolutionary orientalist authors, to invent his own narratives of conflict in a fictitious ‘eastern’ world from Byzantium to the borders of India, embodying his social hope of an end to human tyrannies. Denis Chavis, educated in Constantinople, was a Syrian Christian brought to Paris to teach the Arabic he knew well, and given to the invention of ‘traditional’ matter (Mahdi 1995: 51–61). In the collection’s ‘History of Habib and Dorathil-Goase, or the Knight’, Mount Caucasus is the place of testing and personal discovery. ‘Remember that everything in this habitation is symbolical’ (Heron 1814, vol. III: 346). So at the place of ‘the rivulet … whose everlasting flow, from the birthday of the world/ Had made the same unvaried murmuring’, the great Bird Simorg instructs Thalaba to follow the stream, ‘Tracing its water upward to its source’ at ‘the Fountain of the Rock’ which will ‘Wash away thy worldly stains’ (XI, stanzas xi–xvi). Beneath a ‘lonely pine’ he would find a dog-sledge waiting to take him down through ice and snow to a boat, which, steered by a spirit-maiden would carry him to Domdaniel. He would travel with the green soul-bird of the dead Leila, daughter of his father’s murderer, nestling in his bosom as his companion, to end the tyranny of Eblis by encountering its evil magical powers, but to forgive the killer. Alastor’s watery journey to death is in contrast solitary and without any supernatural explanation, though the symbolic stages of its scenery, including its solitary pine, remain. Southey was set on his narrative way by this kind of middleeastern material, but made a personal development of it. So by an ironic twist, Southey’s ‘destroyer’, dedicated to taking vengeance for his father’s death and other atrocities does not directly destroy, though he is, in Islamic mode, the destined instrument of ‘the end’, and has fulfilment in his own death, beyond which lies reunion with the beloved dead. Southey’s final forgiving closure to his tale of tyranny was probably denied to Shelley because of his more absolute anger against social oppression, to the exclusion of Southey’s human and creaturely mediation as well as his hellish regions.22 Yet the originary source reached by Shelley’s Poet is in its own way life-giving—the mysterious

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semiotic flow of the benign mother-earth’s bosom giving repose, in place of the father’s predictable wrath so pervasive in Thalaba. Nigel Leask has recently distinguished Shelley’s high romantic dream–landscape from Southey’s ‘costume poetry’ and heavy information-based annotations (Leask 1998: 164–88). Yet if Southey’s geography is a mixture of bookish detail from acknowledged travel-sources within imaginary Asian terrain, this is not so far apart from Shelley’s, and both blend the facts of up-to-date natural history and topography with ambiguous feminine appearances, a mountain journey in search for the Water of Life, and the bearing of personal ordeal and recognition of human limits. Only in Shelley, as commentators have repeatedly noted, the natural does the work of a more complex myth on its own. Accuracy seems however to have mattered, judging by the correspondence of Shelley’s Caucasian forest-plants with contemporary naturalists’ accounts, even if these are perceived in Southey’s favoured Islamic architectural terms as natural ‘domes’, ‘pavilions’ and canopies.23 As Southey was fascinated by Erasmus Darwin’s elaborate mythologizing of the natural process, but transferred to his own uses his annotative habit as well as his concerns with the science of weather, rocks and climate, so Shelley in turn traversed a terrain of bitumen pools, river-bores, whirlpools and rainbows in moving water.24 ‘Caucasus’ and ‘Caspian’ appear several times in the first twenty pages of another book Shelley was reading in 1815—the first volume of Pennant’s A View of Hindoostan. Here the well-known topographer describes ancient trade routes into India from the West, drawing both on classical Alexander–narratives and on information given to him by his friend the Persian scholar William Ouseley from his study of the accounts of Alexander in Firdausi’s Shahnama and Nizami’s Iskandarnama (Pennant 1798: 6–11, 19–20). Also notable is his more empirically-focused account of the much later transport of Indian goods down the Oxus into the Caspian sea, and across it to the mouth of the river Kur in Azerbaijan, ‘which descends a great and rapid river from [the Caspian] mount Caucasus, and is navigable very far up, so as to form an easy communication to the Euxine sea’, and thence to Genoa, Venice, Constantinople or Russia. This contrasts remarkably with the solitary voyage of Shelley’s Poet, across the Caspian, and up an unnamed river overhung by the Caucasus on its western

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side, to disembark in the mysteriously beautiful solitudes of his final death–retreat. Shelley’s poem is a total exclusion of Pennant’s context of commercial expansion with a set of European outlets as the framing interest for his geographical knowledge. By 1807, concerns over the Caspian Caucasian region were rising for Britain, according to Charles Wilkinson’s A General, Historical, and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus, by ‘the threat held out to England of a league between Russia, France and Persia, to attack the East Indies’ using this route. In such circumstances, the features of Shelley’s sublime topography of retreat were interpreted by practical geographers as obstacles to the invasion of India. ‘Here they would meet with inaccessible summits, tremendous precipices, impassable torrents, and impenetrable forests’ as well as a ‘ferocious race’ of indigenous inhabitants.25 Shelley’s version of this landscape refuses to admit such practical considerations, and local people meeting the Poet in Alastor, from ‘the Arab maiden’ (lines 120–39) to ‘the cottagers, /Who ministered with human charity/His human wants’ (lines 254–56) and the ‘youthful maidens, taught by nature’ (lines 266–71) who befriend him are hospitable and benign. Pennant’s account of north–western routes into India is followed immediately by a description of ‘Cashmire’ as a paradisal ‘happy valley’, drawn from the Mughal writer Abul Fazl’s A’in-iAkbari and the French doctor François Bernier’s 1664 personal account of the summer resort of the Indian rulers Akbar and Aurangzeb. Its temperate climate, ‘light showers’, ‘thousands of cascades’, ‘angelic’ women, and notable numbers of hermits in places ‘nearly inaccessible’, its people mostly Hindu but ‘as much addicted to the sciences and to poetry as the very Persians’ (Pennant 1798: 44–49), inspired a young Irish actress, Sydney Owenson, to write The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), over which Shelley enthused soon after its publication. In this intense romance set in seventeenth-century south Asia, the Hindu priestess Luxima symbolizes ‘natural piety’, devoted to a Portuguese Franciscan priest in risky times of inquisition. Shelley’s pursuit of the visionary maiden first dreamed up in ‘Cashmire’ has lately, through his admiration for Owenson’s book, been read in terms of the Sanskritic orientalism of the late eighteenth century, while the more widely known Persianist orientalism of the time has been overlooked. Also near the book’s beginning, ‘the conqueror of Asia’

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is introduced. As the priest sails up the Indus, ‘his historical knowledge enabled him to trace, with accuracy, and his reflecting mind, with interest, where Alexander fought, where Alexander conquered’ (Owenson 1811, vol. I: 58–59).26 Robertson’s Disquisition, which Shelley had acquired by 1815, had two maps, the more modern one indebted to James Rennell’s recent work as a south Asian cartographer. It shows the country of the Chorasmi below the Aral sea (understood to have been once joined by marshes to the Caspian) and beyond the Oxus, which runs down into the Parapomisus mountains, part of the ‘Indian Caucasus’, from the other side of which runs the Indus with its tributaries (Rennell 1788). Balk is identified with Baktra, with both names given, and Cashmire appears, surrounded by mountains. Carmania is marked west of the desert of Gedrosia through which Alexander’s troops passed on their return westwards. But not all of Shelley’s places are indicated—Petra and Aornos are absent. The two are marked in typical eighteenthcentury continental or English maps accompanying the text of the classical historians Quintus Curtius Rufus or Arrian, where Petra Sogdiana lies north of the Oxus, one Aornos immediately south-east of it and another Aornos near the river Hydaspes.27 Shelley seems to have confused Aornos near Petra Sogdiana with Aornos on the Hydaspes when he imagined one rock as drearily visible from the other, ‘vast Aornos seen from Petra’s steep’, which ‘Hung o’er the low horizon like a cloud’. To these two rocky promontories, used as refuge and defence by local rulers but captured by Alexander’s men, are devoted two of Quintus Curtius’s purple descriptions of victories against odds: the first a tremendous feat of precipitous snowy ascent in response to the taunt, ‘do your soldiers have wings?’; the second equally strenuous and riskladen, for Heracles had failed to scale it.28 The comment of Gillies on Alexander’s Sogdian exploit is noteworthy for its pro-et-con balancing act: His success in arms, owing to the resources of his active and comprehensive mind sometimes encouraged him to enterprises, neither justified by necessity, nor warranted by prudence. Fond of war, not only as an instrument of ambition, but as an art in which he gloried to excel, he began to regard the means as more valuable than the end, and sacrificed the lives of his men

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to military experiments, alike hazardous and useless. Yet on the present excursion, sound policy seems to have directed his measures (Gillies 1786, vol. I: 627). Drained of historical significance in Alastor, these landmarks suggest a deliberate refusal of positive modern meaning, not waiting to be re-colonized by the West, as Saree Makdisi’s reading proposes, drawing on passages from A Philosophical View of Reform of 1820, but rather resistant to invasive occupation for any public purpose, as ‘the blind earth, and heaven/That echoes not my thoughts’ (lines 289–90) intensify the poet’s ‘brooding care’ and wish for death. If there is a point where the underlying mood of these two strikingly diverse works in verse and prose are similar, it is in Shelley’s gloomy estimate, using remarkably postcolonial language, of ‘the introspective and unconscious abjectness to which the purposes of a considerable mass of the people are reduced’ by oppressive inequalities in both Britain and Asia, so that even ‘nations of the most delicate physical and intellectual organisation and under the most fortunate climates of the globe’ have become ‘a blank in the history of man’. If he imagines the deserts of Asia Minor and Greece being occupied ‘by the overflowing population of countries less enslaved and debased’, he praises the Persians as ‘a beautiful, refined and impassioned people’, values an Islamic stress on equality, and foresees that the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent ‘would, if they were free, attain to a system of arts and literature of their own’, and not of Europe (CWPBS, vol. VII: 18, 19, 50).

Loss of Liberty and ‘the mystery within’ Empire It was in 1817 that Shelley in his essay ‘On Christianity’ made more explicit his own reading of Alexander’s career, supporting Seneca and Le Clerc against Montesquieu and Robertson, in powerful symbolic contrast to Jesus, interpreted as anarchist teacher of peace and simplicity (unlike churches allied to oppressive and warmongering states). The desire of revenge for the aggression of Persia outlived, among the Greeks, that love of liberty which had been their

54 Kitty Scoular Datta

most glorious distinction among the nations of mankind; and Alexander became the instrument of its completion. The mischiefs attendant on this consummation of fruitless ruin are too manifest and too tremendous to be related. Among these ‘mischiefs’ was ‘a system of spoliation’ in retaliation for wrongs (Shelley 1993: 257–58). This is a limited critique of imperial expansion in terms of its military violence; but the very separation of this from supposed advantages has its own negative force, maintaining the ‘vacancy’ in Alastor as a powerful political silence, at a time when Shelley’s contemporaries were wielding a rhetoric of justification which he refused to stomach. Also, one has only to read recent poems weighing time’s losses or societies’ misdeeds against hope, such as the Scottish progressive Thomas Campbell’s popular The Pleasures of Hope (1799) or Shelley’s friend Peacock’s Palmyra or The Pleasures of Melancholy (1812), to recognize Alastor’s originality all the more sharply in its refusal to let any appeal to transcendence weaken the recognition of temporal failure. The poem never quite resolves the tension between such a move towards death as a depressive fatality—another instance of romanticism’s plunge into the chasm of disillusion—or as an astonishing verbal realization, in spite of its gloom, of the mysteriously varied romantic geography of natural transition. This was not Alexander’s last implication in Shelley’s work. During his brief period of support for the Greek struggle for independence from Turkish empire, he presented a ring bearing Alexander’s head to the Greek patriot Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, frequent visitor in 1821 to his Pisa home and dedicatee of Hellas (Holmes 1994 [1974]: 641). But his last word was written in 1822, in The Triumph of Life, where a visionary Aristotle and Alexander, ‘the tutor and his pupil whom Dominion/ Followed as tame as vulture in a chain,’ ‘him whom from the flock of conquerors/Fame singled out for her thunder-bearing minion’, now themselves walk chained to Life’s ‘triumphal chair’ (lines 260–66). They are amongst those for whom he writes a characteristic epitaph:

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their lore/Taught them not this—to know themselves; their might/Could not repress the mystery within,/And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night/Caught them ere evening (lines 211–15). A final twist to the appearance of Alexander in the nineteenthcentury consideration of empire was given by the Indian poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, writer in both Bengali and English. This is in his vigorous English poem with an epigraph from Byron, King Porus—a Legend of Old (1843) (Chaudhuri 2002: 105–19). Alexander’s arrival by the Hydaspes is read as the beginning of India’s loss of freedom: ‘Loudly the midnight tempest sang, Ah! It was thy dirge, Fair Liberty!’ The warriors of King Porus ‘for their country’s freedom bled’ while he stood among them ‘Like a Himala-peak’, astonishing even Alexander, who stopped the battle to save him from dying. King Porus was no slave;/He stooped not, bent not there his knee—/But stood as stands an oak/In Himalayan majesty.... As he asked to be treated as a king, he was released. ‘Thus India’s crown was lost and won’. In Michael Madhusudan’s final stanza there is a touch of the Shelley whom he studied (along with Byron) at Calcutta’s Hindoo College, as he searches for the lost maiden Freedom, how like a dream—/How like bright sunbeams on a stream/ That melt beneath gray twilight’s eye—/That glory now hath flitted by!29 She was ‘Once goddess of Ind’s sunny clime’, but now Thy pearl, thy diamond, and thy mine/Of glistening gold no more is thine./Alas!—each conquering tyrant’s lust/Has robb’d thee of thy very dust! There are uncertainties of identity at the heart of Michael Madhusudan’s life and work, involving his literary use of two languages and his reversal of traditional Hindu epic heroism in

56 Kitty Scoular Datta

his Meghnadbodh Kabya by focusing on Ravana the ‘demon– king’ rather than the god–king Rama, apparently with Milton’s Satan as model. It was a prominent British official in Bengal, Bethune, who had advised him earlier to write poetry in the vernacular rather than English. Even so, it is hard to read King Porus other than as an early expression of Indian nationalist feeling issuing from the very kind of privileged institution for the urban few, over which rancorous debate arose in the wake of Macaulay’s Minute. As a member of the imperial elite, Michael Madhusudan later qualified as a barrister in England; yet his last major, if secret, literary act was probably to translate into English the Bengali play Nil Darpan, a broadside attack on the wrongs done in the Bengali countryside by British indigo–planters—a translation for which an English clergyman went to prison to protect his identity while allowing the colonial population to be aware of what Indians thought, on a burning issue of misgovernment. Porus fought back.

Notes 1. Ouseley’s letter to Douce on Persian sources for the life-story of Alexander is in Bodleian MS, Douce d. 20, 103–4 (1797). Henry Weber, Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries Published from Ancient Manuscripts (1810 vol. I: xx–xxx) discusses enlargements of classical Alexander–narratives by Pseudo-Callisthenes (fifth-century Armenian version of the Historia Alexandri Magni, composed in Greek, probably in the fourth century AD, by an unknown poet, falsely ascribed to Callisthenes, and versions in many languages. He refers frequently to information given by his friend Douce, and describes a fifteenth century Scots version (vol. I: lxxiii–lxxvi). His edition of the Middle English text includes Alexander’s battles with Darius and Porus, his descent under the sea, and building of a wall on the Caucasus against Gog and Magog, as also the tree–oracle which announces Alexander’s imminent death. 2. The Bodleian copy belonged to Francis Douce, like many other printed books related to oriental matters. 3. Alexander’s meeting with Indian ascetics and their intimations of his mortality was enlarged by Pseudo-Callisthenes, and later given Persian, Hebrew, Armenian and Latin versions. See George Cary, The Medieval Alexander. For discussion of Arabic and Persian sources, see Charles Genequand, ‘Sagesse et pouvoir: Alexandre en Islam’; Robert Hillenbrand, ‘The Iskandar Cycle in the Great Mongol Sahnama’ [Persian], and Caroline Sawyer, ‘Sword of Conquest, Dove of Soul: Political and Spiritual Values in Ahmadi’s Iskandarnama’

Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry 57

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

[Turkish] in The Problematics of Power: Eastern and Western Representations of Alexander the Great. M. Bridges and J.C. Bürgel (eds), 125–33, 211–13, 139–44. Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République de Lettres (Paris 1936: 146), places this essay in his Ars Critica (Amsterdam 1696). Pennant 1798, vol. II: 57–58, 148–49, from Lucan on Alexander’s ‘vain youth’ and ‘that prosperous robber’. Fresh estimates of Robertson by Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, and ‘Robertson’s Place in the Development of Eighteenth-Century Narrative History’ in Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (pp. 74–91) provide contexts. Gillies, Ancient Greece, vol. I: 626 (Vico preferred to Le Clerc), 667–71 (Plutarch’s estimate on his meeting with ‘Indian Brachmans’), 674 (agreement with Voltaire and Montesquieu). References are to Giambattista Vico, Nuovo Scientia, IV, xiv, 1; Montesquieu, De L’Esprit des Lois, II, x, chs.13–14, on Alexander’s rationality in using strategic power, his rapidity— so should not be treated as a ‘romance’. On Fox’s orientalism, see Kitty Scoular Datta, ‘Before the Deluge’, in TLS, 20 August 2004, 13–14. [Dr John Beddoes], Alexanders Expedition Down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Indian Ocean (1792) was printed privately with woodcuts and sold in London by booksellers John Murray and James Phillips. It was described and quoted in some detail by John Edmunds Stock, M.D., Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes M.D. with an Analytical Account of His Writings (1811). Beddoes, in his notes to the poem, quoted William Fullarton as an adverse commentator on late eighteenth-century Indian wars, as well as Las Casas and Adam Smith as critics of empire. For Fullarton’s later career as a liberal-minded Governor of Trinidad who prosecuted his predecessor, an abuser of slaves, see V.S. Naipaul, Loss of Eldorado (1969: 217–327). The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (10 vols.), [hereafter cited as CWPBS], vol. IX: 34, 36 (to Hookham, to Rickman, December 1812), 122 (to Lackington, December 1813, ordering Quintus Curtius). CWPBS, vol. IX: 19–20, 18 August 1812, probably refers to The Genius of Thames, Palmyra and Other Poems (2nd Edition, 1812). ‘Palmyra’ had a Greek epitaph from Pindar, ‘Time, the lord surpassing all blessed gods’ (Loeb, Pindar, vol. II: 232), reflected in the quoted lines (The Works of Thomas Love Peacock: Poems, 175). Le Vieux de la Montagne: Histoire Orientale, Traduite de l’Arabe, Par l’Auteur de la Philosophie de la Nature (4 vols., Paris, 1799) is discussed by Pierre Malandain, Delisle de Sales (vol. I: 409–15). The romance is directed equally against fanatisme and tyrannical violence. The myth of Senex de Monte is reproduced in a Southey note for Shelley’s favourite Thalaba the Destroyer (London, 1801 vol. II: 70–72), from Marco Polo in Purchas His Pilgrimage and Friar Odoricus in Mandeville’s Travels. Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis, pp. 109–17 gives

58 Kitty Scoular Datta

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

details of these western sources, and comments that ‘in both western and eastern societies the boundaries between fact and fiction, and reality and fantasy, are not always clearly definable’ (p. 124). CWPBS, vol. VI: 153–71, 358–59, ‘The Assassins’; The Journals of Mary Shelley ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert [hereafter cited as JMS] (vol. I: 51–52, 11 December 1814) lists Thomas Pennant, The View of Hindoostan (2 vols., London, 1798). Coleridge had made the same point about Britain in ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1802): ‘Secure from actual warfare, we have loved/To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!’ (pp. 88–89). CWPBS, vol. IX: 115–16, 119, to Hogg, August–September 1815, on reading Lucan, ‘transcending Virgil’. Shelley was fascinated by the ‘Pythian exhalation’, connecting it with the wind-harp (See Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley, 78). In his August letter, Shelley reflects on ‘the perverted energies of the human mind … who is there who would not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and perceive that Death is so near? Even the men who hold dominion over nations fatigue themselves by the interminable pursuit of emptiest visions ….’ Richard Holmes’ Shelley. The Pursuit, focusing on summer 1815 as a partly obscure period involving illness and withdrawal crucial to the creation of the Alastor volume, sees ‘Oh, there are spirits in the air’ as rather selfreflexive, also including pursuit by the ‘fiend’ and other elements repeated in Alastor. It also questions Mary’s account relating it to Coleridge. Timothy Clark’s Embodying Revolution, pp. 67–68 (on ‘Mutability’) and pp. 105–9, accepts and illuminates the Coleridge link with the Alastor volume. Harold Leroy Hoffman, An Odyssey of the Soul: Shelley’s Alastor, pp. 51–58, related to Shelley’s Poet Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary’—despondent, skeptical of life after death—longing for death after personal loss and disappointment at failure of revolution, played off against the Wanderer’s intimations of immortality through Nature. Coleridge’s poems were ordered from Rickman, 28 December 1812, CWPBS, vol. IX: 36. David Reiman ed. Shelley and His Circle, vol. VII: 1–12: Mary’s transcript of ‘France: An Ode’ and ‘Famine, Fire and Slaughter’ illuminate links. So does Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millenium in English Romantic Poetry: 137–40, 259n and passim. Godwin, Coleridge’s friend since 1795, more intimate after 1800, could have discussed Coleridge with Shelley in some detail. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Visions, pp. 257–58, refers to Bodleian Abinger MS C604/3, Godwin’s notes on Coleridge. Joseph Raben, ‘Coleridge as the Prototype in Shelley’s Alastor’, RES, pp. 278–92, presents a substantial earlier argument concentrating largely on ‘Kubla Khan’. CWPBS, vol. VI: 195, discussed illuminatingly by Clark, Embodying Revolution, p. 84. Early in Alastor it is the ‘mind’ or ‘brain’ of the young Poet which is ‘vacant’ (pp. 126, 191) until inspired or dreaming; near the end (p. 662) it is nature which is ‘vacant’, as in the final word of Mont Blanc (1816), ‘vacancy’ without ‘the human mind’s imaginings’.

Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry 59 21. JMS, vol. I: 88, 92, ‘Reading List, 1815’. An early item is Arabian Tales, being a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, translated from the Arabic Manuscript into French by Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte, translated into English by Robert Heron (4 vols.). References to Caucasus: vol. III: 304, 346, 355; vol. IV: 10; to ‘Dom-daniel’: vol. IV: 94, 232ff. 22. On Thalaba the Destroyer, see Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, ch. 2: ‘Robert Southey and the Oriental Renaissance’; Marilyn Butler, ‘Shelley and the Empire of the East’ in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran ed. Shelley, Poet and Legislator of the World: 158–68; Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life, pp. 148–52. 23. In Alastor ‘pyramid[s]’ (pp. 53, 433), ‘domes of sheeted spray’ (p. 335), ‘solemn domes’ (p. 435), ‘canopies’ (pp. 449, 525). 24. ‘Bitumen lakes’ (p. 75) [Thalaba, V.22–VI.2]; ‘whirlpool[s]’ (pp. 328, 355, 386–403), ‘rainbow clouds’ (p. 213), ‘rainbow flowers’ (p. 599) [Thalaba, XII.3]. 25. Jacob Reineggs and Friedrich von Bieberstein, A General, Historical, and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus: With a Catalogue of Plants Indigenous to the Country, trans. Charles Wilkinson, (London, 1806), ‘Advertisement’. Preface to the English translation of Quintus Curtius Rufus with Freinshemius supplement (London, 1809) refers to Bonaparte’s expansionary ambitions in Persia and beyond, with Alexander’s expedition as model. So does John Macdonald Kinneir, Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan in the Years 1813 and 1814; with remarks on the marches of Alexander, pp. 512–29, with a route-map. A relevant historical study is Paul Fregosi, Dreams of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War, 1792–1815. 26. On Shelley and Owenson see Hoffman, An Odyssey of the Soul, pp. 63–68, 101–4; John Drew, India and The Romantic Imagination, pp. 235–54, and Shelley’s letters on it to Elizabeth Hitchener and Hogg, CWPBS, vol. VIII: 103, 112, 117, 135 (June–July 1811). 27. Examples are editions of Quintus Curtius Rufus with J. Freinshem supplement, The Hague, 1708, Delft, 1724, London, 1747 (John Digby’s translation), and Arrian, London, 1729 (Rooke’s translation), Amsterdam, 1757 (Greek– Latin, with a map closely modelled on the Delft 1724 Curtius). 28. Petra Sogdiana: Quintus Curtius Rufus, VII.11: 1–29; Arrian, IV: 18,4–19,4; Diodorus Siculus, XVII: 28,1. Aornos: Quintus Curtius, VIII.11: 1–19; Arrian, III.29 (Bactrian); IV: 28–30, V.26 (Indian); Diodorus Siculus, XVII.85: 1–86. 29. There is a significant analogue to Shelley’s maiden in a Persian poem by Jami, based on Ouseley, The Oriental Collections, vol. I, no. 2: 186–87, and used by Isaac Disraeli, Romances (1799), pp. 144–48, ‘Love’s Dream’: Last night my eyes were closed in sleep, but my happiness awake; The whole night, the live–long night, the image of my beloved was the companion of my soul. Heavens! How did her sugared words fall from her sweet lips! Alas! All that she said to me in that dream has escaped from my memory, Although it was my care till break of day to repeat over and over her sweet words.

60 Kitty Scoular Datta The day, unless illumined by her beauty, is to my eyes of nocturnal darkness. Happy day that first I glanced upon that lovely face! May the eyes of Jami long be with pleasing visions, since they presented to my view last night That object, on whose account he passed his waking life in expectation.

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Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry 61 Delisle de Sales, J. B. C. Izouard. 1799. Le Vieux de la Montagne: Histoire Orientale, Traduite de l’Arabe, Par l’Auteur de la Philosophie de la Nature, 4 vols., Paris: J. J. Fuchs. Disraeli, Isaac. 1799. Romances. London: Cadell and Davies. Drew, John. 1987. India and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fregosi, Paul. 1989. Dreams of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War, 1792– 1815. London: Hutchinson. Gillies, John. 1786. The History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies and Conquests, 2 vols., London: for Messrs Burnet Colles... M’Kenzie, Moore, Jones. Heron, Robert (tr.). 1814[1792]. Arabian Tales, being a Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, translated from the Arabic Manuscript into French, by Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte, 4 vols. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute/ J. Dickson, E. Balfour and P. Hill. Hoffman, Harold Leroy. 1933. An Odyssey of the Soul: Shelley’s Alastor. New York: Columbia University Press. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. 1858. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. London: Moxon. Holmes, Richard. 1989. Coleridge: Visions. London: Penguin. ———. 1994[1974]. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: Harper Collins [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson]. Johnston, Kenneth R., with Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson and Herbert Marks (eds). 1990. Romantic Revolutions. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press. Jones, William. 1799. The Works of Sir William Jones in Six Volumes. London: Lord Feignmouth and Lady Jones. Kinneir, John Macdonald. 1818. Journey through Asia Minor, Armenia, and Koordistan in the Years 1813 and 1814; with remarks on the marches of Alexander. London: John Murray. Leask, Nigel. 1998. Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowes, J. L. 1930. The Road to Xanadu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lydgate, John. 1934. Minor Poems, 2 vols., ed. H.N. Mac Cracken, EETS.OS.192. London: Oxford University Press. Mahdi, Muhsin. 1995. The Thousand and One Nights. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Majeed, Javed. 1992. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Makdisi, Saree. 1998. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malandain, Pierre. 1982. Delisle de Sales, philosophe de la Nature (1761–1816), 2 vols. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation and Taylor Institution. Mauradja d’Ohsson, Ignace de. 1788[1787]. Oriental Antiquities and General View of the Othoman Customs, Laws and Ceremonies, vol. 1, English Translation. Philadelphia: Printed for the Select Committee and Grand Lodge of Enquiry. Medwin, Thomas. 1847. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Thomas Medwin in Two Volumes. London: T. C. Newby.

62 Kitty Scoular Datta Naipaul, V. S. 1969. Loss of Eldorado. London: Andre Deutsch. O’Brien, Karen. 1997. Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ouseley, William. 1797. The Oriental Collections: Consisting of Original Essays and Dissertations, Translations and Miscellaneous Papers, Illustrating the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literatures of Asia, vol. I. London. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. 1811. The Missionary: An Indian Tale, 3 vols. London: J. J. Stockdale. Paley, Morton D. 1999. Apocalypse and Millenium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Peacock, T. L. 1812. The Genius of Thames, Palmyra and Other Poems, 2nd edition. London. ———. 1927. The Works of Thomas Love Peacock: Poems, ed. H. F. B. BrettSmith and C. E. Jones (with introduction and notes). London: Constable. Pennant, Thomas. 1798. The View of Hindoostan, 2 vols. London: Henry Hughes. Reiman, David (ed.). 1986. Shelley and His Circle, vol. VII. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Reineggs, Jacob and Friedrich von Bieberstein. 1806. A General, Historical, and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus: With a Catalogue of Plants Indigenous to the Country, 2 vols., tr. Charles Wilkinson. London. Rennell, James. 1788. Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul Empire: With an Introduction, Illustrative of the Geography and Present Division of that Country: And a Map of the Countries Situated between the Head of the Indus, and the Caspian Sea. London: for C. Taylor; W. Miller; A. Collins and Darton and Harvey. Robertson, William. 1794. An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients Had of India, 2nd edition [1st edition 1791]. London and Edinburgh: Printed for A. Strahan and T. Cadell. Ross, D. J. A (ed.). 1956. The Medieval Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, Mary [JMS]. 1987. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shelley, P. B. [CWPBS]. 1926–30. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols, in Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (eds). London: Ernest Benn. ———. 1993. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. I. ed. E. B. Murray. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Southey, Robert. 1801. Thalaba the Destroyer. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees. ———. 1986. New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols., ed. Kenneth Curry. New York: Columbia University Press. St. Croix, Baron de. 1793[1772]. A Critical Inquiry into the Life of Alexander the Great, by the Ancient Historians: From the French of the Baron de St. Croix. tr. Sir Richard Clayton. Bath. [Paris] Stock, John Edmunds (M.D.). 1811. Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Beddoes M.D. with an Analytical Account of his Writings. London. Storey, Mark. 1997. Robert Southey: A Life. London: Oxford University Press. Volney, François de. 1807. The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empire, 5th edition, [1st edition 1795]. London. (Trans. from French edition: Paris, 1791).

Oriental Geography and Romantic Poetry 63 Weber, Henry (ed.). 1810. Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries Published from Ancient Manuscripts, 3 vols; Vol. I. Edinburgh: G. Ramsay. White, Newman Ivey. 1947. Shelley, 2 vols. London: Secker and Warburg.

Articles and Chapters Butler, Marilyn. 1990. ‘Plotting the Revolution’, in Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (eds), Romantic Revolutions. ———. 1996. ‘Shelley and the Empire of the East’, in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds), Shelley, Poet and Legislator of the World. Datta, Kitty Scoular. 2004. ‘Before the Deluge’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 August. Donovan, John. 1996. ‘“Lethean Joy”: Memory and Recognition in Laon and Cythna’, in Timothy Clark and Jerrold E. Hogle (eds), Evaluating Shelley. Ferber, Michael. 2002. ‘Shelley and “the Disastrous Fame of Conquerors”’, KeatsShelley Journal (KSJ) 51. Hillenbrand, Robert. 1996. ‘The Iskandar Cycle in the Great Mongol Sahnama’, in M. Bridges and J. C. Bürgel (eds), The Problematics of Power. Le Clerc, Jean. 1729. ‘Criticism upon Quintus Curtius’, in Arrian’s History of Alexander’s Expedition, tr. ‘Mr. Rooke’. Leask, Nigel. 1998. ‘Wandering through Eblis: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism’ in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830. O’Brien, Karen. 1997. ‘Robertson’s Place in the Development of EighteenthCentury Narrative History’, in Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire. Raben, Joseph. 1966. ‘Coleridge as the Prototype of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor’, Review of English Studies (RES), N. S. 17. Rajan, Tilottama. 1994[1991]. ‘The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor’, in David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (eds), New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice. [Previously published in G. Kim Blank (ed.), The New Shelley: Later Twentieth Century Views]. Sawyer, Caroline. 1996. ‘Sword of Conquest, Dove of Soul: Political and Spiritual Values in Ahmadi’s Iskandarnama’, in M. Bridges and J. C. Bürgel (eds), The Problematics of Power. Shelley, P. B. 1993. ‘On Christianity’, The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. I. E. B. Murray (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weber, Henry (ed.). 1810. ‘Kyng Alisaunder’ in Metrical Romances, Vol. I.

Manuscripts and Unpublished Documents Douce, Francis. 1797. Letters to Francis Douce and others. Bodleian Manuscripts Douce, document. 20. Oxford University: Bodleian Library, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts. Douce, Francis. 1757–1834. Douce Book and Print Collection. Oxford: Bodleian Library.

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Maps 1. Gillies, John. 1786. ‘Map Containing the Eastern Division of the Grecian Colonies and Conquests’ in The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies and Conquests. London. 2. Rufus, Quintus Curtius. 1724. ‘Alexandri Magni Macedonis Expeditio’, in Quinti Curtii Rufi, De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni Regis Macedonum Libri. Delft and Leiden. 3. Volney, François de. 1795[1791] ‘World Map’ in The Ruins, or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empire. London. [From Paris edition] 4. Robertson, James. 1794. ‘Map of the South-East part of Asia’, in An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India, 2nd edition. London.

Map 1.1

Map 1.2

Map 1.3

Map 1.4

Chapter Two

’Oriental Gothic’: The Medieval Past in the Colonial Encounter Ananya Jahanara Kabir This essay is part of a wider project on what I term ‘imperial medievalism’. I use ‘imperial medievalism’ as shorthand for the relationship between medievalism and British colonial and imperial interests, especially in India. ‘Medievalism’ signals the construction of the Middle Ages as a distinct period within European civilization and history, a period demarcated from classical antiquity on the one hand, and modernity on the other. Medievalism can serve a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ideological and affective purposes—take for instance the Harry Potter books and films. In the films, especially, a counter-Reformationist fascination with ‘medieval’ magic and witchery interact with resurrected memories of post-war children’s literature to evoke and evade the realities of contemporary Britain. The Harry Potter phenomenon usefully illustrates how medievalism continues to work today, in order to discursively reproduce the Middle Ages as ‘a historical entity capable of offering meaningful and even satisfying intellectual, aesthetic, political and religious images to subsequent societies’ (Chandler 1998: 173). Harry Potter notwithstanding, the heyday of medievalism was arguably the Victorian period, when academic, serious and popular discourse alike were criss-crossed by an intimate relationship with different aspects of the medieval period, and when King Alfred and King Arthur, Normans and Saxons, were frequently turned to as exempla for a historically conscious society. My basic starting point is that Victorian medievalism impacted colony as much as metropolis, in fact, worked to link colony and metropolis together. Victorian medievalism, thus redefined as a variety of imperial medievalism, is to be then traced to processes that were

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set in motion during the last half of the eighteenth century when, on the one hand, medieval studies moved into the public sphere, and on the other, the work of the Orientalists began in earnest. In fact, I see Orientalism and medieval studies as emerging from a similar eighteenth-century European milieu and mentalité; not only should we revisit both branches of scholarly endeavour as processual and evolving through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we should examine the ways in which they evolved in tandem and in dialogue with each other. Spanning the long eighteenth century, imperial medievalism signals those processes of European self-formation that constructed its ‘other’ along temporal and spatial axes of alterity. My research thus intervenes into, perhaps even interrupts, the Saidean and post-Saidean projects of excavating the construction of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment self through sustained ‘othering’ of the so-called Orient. To put it crudely, I am interested in reinserting the ‘spatial Other’ into the discussions surrounding the ‘temporal Other’ that were sparked off by Said’s Orientalism and continued within what then became known as Colonial Discourse Theory. In this essay I shall focus on Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han in order to demonstrate how the medieval past functioned within a relatively early phase of the colonial encounter between Britain and India. But before I do so, I’ll provide a brief overview of how the premises of Edward Said’s Orientalism has been used in Medieval Studies in the past decade or so. This exercise will hopefully tie in my effort with the workshop’s aim of re-reading Orientalism. The self of European Enlightenment located its pre-modern other in the Middle Ages—an other that was both foil to the Enlightened self and its own point of origin. My research locates the points at which that construction of a temporally distant other met the construction of spatially distant other. We can ourselves scarcely escape some touch of the amabilis insania, when we follow the course of his personal narrative into this region, not merely of a bold, adventurous and independent people, but of scenery, the grandeur of which seems scarcely to be encompassed in any part of the world; of beetling mountains crowned with the most noble and picturesque

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castles, several of which, in extent and magnificence, may be compared to Windsor, of sunny lakes, reflecting palaces and gardens, such as we read of in Ariosto, and of temples, particularly those of the Jains, in which the rock-hewn cavern faces, like those of Ellora and Ajanta have, as it were, left something of their massy and mysterious character, yet have given place to almost Grecian freedom and regularity of design, blending with a richness of detail, which may be said to form a kind of florid Oriental Gothic (Anonymous 1832: 6–7). Through this rapturous catalogue of charms, an anonymous reviewer attempts to convey the mood and scope of James Tod’s monumental Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han (Tod 1997 [1829–32]). James Tod (1782–1835) went to Bengal in the service of the East India Company in 1799 and was appointed Political Agent in the Western Rajput States in 1818. After retiring in 1822–23, he published his book on Rajasthan (1829–32). As its title clearly indicates, Tod’s book was very much part of the ‘Ossianic’ milieu. It was explicitly fashioned after the work of antiquarians such as Bishop Thomas Percy and Paul-Henri Mallet, who had begun codifying and collecting the antiquities of the ‘Old North’, as well that of those similarly interested in the annals and antiquities of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, often through the collection of oral forms such as ballads.1 These activities would appear as the most obvious influence on Tod’s ambitious task of rendering into English narrative the orally transmitted genealogies, historiographies and myths of the different ethno-linguistic subgroups that comprised, through their ‘feudal’ state-formations, the political and cultural units of Rajasthan. Yet Tod’s retelling of these oral materials, supplemented by an evocative personal narrative of his journeys through the region, is no mere ‘derivative discourse’2 that transplanted willy-nilly antiquarian scholarship of late eighteenth-century England to the colonial frontier in north-west India. As suggested by the response of the anonymous reviewer cited above, Annals and Antiquities belonged within an evolving matrix of affective and ideological discourses that, from the late eighteenth century onwards, enmeshed antiquarianism together with Orientalism, the register of the gothic, the descriptive technique of the picturesque, as well as the political theory of oriental despotism.3 Richly suggestive,

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in fact, of a particular imbrication of metropolitan and colonial interests at the end of the period, covered by the present colloquium, Annals and Antiquities exemplifies how identities were ‘exported’ from different moments in Europe’s past to delineate and describe India’s present, and to mitigate thereby the ontological shock and estrangement of colonial encounter. What resulted was an enormously popular portrait of Rajasthan and, by extension, of India, which was turned to repeatedly by colonial administrators seeking to buttress their views of ‘Rajput feudalism’, ‘Maratha banditry’ and ‘Mughal despotism’. This portrait also fed substantially into both anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial formation of identity. One of the most striking routes of its influence follows its impact, together with the writings of Walter Scott, on the Bengali nationalist litterateur Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (Rajtarangini), and its translation and abridgement into Bengali children’s stories by the modernist nationalist artist, Abanindranath Tagore (Rajkahini).4 Today, not only do these texts continue to be extremely widely read within Bengal; Tod’s Annals and Antiquities itself remains embedded within the selffashioning processes of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Consequently, this ‘antiquarianist’ text of the early nineteenth century must rank as the one document of that period whose handsome leatherbound editions are still stocked by boutique souvenir shops at some of the most luxurious hotels of India. It is beyond the scope of this essay, and also of this colloquium, to follow in detail such anti- and postcolonial nachleben of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities. These lines of transmission and reappropriation are simply mentioned here to draw attention to the lively participation of the recovery of Europe’s pre-modern past in its attempts to come to terms with Britain’s colonial and protoimperial present: a participation that can be obscured by, to borrow a word from Walter Scott’s preface to Ivanhoe, the ostensibly ‘dryasdust’ nature of antiquarian activity during Tod’s lifetime. The imaginative and intellectual genealogies of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities thus enable us to reassess both its author’s debt to antiquarian scholarship, as well as the extent to which that scholarship was implicated within colonialism. Unravelling these genealogies also enables sharper articulation of the colonial dimension of the relationship between the gothic and the picturesque.

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While the political charge of these aesthetic modes has been thoroughly documented, Annals and Antiquities sheds valuable light on the specific ways in which concepts such as ‘despotism’ and ‘feudalism’ could fruitfully be interwoven with what Nigel Leask has termed the ‘Indian picturesque’, and what Chris Bayly describes in Imperial Meridian as Tod’s ‘neo-Gothic romance’ (Leask 1992; Bayly 1989: 155).

The Discursive Context of Annals and Antiquities In his seminal book, Imagining India, Ronald Inden located Tod’s interest in political structures within Tod’s general contention that ‘the feudal polity of the Rajputs was the essence of the Hindu state in general and not simply the outcome of Hindu states which reproduced themselves, with great effort, on the periphery of more powerful Islamic states in northern India’—states which, to Tod, exemplified oriental despotism (Inden 1990: 174). In a lengthy refutation of Inden’s comments on Tod, Norbert Peabody has recently sought to problematize, through a re-reading of Annals and Antiquities, Inden’s accompanying characterization of Indological discourse as attributing ‘discrete, oppositional essences’ to East and West (Peabody 1986). In contrast, Peabody analyses Tod’s presentation of the Rajputs as marked by, first, shifting valences of ostensible oppositions, which ‘permit Self to construct a multiplicity of Others who are, importantly, divided among themselves’; second, ‘a segmented mode of social classification’ drawing on ‘Scottish ideas of historical progress’, and; third and most importantly, ‘the unifying idea’ of ‘Romantic Nationalism’ (Peabody 1986: 188, 190, 193). According to Peabody, therefore, the Rajputs of Annals and Antiquities are considerably closer to Europeans than they might otherwise appear when viewed through Inden’s postulated argument for ‘a strict dichotomising opposition of self and other’. While intuitively grasping Tod’s desire to place ‘at least some aspects of India and Europe within a unified analytical field rather than a dichotomous one’ (Peabody 1986: 197), Peabody nevertheless fails to identify fully the shaping forces undergirding this desire. For instance, turning to the same anonymous reviewer

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that I have referred to above (Anonymous 1832: 8–9), Peabody comments on Tod’s comparisons between Rajputs and Europeans based on his references to the ‘martial mythology and warlike poetry of the Scandinavians’; he further notes Tod’s heavy reliance on the arguments regarding European feudalism developed by his contemporary, the eighteenth-century medieval historian, Henry Hallam; he also footnotes both Bayly’s comment on Tod’s ‘neo-Gothic’ style and another anonymous reviewer’s observation of Tod’s recourse to ‘Ossianic rhythms’ (Peabody 1986: 197, n26). Yet these references are not integrated within a broader recognition of the importance of antiquarianism, and its discursive and aesthetic affiliations for Annals and Antiquities. In the process, Peabody even glosses over Inden’s partial acknowledgement of these influences, as evident in Inden’s statement that ‘Tod considered the Rajputs to be descendants of the Scyths, Dark Ages Aryans from Central Asia, and the same in origin as the tribes of early Europe’ (Inden 1990: 174). I invoke Peabody’s considerably nuanced but nevertheless incomplete reading of Annals and Antiquities to emphasize that a full understanding of this crucially influential and representative text must involve an awareness of its position as the interface between nascent forms of imperialism and medievalism, as articulated through the overlapping interface between Orientalism and antiquarianism. It is equally necessary to plot on this grid the points at which references to political and economic arrangements of non-European and pre-modern societies were invoked by authors, such as Tod, in order to flesh out a universal scheme of social progress. Within this scheme, references to feudalism and despotism must be placed against the role played by concepts such as ‘rudeness’ and ‘infancy’, which became commonplace terms for describing civilizations and times that lay outside the ambit of post-Enlightenment Europe. The spatial difference in the declared infancy of Indian civilization—the denial, in Jonathan Fabian’s terms, of coevalness—worked in tandem with the temporal difference between Enlightenment Europe and its own imagined infancy: the Middle Ages, or the period between the fall of Rome to the barbarian hordes (the end of Antiquity), and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks (the beginning of modernity).5

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Thus, if Hugh Blair could refer to the ‘infancy of societies’ during which ‘the passions and imagination reigned unchecked’, rendering ‘speech picturesque and imaginative’ (Blair 1763), and Bishop Percy, likewise, to ‘the rude ages prior to history before the Britons or Germans were invaded by other nations’ (Percy 1859: 18),6 so too could Thomas Maurice, author of the eightvolume Indian Antiquities, declare: ‘I seemed to be under the necessity of writing, not so much the history of Hindostan, as the history of Asia itself, and of the human race in their infant state’ (Maurice 1800: 30). The trope of the infancy of nations encouraged descriptive, and ultimately evaluative equivalences between the material remains of the European medieval past and the Indian present. For instance, Maurice’s references to ‘the hallow’d shrines’ of India’s deities in his ‘Elegaic Ode to Sir William Jones’ (1795) are paralleled by ‘the gorgeous shrines’ of pre-Reformation Westminster in his later ‘Ode to Westminster Abbey’ (1813), both structures equally resplendent with trappings such as altars, tapers, incense, that appear interchangeable between a Hindu and a Catholic place of worship. For Maurice and his contemporaries, a single word, ‘Gothic’, would provide sufficient justification for an equivalence that might strike us today as somewhat singular. In both popular and learned discourse during the eighteenth century, the adjective ‘gothic’, denoting the conglomeration of Germanic (and, prior to Percy’s insistent differentiation, Celtic) tribes, encompassed the chronological extent of post-classical and pre-modern Europe. Roughly equivalent to our sense of ‘medieval’, ‘gothic’ also connoted its political, cultural and ultimately aesthetic reflexes, but not always in a congruent or neatly aligned fashion. When used for the political institutions, such as the English Constitution, supposedly inherited from Germania, ‘gothic’ carried a positive charge of liberty, freedom and ancientness (Kliger 1972; Smith 1987). Around the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the antiquarian recovery of the Old North, as embodied in Scandinavian sagas and poetry, and the transformation of the study of Anglo-Saxon from a private enterprise into a university subject, further augmented the positive, ‘Germanic’ sense of the gothic. Simultaneously, however, the equation of ‘gothic’ and ‘medieval’ crystallized within ‘Gothic fiction’ of the late eighteenth century to accrue

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negative associations of Catholicism and ‘monkish superstition’, lechery and vanity (Watt 1999; Ellis 2000). By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, therefore, ‘the Gothic was constructed both as a distant, non-specific, period of ignorance and superstition from which an increasingly civilised nation had triumphantly emerged, and as a similarly distant fount of constitutional purity and political virtue from which the nation has become dangerously alienated’ (Watt 1999: 14). The Gothic, ‘an originally ethnic and historical delimiter’, thus became an ambivalent, ‘moveable’ site (Gamer 2000: 4), an imaginative realm of unbounded excess inviting a veritable gamut of affective responses evident in the following quotation from Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance: The abbey of St Augustin was a large, magnificent mass of Gothic architecture, whose gloomy battlements and majestic towers arose in proud sublimity from amid the darkness of the surrounding shades. It was founded in the 12th century, and stood a proud monument of monkish superstition and princely magnificence.… The view of the building revived in the mind of the beholder the memory of past ages … the rude manners, the boisterous passions, the daring ambition and the gross indulgences which formerly characterised the priest, the nobleman and the sovereign, had now begun to yield to learning …. Here prejudice, not reason, suspended the influence of the passions, and scholastic learning, mysterious philosophy and crafty sanctity supplied the place of wisdom, simplicity and pure devotion (Radcliffe 1791: 116–17). Fascination, revulsion, curiosity, awe, gloom and horror, nostalgia for the past and celebration of the present were evoked through certain descriptive modalities, well illustrated through Ann Laetitia Barbauld’s address to a ruined abbey within her discussion of monastic institutions: Dark and gloomy mansions of mistaken zeal, where the proud priest and lazy monks fattened upon the riches of the land, and crept like vermin from their cells to spread their poisonous darkness throughout the nation … the dim glass of the arched

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window, stained with the gaudy colours of monkish tales and legendary fiction; low cells, long and narrow aisles, gloomy arches, damp and secret caverns which wind below the hollow ground; farewell, ye once venerated seats! Enough of you remains, and may it always remain, to remind us from what we have escaped, and make posterity for ever thankful for this fairer age of liberty and light! (Barbauld 1825[1773], Vol. II: 195–96). As these two representative quotations suggest, complex emotional responses were evoked through certain descriptive modalities: the play of intense light and deep shadows; ruined buildings metonymic of England’s Catholic past, such as abbeys, chapels, cathedrals and monasteries; and the architectural ‘irregularities’ of these buildings, including both external ornamentation and the labyrinth-like unpredictability of corridors, chambers and staircases. Around the same time, moreover, the adjective ‘Gothic’ began to be commonly used to characterize Indian architecture, specifically its ‘anti-classical’ ornamentation and decoration. To mark this spatio-temporal translation, the qualifiers ‘oriental’ or ‘eastern’ were sometimes added—as evidenced by our anonymous reviewer of Annals and Antiquities. This ‘gothicisation’ of Indian architecture began with early comparisons made by French Orientalists studying Indian religions (Mitter 1977: 73–124). Thus, in the preface to his monumental translation of the Zend-Avesta (1771), Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron described a gallery of bas-reliefs at Ellora as being ‘almost in the style seen around the apex of the church of Notre Dame’ (Zend Avesta 1771, Tome 1: ccxxxiv, my translation); likewise, Le Gentil compared ‘the bas-reliefs on the gopuram of the Temple at Vilnour to those which are preserved in our Gothic churches’ (‘nos eglise gothiques’), and belonging to ‘the times which we call barbaric and Gothic (‘ces temps que nous nommons barbare et gothique’)’ (Le Gentil 1779: 576, my translation). This initially technical, if nonetheless evaluative, use of ‘Gothic’ for Indian architecture soon absorbed the descriptive and affective modalities that were accruing in England around the Gothic aesthetic. Elaborating on the idea that ‘Egyptian, Hindoo, Moorish and Gothic architecture’ were ‘essentially the

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same; the spontaneous produce of genius in different countries’, for instance, William Hodges, in his Travels in India (1793) states the Indian pagoda and choultry, are as evidence copies of the numerous caverns, cool grottos and excavations in the rocky banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt, and in the island of Elephanta and Salset near Bombay. Gloom and darkness are common and desirable to both; for Fancy works best when involved in a veil of obscurity (Hodges 1793: 75–76). As Hodges’ comment further suggests, ‘the Oriental Gothic’ merged with the viewing and descriptive stratagems of the ‘picturesque’ with which the gothic was also being aligned in the metropolitan context. As fuzzily multivalent an eighteenth century term as the ‘Gothic’, the ‘picturesque’ is likewise ‘an aesthetic as well as ideological commitment’ (Bermingham 1986: 66). There were other overlaps as well. Whether invoked in gardening or landscape appreciation, the picturesque appealed to irregularity, dramatic contrasts of light and shade, and ‘georgic’ subject matter7 —contrasts that were equally salient within the gothic mode. The strategic placement of the ‘dim ruin’ within the landscape, in order to solicit emotional responses of elegy and nostalgia, was where the gothic and the picturesque most obviously dovetailed (Gamer 2000: 18–23). The ruins of medieval structures that inhabited open spaces evoked nostalgia for a pre-enclosure, feudal, paternalistic past (Bermingham 1986: 70–74). The picturesque mode of representation thus worked to (re)create seemingly wild and irregular landscapes for consumption and disciplining. This ideological potency of the picturesque landscape further suggests that it be seen as ‘the dreamwork of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin, and folding back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance’ (Mitchell 2002: 10). Certainly, in conjunction with the ‘Oriental Gothic’, the ‘picturesque’ became a highly suitable intellectual tool for imaging the landscape of colonial India. The peripatetic duties of many company officials, including Tod, recapitulated the wanderings

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of the picturesque traveller in search of that perfect view (Edney 1997: 53). In the colonies, furthermore, the realist and picturesque views seemed to merge: India, in particular, seemed naturally picturesque and, not coincidentally, intrinsically medieval. The relationship between landscape and vision that the picturesque aesthetic depends on was further complicated on the colonial frontier by ‘the association between landscape and surveillance’ (Bunn 2002: 128). Thus focusing on the imperial, and specifically Indian, the picturesque illuminates not only how colonial landscapes responded to local contests over symbolic power, but furthermore, how these struggles were influenced by metropolitan changes in the relations of production and self-fashioning. This perspective further suggests that, to Matthew Edney’s catalogue of interrelated ‘gazes’ employed by the British in looking at Indian terrain—the ‘picturesque’, the ‘scientific’, and the ‘geographic’, we now add ‘the antiquarian gaze’, modulated by the register of the Oriental Gothic (Edney 1997: 53). The institutionalization and secularization of antiquarian activity in England from the second-half of the eighteenth century onwards shared from the outset certain features with the Indian picturesque: curiosity,8 and an ideological grounding in the trope of the infancy of nations. As Sharon Turner declared in the ‘preface’ to the first edition of his enormously influential History of Anglo-Saxon England: ‘because to contemplate the infancy of celebrated nations is among the most pleasing occupations of human curiosity, it is peculiarly important to us, the posterity of the AngloSaxons, to know as much as possible of our continental ancestors’ (Turner 1805, Vol. I: iv). Curiosity about the past and curiosity about the strange and exotic came together in the Society of Antiquaries; the early volumes of its journal Archaeologia devoted equal space to Oriental and British antiquities. Its first director, Richard Gough, published A Comparative View of the Ancient Monuments of India in 1785 and British Topography in 1780; his motivation for both was a sense of intellectual and moral duty befitting a progressive nation ‘not only to penetrate the wilds of Europe and the deserts of Asia and Africa’ but also to instigate ‘curiosity for the works and memorials of our own priests and heroes’ (Gough 1780, Vol. I: xxiii).

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This balancing act of curiosity and duty impelled imaginative and scholarly forays into both the medieval past of Europe and the Indian present, blurring the distinctions between these ventures. As the Daniells memorably claimed in their celebrated ‘introduction’ to A Picturesque Voyage to India: The contemplation of oriental scenery is interesting to the philosophic eye, from the number of monuments, and other venerable objects, which still exist in those celebrated countries, and which cast a gleam of traditionary light on the obscurity of departed ages. Happily for curiosity, these vestiges are often elucidated by the manners of the present inhabitants, who with unexampled fidelity have preserved their primitive customs unimpaired by time or conquest; and in their domestic institutions still present the image of a remote and almost obsolete antiquity (Daniell and Daniell 1810: ii–iii). The recourse to the temporalizing trope reveals exactly how artistic endeavour, ‘the deceptively guiltless spoliations’ involved in the ‘transport[ation] to Europe [of] the picturesque beauties’ of India could augment the work of supposedly disinterested ‘students with no rapacity but for lettered relics, … naturalists, whose cruelty extends not to one human inhabitant, [and] philosophers, ambitious only for the extirpation of error, and the diffusion of truth’ (Daniell and Daniell 1810: ii–iii). The picturesque fetishizing of India, delineating the inhabitants and architecture amidst seemingly unchanging vistas, vivified ‘the obscurity of departed ages’ as well as the ongoing scholarly quest for their recovery. Likewise, scholarly reconstructions of heroic societies, usually presented through their literary ‘antiquities’, provided traveller-artists in India with a range of imaginative vocabulary whereby their first impressions could be articulated. The eclectic James Forbes, author of the Oriental Memoirs, is a case in point: on the one hand, he compares Akbar to Alfred— favourably, it might be added—(‘his name, like Alfred’s fills the mind with delight’), while on the other, he finds the Hindus of Gujarat living somewhere between Mesopotamia and the Palestine, a state he often calls a ‘patriarchal age’ (Forbes 1813: 79, 82, 147–48, 309). This particular descriptive and evaluative tag recurs in contemporary descriptions of medieval Europe, such as that by Sharon

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Turner, and its imprecise denotations made it vaguely suggestive of, to return to the words of the Daniells, a ‘remote and obsolete antiquity’ that was nevertheless observable still in parts of the world.

Annals and Antiquities as a Constitutive Moment It is against this discursive background that I wish to place Tod’s Annals and Antiquities. As I have sought to suggest above, the categories of the ‘medieval’ and the ‘Oriental’ occupied a contiguous space in the collective imagination of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. This imaginative grid generated images of the ‘Gothic’, which could be applied with equal ease to the Indian present and the medieval past. By meshing sedimented layers of English cultural memory and nostalgia with the wonder occasioned by the relatively recent experiencing of India, the Gothic mode offered rich, sensuous and emotional satisfaction that simultaneously rendered concrete the abstract trope of ‘the infancy of nations’. It is my contention that Annals and Antiquities embodies a constitutive moment in this developing interface between orientalism and antiquarianism that Tod’s readers recognized, moreover, in categorizing it as ‘a kind of florid Oriental Gothic’. I shall now substantiate these points by turning to some relevant passages in the first volume of the Annals and Antiquities. Tod’s introduction, ‘Geography of Rajasthan or Rajpootana’ appears to exemplify what Edney identifies as the ‘geographic gaze’ employed by the colonial British in India. Certainly a cartographic, even trigonometric impulse manifests itself early on: ‘This space comprehends nearly 8 degrees of latitude and 9 degrees of longitude, being from 22 degrees to 30 degrees north latitude, and 69 degrees to 78 degrees east longitude, embracing a superficial area of 350,000 square miles’ (1).9 After supplying a list of the actual states surveyed, Tod remarks on the fact that the important state of Mewar was ‘almost a terra incognita’ (2) prior to his research, as evidence for the ‘scanty knowledge’ of Rajasthan hitherto possessed by the British. ‘This blank the author filled up’, he adds with obvious pride; ‘It is a duty owing

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to himself to state that every map, without exception, printed since this period, has, as its foundation, as regards Central and Western India … the labours of the author’ (2). In a few years, he had in fact ‘filled several volumes with lines of route throughout this space; and having many frontier and intermediate points, the positions of which were fixed, a general outline of the result was constructed, wherein all this information was laid down’ (5). In keeping with Edney’s contention that the picturesque formed an essential dimension of the geographic gaze, Tod’s cartographic impulse time and again appears in combination with a picturesque vantage point, which he invites the reader to share. The introduction itself is replete with statements such as ‘let me place the reader on the highest peak of the insulated Aboo, the saint’s pinnacle, as it is termed, and guide his eye in a survey over this wide expanse, from the blue waters of the Indus west to the withycovered Betwa on the east’ (7). Elsewhere too, Tod refers to the picturesque doctrine of irregularity: the reader can easily conceive the scene of the encampment, it was at the North-East angle of the lake, having in front that little fairy islet with its Saracenic summer abode. Gardens fringe the base of the embankment, which was bordered with trees; over the parapets … peeped the spires and domes of temples and mosques, breaking the uniformity, and occasionally even showing the distant and elevated land beyond the Chumbul (533). Indeed, Tod seems to have read several manuals on the ideal picturesque vista. Many of the landscape descriptions within his personal narrative invokes the typical threefold division of the picturesque painting into foreground, middle and background: I was quite satisfied with this view of the castle of Dulleel, and enjoyed from the point of descent a noble prospect. In the foreground is the cenotaph of Rana Ursi, in the centre of the valley, which extended and gradually opened towards Mandelgurh, whose blue ridge was distinctly visible in the distance. The hills to the right were broken abruptly into masses, and as far as the eye could stretch on either side, were disordered heaps of gigantic rocks (542).

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Castles often stud the picturesque landscape, introducing an explicitly Oriental Gothic architectural element: The coup d’oeil of the castellated palace of Boondi, from whatever side you approach it, is perhaps the most striking in India; but it would require a drawing of an extremely large scale to comprehend either its picturesque beauties or its grandeur (537). Furthermore, in his account of the grand temple of Barolli, Tod uses varying indices of comparison similar to those used by traveller–writers such as Hodges and Forbes. In one breath, Tod invokes ‘an ease not unworthy the art in Europe’ (565), declares that ‘parts [of the figures], especially the heads would not disgrace Canova’ (566), comments on ‘the form of arch well known in Gothic and Saracenic architecture, but which is an essential characteristic of the ancient Hindu temple’ (567), and evaluates the portico as possessing ‘perfect’ proportions, though ‘less than that Grecian standard’ (567). When describing ‘a procession of fair Charunis who, as they approached, gracefully waved their scarves over me, until I was fairly made captive by the muses of Murlah’, Tod even directly acknowledges the painterly vision of the picturesque. After contrasting ‘the manly persons of the Charuns, clad in the flowing white robe with the high, loose, folded turban inclined on one side, from which the mala, or chaplet, was gracefully suspended’, with ‘the females, … uniformly attired in a skirt of dark brown camlet, having a bodice of light-coloured stuff, with gold ornaments worked into their fine black hair’, he refers to one of the picturesque mode’s founding Italian fathers: ‘never was there a nobler subject for the painter in any age or country; it was one which Salvator Rosa would have seized, full of picturesque contrasts: the rich, dark tints of the female attire harmonising with the white garments of their husbands’ (499). Another feature of the picturesque mode, a penchant for seizing on what we may term irregularities of flowing water, also makes a frequent appearance, as in his account of the waterfall at Cheermuth. Here, ‘a little camp pitched on an elevated spot, command[ed] a view over one of the most striking objects of nature— a scene bold beyond the powers of description.’ The abrupt precipice, river that here ‘expanded into a lake of ample dimension’,

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there ‘shrunk into such a narrow compass that even man might bestride it’, rapids created as ‘the stream split into four distinct channels’, ‘whitened spray’ and ‘masses of black rock’ all enable the eye to ‘dwell on a variety of picturesque objects, seen through the prismatic lens of the spray clouds’ (572–73). Similar features, including rapids, rills, spray and rock outcrops abound in picturesque descriptions both fictional and eye-witness. A specially interesting example for our present purposes is the comparison of the history of English to a ‘picturesque river’ made by the first professor of English at London, Thomas Dale, in his inaugural lecture in 1828: An inquiry into the origin, formation and progress of the English language may be compared to a voyage up the channel of a magnificent and hitherto unexplored river. In ascending the stream, as you pass the confluence of one tributary after another with the parent flood, the width may be observed continually to diminish, and the depth gradually to decrease; at length, all further progress is impeded by some natural barrier; and though the river has now dwindled to a rill, the fountain whence it issues cannot precisely be ascertained; for it divides itself into innumerable branches, or escapes among impassable rocks. Thus in tracing the stream of our language backward to its remoter sources, when we have ascended beyond the derivatives which successively flowed into it from the Latin, Greek and the French, and arrived at the scanty dialect of our Saxon forefathers—henceforth all is obscurity and conjecture (Dale 1828: 17). Writing almost contemporaneously, Tod and Dale together attest to the circulation of certain images within discursive modes, that were knitted together anyway by a conceptual debt to antiquarian scholarship. Certainly, Tod, the connoisseur of the picturesque, was also the antiquarian, and his antiquarian interest in landscape was interchangeable with an interest in its geological dimensions. Speaking of the Central Indian plateau, he declares, ‘here the geologist may read the book of nature in distinct character: few tracts will be found more interesting to him, to the antiquarian,

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or to the lover of nature in her most rugged attire’ (11). This comment well illustrates Edney’s observation that ‘in India, the British assembled vast collections of mineralogical, botanical and zoological specimens, in the human arena, the study of dress, society, tools, architecture’, making the specimen ‘the fetish of the traveller’ and creating ‘new taxonomies of knowledge by linking each sample to the other’ so that ‘observation and the archive functioned analogously to collection and the museum’ (Edney 1997: 40–41). I would add, however, that it is the antiquarian as picturesque observer who, at this particular colonial moment, offers a key paradigm for the task of ‘commodifying the knowledge and aesthetic aspects of landscape … transforming India from a land of spectacle into a comprehensible empire’ in the process (Edney 1997: 42). The antiquarian dimension of Tod’s work frequently manifests itself as a philological one. Footnotes to place names, for instance, frequently contain philological information, which equally often migrates from the margins into his personal narrative proper. His comment, ‘in the sanscrit puttur, stone, rock, we have nearly the petros of Greeks’ illuminates interestingly the following statement that ‘here at every step are relics of past ages’ (495). Another, perhaps less self-conscious and more indirect aspect of Tod’s antiquarianism is the constant transference of terminology evocative of the Scottish Highlands—feuds, castles, stewards, cairns, bards and ballads—to descriptions of Rajputs and their mores. Simultaneously, the Rajputs are incessantly compared to what we may term ‘assorted proto-Indo-European tribes’, including the Scandinavians, the Scyths and the Goths. Drawing on Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Pinkerton’s On the Goths, and although he does not explicitly state it, the rather ‘wild’ theories of Charles Vallancey, Tod proffers frequent analogies between the Goths, Rajputs and the Scyths. Comparative mythology functions as the most congenial axis of comparison. He thus quotes Pinkerton’s assertions on the equivalence between the Goths and the Scythians, inserting within parentheses his own additions drawn from his Indian experience: ‘the Scythians worshipped Mercury (Budha), Woden or Odin, and believed themselves his progeny. The Gothic mythology, by parallel, might be shown to be Grecian, whose gods were the progeny of Coelus and Terra (Budha and Ella)’ (51). Adducing further evidence of

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‘a common origin for the tribes of early Europe and the Scythic Rajpoot’, Tod draws up a staggering list of equivalences between Scandinavian and Hindu myths and customs, moving fluently between the latter, the Old Norse Edda and Tacitus’s Germania. A further strategy of equivalence is to establish phonetic resemblances between terminologies from these different catchment areas, as it were, often through unexplicated parentheses or insertions: ‘in the Edda we are informed that the Getes, or Jits, who entered Scandinavia, were termed Asi, and their first settlement Asgard’; to this is added the footnote, ‘Asi-gurh: fortress of the Asi’ (54). While offering many an analogy that seems a trifle ludicrous in hindsight—such as that between ‘bards’ and ‘bardai’ (57), Tod does often hit on a ‘real’ cognate, such as ‘madhava’ (honey) and ‘mead’ (67), anticipating, on such occasions, both the methods and conclusions of comparative Indo-European philologists. Like them, he is enraptured by the wonder of establishing equivalence between otherwise distant and evidently unrelated civilizations and cultures. His discussion of consecrated groves, which moves from Tacitus to Northern India, is a case in point (56, 67). At these moments, the ‘Oriental Gothic’ reflexes of such descriptions of sacrally invested areas additionally emerge: in the indented recesses of this elevated land, which covers an immense portion of central India, there are numerous spots of romantic beauty, which enthusiasm has not failed to identify with religious associations. Wherever there is a deep glen, a natural fountain, or a cascade, the traveller will infallibly discover some traces of the ‘Great God’ (Mahadeva) of the Hindus, the creator and destroyer of life (505). Yet, it is not merely the Rajputs who are compared to Goths via the Scythians. In a useful illustration of both the shifting of categories noted by Peabody, and the ambivalence embedded within the term ‘Goth’ itself, Tod frequently reverts to ideas of the Goths as barbarians at the gates of Rome, to describe the depredations of the Pathans, Turks and other groups of ‘savage Muslim invaders’ whom the Rajputs pitted themselves against in their own self-fashioning. Thus, within his account of Murlah, he comments that ‘the intervening valleys, as usual, fertile, with

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numerous villages, but alienated to the Southern Goths or the partisan Pathan’, adding ‘the brief but expressive words of a Roman Author [Tacitus], solitudinem facet, pacem appellat’ (494). Tod’s portrayal of the Rajput’s Muslim opponents ranges from references to their destructive nature, again recalling the image of the barbarian Goths—comments such as ‘the Tartar iconoclast who destroys Ganesha idols’ (569) and ‘Nature has cooperated with the ruthless Toork in destroying the oldest specimen of the art’ (574) abound in the text—to the attribution of Oriental despotism to the Mughals, who, for all their civilizational splendour, are seen as latter-day Turks and Tartars: ‘We are proud to pay our tribute of applause to the illustrious house of Timoor, whose princes, though despots by birth and education, and albeit the bane of Rajpootana, we must allow, present a more remarkable succession of great characters, historians and warriors than any contemporary dynasty in any part of the world’ (506–7). Tod’s emphasis on the despotism of the Mughals and the depredations of their predecessors gains resonance when we note the embeddedness of this emphasis within his picturesque vision: Although its elevation is not above 400 feet from its western base, the transition is remarkable, and it presents from the summit one of the most diversified scenes, in a moral, political, or picturesque point of view, that I ever beheld. From this spot the mind’s eye embraces at once all the grand theatres of history of Mewar. Upon our right lies Cheetore, the new capital, and the shelter of her heroes, here, at our feet, or within view, all the alienated lands now under the ‘barbarian Toork’ or Mahratta … what associations, what aspirations, does this scene conjure up to one who feels as a Rajpoot for this fair land! (504). Here, the moral, political and the picturesque inhabit a single continuum. The long view of history as itself a picturesque vista also transmits a didactic and moral message: that it behoves the British to rescue the Rajputs enfeebled by the burdens of despotic rule. Thus, speaking of the need to rejuvenate agriculture in Rajasthan, Tod observes, (W)e have saved Rajpootana from political ruin; but the boon of mere existence will be valueless if we fail to restore the moral

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energies of the population; for of this fine region and noble race one might say, as Byron does of Greece: ‘Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!’ (510). In the above comment, as throughout Tod’s writing, a tissue of references to the different pre-modern pasts of Europe does far more than merely establishing an imaginative contiguity between that past and Rajasthan. Tod’s reconstruction of the history of the Rajputs from the oral narratives of different tribes is meant to serve several purposes, of which making good the absence of the ‘historical muse’ in India is a pre-eminent one. This absence he attributes to ‘eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus’, since after such depredation by ‘barbarous, bigoted and exasperated foes’ the literature of the country must have sustained ‘irretrievable losses’ (xiv). These oppressions of the ‘Oriental despot’ are furthermore, conflated rhetorically with the Norman Yoke as overt comparisons of the Saxon heptarchy to the Rajput seven states, and as Anglo-Saxon monks to Brahmins reiterate.10 Such conflations are evident in his dedication to George IV itself, where Tod requests ‘his most gracious majesty’ to rescue the Rajput princes from the ‘yoke of lawless oppression’ (frontispiece). Tod’s advocacy on behalf of the Rajputs is enabled by his perception of the equivalence between his past and them, as well as the distance between them and his present. That distance is ultimately measured by literary output: It must be recollected … that until a more correct taste was imparted to the literature of England and of France, by the study of classical models, the chronicles of both the countries and indeed all the polished nations of Europe were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild and as barren as those of the early Rajpoots (xv). This envisaged deliverance of the Rajputs from the ‘despotic Muslim yoke’, political in intent, but literary in embodiment, was no isolated flight of fancy. It is echoed in Thomas Macaulay’s infamous and highly influential Minute on Indian Education, dated 1835, where he equated through literary production, different

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stages of medieval England (Saxon and Norman) to contemporary Indian society (Macaulay 1972: 243). On that foundation, Macaulay and his fellow Anglicists erected an ideologically more potent analogy: that between the role of the classics during the Renaissance and the projected role of English in India. The importance of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities lies in offering a glimpse into the process whereby the colonial encounter moved from a relatively benign establishment of equivalences, in order to overcome the ontological shock of difference, towards the active implementation of colonial administrative policies that used those very equivalences for practices, perhaps less than benign in outcome.

Notes 1. For some of these issues, see Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian, Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain 1750-1820, and Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain. 2. A phrase I borrow from Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? He, of course, uses it in what could be seen as a context fairly different from that of Tod. 3. The relationship between antiquarianism and Orientalism, along with its development into Indo-European theory and its imperial ramifications has been discussed from different angles; see, for instance, Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire and Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India. The Gothic, the Picturesque, and Oriental Despotism are all topics with extensive secondary literature; useful in the present context are James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832, Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rural Tradition, 1740–1860, Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (ed.), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, and Franco Venturi, ‘Oriental Despotism’, Journal of the History of Ideas. 4. Some of these issues are explored by Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. 5. Recent work by medievalists has begun to deconstruct this periodisation and othering of the Middle Ages both during the Enlightenment and beyond; see, the essays in Michelle Warren and Patricia Clare Ingham (ed.), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern and Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (ed.), Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. 6. The preface, from which this remark is taken, was first published in 1770.

86 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 7. For a useful recapitulation of these aesthetic features of the picturesque, especially as an Italianate legacy, see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (pp. 57–63). 8. For the relationship between curiosity, the picturesque, and travel-writing, see Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’. 9. This and the subsequent page references are from Tod 1997[1829–32]. 10. For the Norman Yoke, see Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 50–122. I discuss this issue at greater length in my essay, ‘Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India’ in Kabir and Williams (ed.), Postcolonial Approaches.

References Books Anquetil-Duperron. 1771. Zend-Avesta, Tome 1. Paris: N. M. Tillard. Ballantyne, Tony. 2001. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Barbauld, Ann Laetitia. 1825. The Works of Ann Laetitia Barbauld, 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green. Bayly, Chris. 1989. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman. Bermingham, Ann. 1986. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rural Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Blair, Hugh. 1763. Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, Son of Fingal. London: T. Beckett and P. A. De Hondt. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed, for the United Nations University. ———. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1998. The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820. Trieste: Parnasso. Copley, Stephen and Peter Garside (eds). 1994. The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dale, Reverend Thomas. 1828. An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on October 24th, 1828. London: John Taylor. Daniell, William and Thomas Daniell. 1810. A Picturesque Voyage to India. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme. Edney, Matthew. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Ellis, Markman. 2000. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

’Oriental Gothic’ 87 Forbes, James. 1813. Oriental Memoirs. London: Printed for White and Cochrane, by Richard Taylor and Co. Gamer, Michael. 2000. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gough, Richard. 1780. British Topography, 2 vols. London: T. Payne and Son, and J. Nichols. Hill, Christopher. 1958. Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London: Secker and Hudson. Hodges, William. 1793. Travels in India: During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783. London: Printed for the author, and sold by J. Edwards. Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Deanne Williams (eds). 2005. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kliger, Samuel. 1972. The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought. New York: Octagon Books. Le Gentil, Guillaume. 1779. Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde. Paris. Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and The East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1972. Selected Writings. Ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney. Chicago, London: Chicago University Press. Maurice, Thomas. 1800. Indian Antiquities or Dissertations on Hindostan [1st published in 1793]. London. Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.). 2002. Landscape and Power, 2nd edition. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Mitter, Partha. 1977. Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Percy, Thomas (tr.). 1859. Mallet’s Northern Antiquities. London: H. G. Bohn. Radcliffe, Ann. 1791. A Sicilian Romance. London: T. Hookham. Smith, R. J. 1987. The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stafford, Fiona. 1988. The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tod, James. 1997[1829–32]. Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, 2 vols., reprint. Delhi: Rupa Paperback [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul]. All citations are from this reprint. Trautmann, Thomas. 1997. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Sharon. 1805. The History of the Anglo-Saxons—From the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest, Vol. I. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, et al. Utz, Richard and Tom Shippey (eds). 1998. Medievalism and the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman. Turnhout: Brepols. Warren, Michelle and Patricia Clare Ingham (eds). 2003. Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern. New York: Macmillan.

88 Ananya Jahanara Kabir Watt, James. 1999. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wawn, Andrew. 2000. The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth Century Britain. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Articles and Chapters Anonymous. 1832. Review of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, Quarterly Review. Barbauld, Ann Laetitia. 1825[1773]. ‘On Monastic Institutions’, The Works of Ann Laetitia Barbauld, Vol. II. Bunn, David. 2002. ‘Our Wattled Cot: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes’, in W. T. J. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, pp. 127–73. Chandler, Alice. 1998. ‘Carlyle and the Medievalism of the North’ in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (eds), Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman, pp. 173–92. Hill, Christopher. 1958. ‘The Norman Yoke’ in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. London: Secker and Hudson, pp. 50–122. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2005. ‘Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India’, in Kabir and Williams (eds), Postcolonial Approaches, pp. 183–204. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002a. ‘Introduction’, Landscape and Power, pp. 5–34. Peabody, Norbert. 1986. ‘Tod’s Rajast’han and Boundaries of Imperial Rule in 18th Century India’, Modern Asian Studies 30, pp. 185–220. Venturi, Franco. 1963. ‘Oriental Despotism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 24, pp. 133–42.

Chapter Three

The Limits of Orientalism: Classical Indian Dance and the Discourse of Heritage Pallabi Chakravorty The Natya Academy in Philadelphia recently organized Rukmini Devi Arundale’s birth centenary celebration. This day-long event was packed with workshops, exhibits, a symposium, and an eveninglength dance performance by the students of Natya. Through this event the director of Natya, Shobha Sharma, wanted to instil a sense of cultural heritage in her south Asian-American students. Rukmini Devi, an Indian classical dance revivalist and the modern architect of Bharatnatyam, was the ideal cultural icon to establish this connection to a homeland and a glorious past. Cultural heritage refers to how the past is interpreted and lived in the present. Its epistemological grounding is in mental constructs through which the past comes to us as a representation of memories, thoughts and images (Ram 2000a). Cultural heritage engages in constructing narratives of tradition, which are then selectively assembled as official texts for the creation of a national history. National heritage is defined by the ideology of the nationstate. Hence, it is a political category implicated in the discourses of power. Classical Indian dance, since its inception during anti-colonial nationalism, has been integral to the heritage discourse. I shall explore this idea in three parts. First, I will look at how the postcolonial discourse surrounding Indian classical dance established our relationship to the past, following an orientalist vision resulting in what recent scholarship has shown to be an ‘invented tradition’. Second, I will argue that this relationship was concerned with re-presentation of the past through a discursive analysis that privileged the textual or ‘objective’ basis of knowledge production.

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In the process, it ignored the experiential embodied forms of knowledge that are critical in forging cultural identities through bodily practices, such as dance. I argue that through such practices, which involve repetitive movements or habituation, cultural memory is sedimented in the body. In the book How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton shows how through ritual inhabituation of performance ‘a community is reminded of its identity as represented and told by a master narrative’ (Connerton 1989: 70). This embodied history is experienced through kinetic and tactile sensory modes that are outside of representational narratives. I introduce the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa for such a bodycentred approach to cultural analysis and identity formation. In the third part, I will return to the notion of cultural heritage and the discourse of Orientalism once again within the diasporic context, to look at its rearticulation in the context of globalization and multiculturalism.

Classical Indian Dance and the Invention of Tradition Postcolonial theory made its mark by challenging the hegemonic narrative of nationalist discourse. It showed how nationalist discourse followed the grand teleological structure of enlightenment historicism. Edward Said’s book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978) illustrated how representations of the orient in European writings such as literary texts, travelogues, etc., produced a particular discourse about the orient. Through this discourse the colonial authorities forwarded a specific political vision by promoting a set of binary oppositions between Europe and the Orient. The study of the Orient was a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the orient, the East, ‘them’) … when one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and end points of analysis, research, public policy … the result is usually to polarize distinction … (Said 1979[1978]: 45–46, cited in Loomba 1998: 45).

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Partha Chatterjee (1986) argues that nationalist discourse inverted the problematic of colonialism from subjugation to independence, but relied upon the same thematic, that of a binary opposition between ‘east’ and ‘west’. Chatterjee contends that the binary was constructed through the opposition of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, or the essential and the inessential during anticolonial nationalism in India. The material domain symbolized the outside—the domain of science, technology, economy and the state where the east had been subjugated by the west. The inner domain symbolized the spiritual identity of the east, which retained its essential cultural roots. The nationalists looked to orientalist scholarship that had imbued India with a classical golden Hindu civilization for reclaiming a national past with uninterrupted history. Dance revivalists such as Rukmini Devi, Krishna Iyer, Madame Menaka, etc., went in search of cultural authenticity and cultural roots, which, like the search for origin, is implicitly teleological and suggests the idea of evolutionary progress to an ultimate destiny. Inspired by the enlightenment project of modernism, the revivalists looking for cultural roots or heritage were involved in the fundamental project of modern nation building. The pre-colonial performance practices of India, such as dance and music represented the inner spiritual domain—the authentic Indian identity. The Bengali Renaissance or nabajagoran spearheaded the arts revival movement in India in the nineteenth century. However, regional dance practices, for instance the sadir and kathak had, by the turn of the twentieth century, become associated with amoral practices and the devadasi and tawaif were stigmatized as prostitutes. This was due to the systematic launching of the anti-nautch movement in the 1890s that made dancing an illicit and licentious activity. The ideas of purification, reform and national regeneration became the focus of the arts revival movement. It prompted the educated elite to purge such amoral associations from regional dance practices and claim an ancient Indian golden age of arts, aesthetics and culture. The rediscovery and publication in 1926 of the Natyashastra, the ancient dramatic treatise on dance and theatre, helped to establish an immutable origin or cultural root for performative practices in India and a historical continuity from the Vedic classical age to the present. A. K. Coomaraswamy, the renowned art historian,

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was instrumental in making dance a central element of the arts revival movement. His book Dance of Shiva was crucial in establishing the spiritual roots and antiquity of dance in India. In postindependence India, scholars such as Kapila Vatsayan codified and textualized the regional dance practices under the classical label and helped to institutionalize them in national centres. Thus, the creation of dance history followed the same objectifying linear trajectory of nationalist history that shaped the nationalist discourse. The nationalist discourse invented tradition to represent a past and create a national heritage. The postcolonial critique of classical Indian dance has produced a significant body of scholarship, mainly on Bharatanatyam and its reconstruction. Avanthi Meduri has written about the discourses of orientalism, colonialism and nationalism as they shaped modern Bharatanatyam and its practitioners (Meduri 1996). Her research drew on earlier works by Amrit Srinivasan (1985) and Saskia Kersenboom-Story (1987). Scholars such as F.A. Marglin (1995) and Ratna Roy (2004) have looked at Odissi in the context of its pre-colonial and postcolonial history. In my own work on Kathak I have studied cultural and gender politics. I have looked at dance patronage as it had moved from royal courts to the central government, and now to the corporate sector (Chakravorty 2000). However, what has remained marginal in much of this postcolonial critique is the role of embodied memory and cultural constructs that shape perception in producing identity and agency.

Embodiment and Cultural Memory Now I will focus on how a body-centred approach to dance can shift the analysis of heritage discourse from the binary of orientalist discourse to an embodied experiential one. According to Paul Stoller, it shifts the focus from how historical texts constitute a discourse to the concrete analysis of how embodied practices mold historical contexts to constitute power-in-the-world (Stoller 1995: 13). The dominance of the visual associated with objectifying modes of knowledge production is integral to the conceptual structures of Indo-European languages, where there is a correlation between the visual and the verbal. Here, seeing is equivalent to knowing/

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thinking/the mind (Tyler 1984). Not surprisingly, the visual epistemology of seeing dominates most Euro-American art and theatre practice, where cognition and perception are entirely based on observational empiricism. Thus seeing or sight is considered to be the primary axis of perception, and is relevant to linguistic analysis. Paul Stoller observes: Vision has been king of perception in the Western Academy. Accordingly the guiding metaphors of the humanities and social sciences have been visual ones: infrastructures and superstructures, systems and configurations, texts and metatexts. Throughout the history of anthropology, ethnographers have been participant ‘observers’ who ‘reflect’ on their ‘visual’ experience and write ‘texts’ that ‘represent’ the other’s ‘pattern’ of kinship, exchange, religion (Stoller 1995: 13). The anthropological groundwork for the study of dance in society was laid in the 1960s and 1970s, when the dancing body was analysed as a medium of communication. Linguistic models were the main tools for analysing the dancing body. This approach emphasized the form and function of dance, the deep structures of dance, and dance as movement systems. The experience of dance was contained within a system of signs and meanings, such as hermeneutics concerned with exegesis of cultural texts. More recently, with the emergence of dance studies, scholars have tended to analyse dance as choreographic text using representational narratives of power and discourse. Michael Jackson argues that body praxis cannot be reduced to cognitive and semantic operations as body movements often make sense outside of linguistic concepts, such as communicating, codifying, symbolizing and signifying thoughts as things. He further argues that it is simply reductive to treat body praxis as necessarily being an effect of semiotic causes (Jackson 1981). The knowledge of embodiment arises from the depth of habit where conscious strata of culture are sedimented as social routines of bodily dispositions (Taussig 1993). The process of habit formation thus makes knowledge sink to an unconscious level where we do not have to be conscious of it in a linguistic sense (Bateson 1972). Through multi-sensorial channels of perception, bodily habit can arouse a world of emotion, which is captured simply in the words: ‘The heart has its reasons which reason does

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not at all perceive’. In describing the Ajanta caves, Richard Lannoy explains: The Ajanta style approaches as near as it is likely to get felicitous rendering of tactile sensations normally experienced subconsciously. These are felt rather than seen where the eye is subordinate to a total receptivity to all the senses. Here the eye functions quite differently from its linear reading of a flat image. It explores the non-visual properties of spatial forms, creating a sign language or optical braille for the tactually educated … It could be said that the Ajanta artist is concerned with the order of sensuousness, as distinct from the order of reason (Lannoy 1971: 46–50, cited in Schechner 1986). The order of sensuousness is best described in the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa. The aesthetic theory of rasa associated primarily with dance and dramatic performance is fundamentally different from the western aesthetic of observation or ‘the gaze’. In the latter, knowing is associated with the verbal and analytical, making it rationally ordered and objective. Therefore, what is observed is separated or distanced from the eyes so that it can be read as a linear narrative. In the western aesthetic, perception or knowledge is based on maintaining the separation between the subject or the observer and the object or the observed following the ‘order of reason’. This is fundamentally different from Indian theories of aesthetic perception, which belong to a tactile world of aesthetic patterning. Here, seeing or darshan is linked to the awakening of rasa within the spectator or observer. Seeing is gazing, knowing and touching (Eck 1981). Thus the visual is grasped through touch and it involves the expression of feelings or emotions. In this sense, perception is not an individual act of contemplation, but a participatory collective experience. The privileging of perception or knowledge only through the visual is reversed here, where the distance between the observer and the observed is replaced by the direct and sensuous experiences of tasting, touching and feeling. The synaesthesia of rasa fills space, joining the outside to the inside, the mind and the body, the performer and the audience, thus dissolving binary conceptions.

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Rasa theory was suggested by Bharat Muni in the Natyashastra treatise. Later rasa theory found expression in the medieval devotional movements of bhakti. Bhakti was imagined as intense emotional outbursts of personal devotion to god. The aesthetic emotion of rasa was experienced through bhakti by the devotee (bhakta) in the form of divine bliss. The Vaisnavas rejected the role of the Brahmin or the priest as the ritual intermediary between man and god as practised in orthodox Hinduism. They claimed that through singing and dancing they could reach communion with Krishna, a communion patterned after erotic human emotions between man and woman. This is the erotic love known as sringara rasa expressed in the stories of Radha and Krishna. According to Abhinava Gupta, who reinterpreted the rasa theory during the bhakti period, the state of rasanubhuti is an impersonal transcendental state where emotion belongs in the public domain as a collective experience. The process of learning and practice called riaz in kathak brings forth the synaesthetic pleasures of rasa. The very act of dancing, which in traditional practices requires intense habituation of movements, invokes a mimetic mode of perception that is not merely a mechanical reproduction of movement. It is a kind of ‘sense experience’, which goes beyond discursive concepts that privilege a binary linguistic/mentalist approach to a more bodily, participatory one. I have discussed elsewhere how the process of learning and practice (riaz) of kathak can be akin to ritual performance, ultimately by evoking the ritual enactment of Krishna leela (Chakravorty 2004). The aesthetic theory of rasa associated with traditional Indian performative practices can enable us to go beyond discursive concepts that privilege a linguistic, objectifying approach for understanding art/ritual/culture to a more participatory, embodied one. The very act of dancing is not merely a text, like a memoir, or a story told and reflected on; it is not a mere representation of the past. In Connerton’s words: It is a cult enacted. An image of the past, even in the form of a master narrative, is conveyed and sustained by ritual performances. And this means that what is remembered in commemorative ceremonies is something in addition to a collectively organized

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variant of personal or cognitive memory. For if ceremonies are to work for their participants, if they are to be persuasive to them, then those participants must not be simply cognitively competent to execute the performance; they must be habituated to the performance. This habituation is to be found in the bodily substrate of the performance (Connerton 1989: 70–71). During the riaz or performance of Kathak the dancer reaches this heightened emotional state. As the body twirls in frenzied motion and the feet stomp in rhythmic beats, the performer experiences the pleasure of rasa deep inside herself, within her own body that is dancing—that is hearing the music—that is moving. Where the hands go the eyes follow, where the eyes go the mind follows, where the mind goes emotions follow, and when emotions are expressed—there is rasa. Thus through habituation of movement patterns, the mind connects us to our body or emotions. During riaz, the performer is the audience, the outsider and the insider. This dissolution of binaries evoked through intense emotional introspection connects the individual self to a collective/universal self, described in monistic Hindu philosophy as atman. It evokes in the performer’s imagination the ritual enactment of a master narrative, sedimented in the body in the form of cultural memory. In Kathak, the dancing accompanied by melodic structures (nagma) and singing evoke the images of Krishna leela. The narratives of leela are based on erotic human love. With the sound of the gungroo, the incessant rhythmic beats, the passionate singing, the melody cycles, the performer’s body merges with that of the bhakta (literally meaning one who partakes or participates), as a partaker in the ritual play or leela. Thus rasa, which produces passionate pleasure, causes re-enactments of the mythic ritual performance of the leela in the minds of the performers whose bodies are absorbed in the rituals of dance or riaz. The ritual performance of Kathak riaz is as much a mental process as an embodied social practice built in the body, through habit or repetitive movement. The past relives in the body as part of a social habitus where the various components of dance such as music, tala, raga, form an emotional aesthetic patterning. The aesthetic belongs to the diverse social formations in India—Hindu, Muslim and

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Christian, but the nationalist representation of classical Indian dance reduces it to a dominantly Hindu tradition (Ram 2000a). The embodied aesthetic of Krishna leela is transformed through the device of a nationalist narrative into a Hindu tradition, thereby homogenizing its diverse history, especially its development in Mughal courts as a secular dance form. In this way, the embodied practice of Kathak builds a historical context to reproduce dominant power structures in India, and tradition is reinvented as eternal (some of this has been discussed in Chakravorty 2004).

Heritage as Multiculturalism The meaning of cultural heritage then emerges not only as a representation of a past but as the concrete embodied practice of an emotional/aesthetic habitus. Then, during the Rukmini Devi Arundale birth centenary celebration, does the south AsianAmerican girl child performing the tillana connect to the past through habituation of movement patterns sedimented in her body through riaz? Is it possible to connect to the past through habituation when the habitus of performance is so far removed from the original context? Since in the diasporic context cultural patterns are no longer available through lived practice, the past has to be preserved, encoded and represented through the narrative of ‘tradition’. Is the south Asian-American girl child performing tillana merely a signifier for ‘motionless tradition’ serving the multicultural agenda of a state ideology? There is no doubt that the discourse on cultural heritage rearticulates itself in the postcolonial diasporic context in a new category—multiculturalism. ‘Orientalism’ has yet another interpretation in this postcolonial context, where it becomes an important framework for analysing the discourse on multiculturalism and the global circulation of classical Indian dance. Classical Indian dance, as an example of authentic Indian identity, adheres perfectly to the notions of prescribed cultural differences for multicultural America. Such categorization promotes a kind of autoexoticization among its practitioners where the dance becomes a reference point for ancient Indian tradition and culture. This further facilitates an ethnicity of identity, which upholds race as

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the ultimate marker of identity. South-Asian becomes a category that homogenizes substantial cultural and national diversity among its members. It promotes the ideology of identity politics that makes class invisible. In this postcolonial multicultural context, classical Indian dance is a hotbed of intercultural politics. Thus, race and the politics of location become important debates among artists and scholars (Coorlawala 2004). Moreover, the recent emergence of contemporary south Asian dance among the diaspora brings in another dimension to the heritage discourse. In many cases, the traditional vocabularies are techniques and raw materials for a new generation of avante garde choreographers who are talking about a complete rupture from the classical past. They are searching for new aesthetics that speak about a new cultural context, where boundaries are blurred and porous. One can argue that the category of rasa is no longer relevant in such a context where rituals are only identified as commodities, and identity markers abstracted from socio-historical contexts. As I watched the Bharatnatyam dancers dancing in unison to sa-sa-ni-dha, I realized that there is a certain immediacy and emotional resonance in good performance that has meaning outside of representation or discursive analysis. Despite various ruptures, the past lives in their bodily habits as in the simple steps of the adavu. This extra-linguistic ‘thereness’ of culture acquired through primary socialization of the senses is aptly described by Guha in the diasporic context: The past of the immigrant leads a half-life, like seeds in the winter ground awaiting the right weather to spring into life. This magical springing back to life is experienced by immigrants every time the right soil is restored—every time the Indian immigrant steps back on the tarmac in India, all kinds of embodied dispositions and ways of knowing that one did not have access to without this social landscape are instantly there, at one’s disposal. On a smaller scale, they spring into life whenever immigrants from the same background have social dealings with one another: the body movements change, even if one continues to speak English the accent changes, and quite fundamental aspects of one’s being, such as what it is to be a woman, alter in subtle ways (Guha 1998: 159, quoted in Ram 2000a: 265).

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Kalpana Ram argues that despite various ruptures not everything about culture changes at the same pace, and cultural practices that are habit-oriented change at a slower pace, so that even in an altered context the emotional qualities of the raga or the nritta in the Indian classical repertoire is not altogether erased (Ram 2000a). Following this train of thought, one can concur that the most radical change takes place at the depth of habit. Changes in our aesthetic disposition create changes in ideology, not the other way round.

Conclusion Dance as cultural heritage is generally discussed in terms of assemblages of texts, readings and choreographies in postcolonial theory. In this narrative, tradition is understood as a discourse of modernity, and modernity is understood as a complete rupture from tradition. There is an insidious opposition in this binary comprehension of tradition and modernity where ‘tradition’ is only meaningful as a solid and unchanging authenticity. Its only role in political terms is its function as ‘strategic essentialism’ for maintaining a subaltern group identity. Modernity signifies a clean break from the past in this binary construct. However, cultural heritage as tradition can also be experienced as embodied continuity with the past, as I have argued in this essay. Here, tradition is not formalistic and rule-bound, but exists as highly charged and condensed phenomena, intertwining synaesthesia of all the senses that are involved in the music, rhythm, temporal intervals, language and utterances (Ram 2000b: 362). In this time of immense cultural flux, perhaps a focus on social aesthetic patterning dealing with all the senses, not just the visual/ verbal, can open a window into a more stable, regulatory system of culture. These aspects of culture that are meaningful and coherent without being representational can provide fresh perspectives on cultural politics. Cultural heritage or tradition, experienced through dance, music, theatre and ritual, can then be an important conceptual node for diffusing binary constructs, and become available as a vital political force experienced daily as lived culture.

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References Books Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to An Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantyne Books. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eck, Diana. 1981. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Publications. Kersenboom-Story, Saskia. 1987. Nrityasumangali: Devdasi Tradition in South India. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Lannoy, Richard. 1971. The Speaking Tree. London: Oxford University Press. Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Marglin, F. A. 1995. Wives of the God-King: Rituals of the Devdasi of Puri. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1986. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Said, Edward W. 1979[1978]. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Stoller, Paul. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories. New York: Routledge. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor W. and Edward M. Bruner (eds). 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Articles Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2004. ‘Dance, Pleasure and Indian Women as Multisensorial Subjects’, Visual Anthropology, 17, pp. 1–17. Coorlawala, Uttara Asha. 2004. ‘Discussant’ in Pallabi Chakravorty (ed.), Dance in South Asia: New Approaches, Politics and Aesthetics (Proceedings). Swarthmore: Swarthmore College. Guha, R. 1998. ‘The Migrant’s Time’, Postcolonial Studies, 1(2): 155–60. Jackson, Michael. 1981. ‘Knowledge of the Body’, Man (n.s.), 18, pp. 327–45. Ram, Kalpana. 2000a. ‘Dancing the Past into Life: The rasa, nritta and raga of Immigrant Existence’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, (Special Issue on the Politics of Dance) University of Sydney, pp. 261–74. ———. 2000b. ‘Listening to the Call of Dance. Re-thinking Authenticity and Essentialism’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (Commentary, Special Issue on the Politics of Dance) University of Sydney, pp. 358–64. Roy Ratna. 2004. ‘Mahari Dance—an Alternative Narrative in Odissi’ in Pallabi Chakravorty (ed.), Dance in South Asia: New Approaches, Politics and Aesthetics (Proceedings). Schechner, Richard. 1986. ‘Magnitudes of Performance’ in Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (eds), The Anthropology of Experience, pp. 344–73.

Classical Indian Dance and Heritage 101 Srinivasan, Amrit. 1985. ‘Reform and Revival: The Devdasi and Her Dance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20, pp. 1869–76. Tyler, Stephen A. 1984. ‘The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind’s Eye Sees’, Journal of Anthropology Research, 40(1), pp. 23–40.

Manuscripts and Unpublished Dissertations Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2000. Choreographing Modernity: Kathak Dance, Public Culture, and Women’s Identity in India. Unpublished Dissertation, Philadelphia: Temple University. Meduri, Avanthi. 1996. Nation, Woman, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devdasi and Her Dance. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: New York University.

Chapter Four

’Truth Is, at the Moment, Here’: Adrienne Rich and the Ghazal Sonali Barua In this essay on Adrienne Rich’s ‘Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib’ (Rich 1993a: 339–55), I shall discuss what led Rich to celebrate Mirza Ghalib, outline the multiple ways in which the ghazal form was peculiarly sympathetic to her politics and analyse the poem in the light of traditionally prescribed ghazal style and content. I shall demonstrate that while Rich’s appreciation of Ghalib was informed by what may arguably be regarded as a mediated and distorted understanding of what the poet stood for, that understanding was to prove remarkably nutritive to her growth as a poet and was to produce English ghazals of which Ghalib himself might have approved.

Ghalib as Rich Knew Him Ghalib, as is well known on the subcontinent, was revolutionary in his approach to language and signification and in his articulation of a recognizably modern sensibility. Rich, collaborating with Aijaz Ahmed on English versions of Ghalib’s ghazals for a specially commissioned centenary publication, encountered a poet who wrote gracefully in several classical languages, an unconventional pantheist with a soft spot for Shia Islam and a serious interest in philosophy. Like Rich, Ghalib displayed a precocious talent, but unlike her, he showed an early interest in the ideation of obscure, impenetrable imagery, refusing to adopt the limited themes and metaphors of the Urdu poetry of his time. His oftquoted boastful claim to the possession of an ‘andaaz-e-bayaan

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aur’ (a different or unique way of speaking/communicating) was thoroughly justified by the rich and novel complexities of his poetry. In one notoriously difficult instance, he compares the eyelids of a deer to a backscratcher, an image for which nothing in Urdu literature had prepared his audience (Niyazi 2002: 12). Rich wrote: ‘My ghazals … owe much to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet self educated and profoundly learned, who owned no property and borrowed his books, writing in an age of political and cultural break-up’ (Rich cited by Khan: 1970). More importantly, she would have identified with his delight in experimental metaphor, in opaque and ambiguous images as liberating and clarifying catalysts in the poetic process. Hamid Ahmed Khan refers to Ghalib’s ‘gropings towards the farthest reaches of the human imagination (his) … struggle towards the discovery of a unity between apparently disconnected and disparate things’ (Khan 1970: 44). Ghalib was trained in the classical Persian and Urdu technique of ma’ani afrini or ‘meaning creation’, the enriching complication of poetic meaning through the use of words with several possible interpretations. For Rich too, the impenetrability and double valency of metaphor was a means both of connection and subversion, of possibilities beyond the logical or the linear. Khan remarks on Ghalib’s scientific outlook, his interest in natural phenomena and his ‘instinctive curiosity for the minutiae of physical reality’. Similarly, Rich wrote: Poetry and politics both have to do with description and with power. And so, of course, does science. We might hope to find the three activities … triangulated, with extraordinary exchanges … Instead … they have become separated, poetry from politics, poetic naming from scientific naming, an ostensibly ‘neutral’ science from political questions, ‘rational’ science from lyrical poetry … (Rich 1993b: 6). While Rich did not experience Ghalib’s regular financial crises or his melancholy over bad press, there is in both poets a deep and recurring anxiety about the act of poetic creation, issues of reception and the viability of poetry as a profession. Rich was to say: ‘You must write and read as if your life … at most, your livelihood depended on it: the next step, the next job, grant,

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scholarship, professional advancement, fame; no questions asked’ (Rich 1993b: 33). In Ghalib, she also saw a poet whose life actually depended on poetry for ‘the next job’ (or) ‘grant’, yet who chose not to produce easily marketable verse. It may be useful, however, to remember that Rich’s experience of Ghalib was mediated by Ahmed’s translations. Ahmed describes Ghalib’s as a ‘more than usually vulnerable existence’ (Ahmed 1971: xi) and, referring to the fall of the Mughal Empire, alludes to the moment, rather exaggeratedly, as one ‘of almost cosmic self-doubt in the sub-continental consciousness’ (Ahmed 1871: xii). This was probably true only of the small minority of courtiers who directly depended on the Mughal treasury for their income, rather than of the subcontinent as a whole, particularly since the majority of the populace was Hindu. Ahmed shows a tendency to interpret Ghalib in fashionably modern terms: ‘Ghalib undercuts the whole debate which proceeds from the assumption that the particular and the universal are … in opposition. For Ghalib, the particular is the universal: a man’s history is the history of his intelligence, plus his emotions, plus his times’ (Ahmed 1971: xxiv). This could have been true of any ghazal writer: for now, such a construction of the poet would have been irresistible for Rich with her deep belief in the identification of the personal and the political. Ahmed’s reading of the verses too, as Ralph Russell details, is problematic. Among several factual and translation errors, Russell highlights the handling of a line in Ghazal VI: ‘barq-e khirman rahat khun-e garm-e dihqan hai’ which Ahmed translates as: ‘The warm blood of a farmer has in it the potential (of revolt) as there is potential electricity hidden in unthreshed corn’, adding: ‘Peasant revolts are rather a rarity in subcontinental history. Only in Ghalib’s time … did the peasant revolt often enough for it to become a conceivable metaphor in poetry’ (Ahmed 1971: 30). Russell, who translates the line as ‘The hot blood of the peasant is the substance of (the lightning … that destroys) his crop’, observes that the concept is perfectly intelligible with or without a background of peasant revolts (Russell 1999: 48). Though Russell’s translation also has its own curious political valence, he is probably correct in tracing Ahmed’s interpretation to the latter’s investment in Marxist historiography. It would seem that Ahmed presented Rich with a glamorized, politically corrected 1960s’ version of Ghalib, apparently resuscitating him from the amoral,

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epicurean image of the nineteenth century Urdu poet. It seems inaccurate to call Ghalib a political poet in the way Rich understood it. Certainly, if the films and television serials made on him are to be believed, he entered and has remained in the popular memory as a poet with an unfortunate weakness for expensive wine and women no better than they ought to have been. On a more factual note, while his personal letters reflect critically on the Mughal court as well as British military violence, he was himself preoccupied with lobbying for patronage rather than in altering social conditions. In his widely read diary, the Dast-ambooh, the poet who had enjoyed the largesse of Bahadur Shah made a volte-face to praise the British, who by then, controlled his pension. Rich wrote of: ‘Politics as (the) expression of the impulse to create, an expanded sense of what’s humanly possible’ (Rich 1993b: 25). Ghalib stood at several removes from such a position, but poetry and politics were so intricately connected for Rich that Ahmed’s portrait of the tragic, conscientiously objecting poet pushing bravely into the metaphoric unknown appears to have won the day.

Beyond the Untranslatable In respect of the ghazal Russell reminds us that ‘… without guidance from those steeped in the tradition, we understand, at a generous estimate, about as much as an intelligent fourteen-year old understands of Donne’ (Russell 1978, cited by Marian Molteno in Russell 1999: 11). Rich would have been aware that the classical Urdu ghazal notoriously resists translation and that Ghalib, most difficult of difficult Urdu poets, was the one least likely to be exceptional on this count. Indeed, the issue of translation is one with which Rich engages in many poems, including the ghazals. The condensed and reflective abstractions of Urdu verse typically gesture towards rather than state meaning. This led to the crystallization of a small set of images which could be more or less programmatically deployed: the bulbul, the rose, the decanter. By the twentieth century the ghazal had fallen into disrepute among intellectuals as an effete, sentimental and decadent form, impoverished of original imagery, fit only for the titillations of the

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courtesan’s dance hall, and ghazal writing had deteriorated into a social talent. Frances Pritchett and William Hanaway hold that the ghazal cannot be seen as a social document and that attempts to move from poetic imagery to social reality are destined to break down (Russell 1999: 51–68). Why, then, did Rich choose this form in which to write so many poems? The word ghazal literally means ‘talking to women’ and the form, for all its male approval and participation, was regarded as essentially feminine. In Sufi writing, which influenced almost all ghazal poets, verses written by men to God addressed a yaar (intimate friend) or mehboob (beloved), both otherwise used to indicate a romantic or sexual connection. This convention was later used to conveniently shield poets making public but disguised protestations of devotion towards the women whom Islamic society did not otherwise allow them to address. The Persian love poetry of Bukhari, Aseer and Bedil was ambiguous regarding the beloved’s gender, leading to accusations of covert homosexuality. The rekhti tradition—in which male poets, possibly writing for courtesans, impersonated female voices— flourished till the seventeenth century. Russell notes that segregation in Islamic cultures also gives rise to severely concealed lesbianism and refers to the Urdu word capti or ‘lustful congress of two women’ (Russell 1999: 67). None of this helped the ghazal’s status as an art form in a society that placed taboos on romance of any sort, whether same-sex or otherwise. To the question ‘Who or what is the beloved of the Urdu ghazal?’, Russell answers: ‘Any person or any ideal to whom or to which the poet, whether in real life or in fantasy is prepared to dedicate himself, sacrificing himself for its (her, his) sake and willingly accepting the hostility of his fellow men as an inevitable consequence of his love’ (Russell 1999: 55). Rich uses the male voice in several poems, including ‘The Roofwalker’ and ‘Orion’ (Rich 1993c: 23, 45). The sense of the indeterminacy of the image, the speaker and the spoken to in the ghazal would have been of immense interest to her. Though most often recited by male poets, the ghazal was, till late into the last century, sung largely by baijis or courtesans. Fards or extracts from a ghazal can also be sung as a thumri, regarded as a lightweight, ‘feminine’ classical form. By Rich’s time, several well-known singers born to courtesans had been recorded

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and broadcast. However, Dr Amlan Das Gupta, writing on the politics of early Hindustani classical music recordings, observes that courtesans, imitated by male singers because of the preference for feminine voices, initially turned away recording companies for fear of imitation by female rivals (Das Gupta 2004). Later, on account of their low birth, they were banned for years from singing on All India Radio or recording for His Master’s Voice. Classical music was, thus, apparently sanitized of its noxious, sub-cultural origins and caste Hindus permitted daughters to take lessons from male ustads (teachers). But the basic content of the thumris that sweet young things still impress prospective grooms with remains intact. In spite of hectic bowdlerizing, censoring and spiritualizing, thumri lyrics today are not very different from what they have always been: sensual, double-entendre-laden prostitute’s come-ons, an irony that Rich would have relished. Though poetry and calligraphy were among the limited intellectual and creative outlets approved for educated Muslim women, respectable women poets in Ghalib’s day remained predictably invisible unless they happened to be of royal blood, like the Mughal princess Jahanara, or at the very least, highborn, as in the case of Ganna Begum, wife of the Nawab of Farukkhabad, Bahu Begum, wife of the Nawab of Awadh, and Suraiya Begum, wife of the Mughal Emperor’s spiritual mentor. In general, even in the nineteenth century, Urdu poetry by women, usually romantic, was strictly concealed and often remained known only to an intimate circle within the jenana or women’s quarters. By the early twentieth century, however, the leading—and by now publicly acknowledged— composers of sung ghazals were almost all women: Zohra Bai, Gauhar Jan and Janki Bai. It is hardly surprising, then, that Rich, who was arguing about the lesbian continuum and inveighing against compulsory heterosexuality, compartmentalization of the erotic and prescriptive notions of the normal, should have realized this immensely versatile and subversive potential of a form so powerfully inscribed with femi-nine significance. The relatively autonomous form of the ghazal couplet and the need to tease out its underlying, non-narrative thematic unity are conducive both to postmodern communication with its typically fragmentary bursts of thought, which aim for the essence

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rather than specifics, and feminist écriture with its disregard for linear or logical continuity. As Khan emphasizes, the ghazal is, before everything, a public form: the couplet of a ghazal is almost always a record of universal experience … (in) a ghazal, a(n) event must be so generalized as to transform the personal into a broadly human theme … a ghazal need not be and quite often is not, a subjective poem. The only exception to the rule of universal appeal may be the end-couplet … where the writer, using his poetical (name), may introduce a subjective note by pointedly referring to a particular personal experience (Khan 1970: 40).

Personalizing a Public Form The orality of the ghazal lends it enhanced political potency. Ghazals are recited at mushairas before large, participative crowds. A performative tradition of mushairas that continued till well after Ghalib’s time was the placing of an oil lamp in front of each poet to light up his face as he recited. The lamp was ceremonially transferred from poet to poet as the mushaira proceeded. Rich, like Audre Lorde, visualized poetry in terms of illumination. For her, ghazals thus recited would physically and simultaneously, perform, elucidate and reinforce a poet’s message, ensuring a public-ness that the ghazals universality alone could not have guaranteed. In the quarter century before Ahmed began rather anachronistically rehabilitating Ghalib as a ‘personal-is-political’ poet, the ghazal was, in fact, being revitalized as an instrument of political protest. Mohammed Iqbal, and later Faiz Ahmed Faiz, both embedded in the classical stylistic tradition, took up contemporary political concerns. Faiz wrote a moving elegy for the Rosenbergs. Sahir Ludhianvi wrote what was to become a signature ghazal on the Taj Mahal, which speaks ahead of its time in the subaltern voice, indicting Shah Jahan for the huge financial and human cost and harshly ridiculing a love that required marble to be eternized. Women poets like Fahmida Riaz, Zohra Nigah and Ishrat Afreen had begun experimenting with the ghazal in their efforts to highlight gender, class and communal issues.

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Rich’s poems, in spite of deviations from the traditional form, retain the essential spirit of the classical ghazal. I am indebted to the late Agha Shahid Ali for his excellent explication of the ghazal’s metrical rules, at which we shall now take a brief glance. A ghazal is made up of five or more independent couplets or shers in odd numbers. Beher, or metric consistency, is strictly adhered to. Lines in every couplet have an equal number of syllables. The radif, or the second end word of each sher, should rhyme according to an aa, ba, ca, da, ea scheme. An internal rhyme or qafia connects both lines of the first sher with the last lines of the others. This is the most rigid rule, one that most English ghazal writers do not follow. Rich does not follow any rhyme scheme, but there is certainly an effort to follow the beher metrical rules. Like Ghalib’s, her typical lines vary from eleven to fourteen syllables and the series contains fifteen metrically correct shers, the meter lending them some of the cameo perfection of Ghalib’s couplets, as in this one, where the endless effort, energy and human cost involved in active radical politics is figured as a continuously reopened gash in the earth’s body: ‘For us the work undoes itself over and over:/ The grass grows back, the dust collects, the scar breaks open’ or this one: ‘Obey the little laws and break the great ones/is the preamble to their constitution’ (Rich 1993a: 342, 354). Gene Doty observes that translated ghazals like Arberry’s and Gray’s versions of Rumi, rarely use the radif, while Schimmel’s has only the occasional qafia; Walter Leaf’s translations of Hafiz, though, faithfully follow all the rules (Doty 1996). Not that ghazals in languages other than Persian or Urdu were a recent phenomenon or had always flouted the rules. Graf von Platen’s 1821 collection Ghaselen, almost always conformed. Ruckert, Schlegel and Goethe were very interested in the form and took up the rules as a challenge. Goethe’s West-Ostlicher Diwan was written in the Persian style and Lorca’s Spanish Gacelen employed the Arabic form. Recent discussions on the English ghazal have centred on the viability of adhering to a rhyme scheme in a language with such a long tradition of free verse. Doty suggests that placing the qafia before the radif can overload the English line and recommends that either be used but not both together, and that the qafia monorhyme be placed midline. This would seem to be supported, Doty points out, by Elizabeth Gray, who

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argues that what is read as a couplet in English, is one long line with a strong caesura in the Persian original. Ali, however, argues that what saves the ghazal from arbitrariness is, in fact, ‘a technical context, a formal unity based on rhyme and refrain and prosody’ and that ‘a free-verse ghazal is a contradiction in terms’ (Ali 2002: 210–11). Ali’s two English ghazals in The Country Without a Post Office both employ the radif and one the qafia. Doty, instead, recommends ‘parasyntactic’ ghazals ‘composed of individual words selected for sound, rhythm and connotation, but arranged so that no syntactical structures arise ... intended to suggest, to supply the reader’s imagination almost-meaningful (referential) patterns.’ We might recollect Rich’s admiration for Wallace Stevens’s work. In ‘Voices from the Air’ she discusses his poem ‘The House Was Quiet’, in which the words ‘calm’, ‘book’ and ‘page’ are repeated in a pattern that creates something close to Doty’s parasyntactic effect (Rich 1993b: 9–13). Again, in ‘Rotted Names’, Rich quotes Stevens’s ‘Now grapes are plush’, with its play on ‘door’, ‘cloaks’ and ‘walls’ (Rich 1993b: 197–205). ‘If I first loved that poem for its sound, I later loved it for its soundings…’ she writes. It seems that this was the effect she often aimed for, as with the words ‘me’, ‘here’, ‘you’ and ‘there’ in the first Homage ghazal. As Ali argues, suspenseful waiting for how the challenge of the radif-qafia rhyme requirement will be resolved is integral to Urdu ghazal recitation. In English, however, where the ghazal is primarily a written art form, the surprise component is far less vital. Ahmed notes, therefore, that: (F)ormal devices such as rhymed couplets or closely scannable prosodic structures are, in contemporary English as opposed to 19th century Urdu, restrictive rather than enlarging or intensifying devices. The organic unity of the ghazal as translated into English, does not depend on formal rhymes. Inner rhymes, allusions, verbal associations, wit, and imagistic relations can quite adequately take over the functions performed by the formal end rhymes… (Ahmed 1971: xix). Rich explores an interesting variation on the tradition of the takhallus or stylized poetic nom de plume. The takhallus is generally inserted by way of a second or third person reference into

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the maqta or signature final couplet. This rhetorical device, the figure of the poet talking to himself, incorporates what is usually the only subjective response to the universal situation described in the preceding couplets. Rich—appropriately, for a political poet—directly addresses personalities instrumental in shaping or representing her times: Whitman, Montaigne, Vivaldi, Custer. Ahmed writes: (Though) everything that happens to the poet … personally or to the times … is deeply related to his poetry, the immediate event is kept scrupulously out … The response is immediate and moral but the urgency is assimilated within privacy, and the response as it is expressed in poetry, is not so much to the event as to the consequences (Ahmed 1971: xxiv). Rich, who introduces the personal from the early couplets, may be said to have reversed the traditional order of subjectivity and universality in her ghazals, but crucially, without compromising the universal essence of the poem. In her essay ‘Someone is writing a poem’ she goes on to say: ‘The “who” of that reader quivers like a jellyfish. Self-reference is always possible …. But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images’ (Rich 1993b: 85). Indeed, it is in that very ‘delicate vibrating range of difference’, in the teasing almost-penetrability of much of the personal content, and in the ways in which Rich uses poetry both to reveal and conceal, that she is truest to the spirit of the traditional ghazal. Here is an extract from an e-mail sent to me in response to a query I had addressed to Sheila Rotner, to whom the first of the ghazals is dedicated: The origins of that … Ghazal are largely personal, though, as Adrienne would say, in our day and age the personal is political … Adrienne and Alf were very involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Both had students caught up in disasters. My son, Daniel, aged 4, gave Adrienne the first line of the first Ghazal—‘The clouds are electric in this university’, which is

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maybe one reason why she dedicated the poem to me. (Because he was little he used ‘university’ instead of ‘universe’!) ... Between (the) 2nd couplet and the final couplet are personal truths which have not been painted or written. I have to respect that.1 This unexpectedly informative e-mail sheds a great deal of light on Rich’s methods. The first ghazal begins with that attention to natural phenomena common to both Ghalib and Rich. Rotner’s anecdote explains a word we may otherwise have quite logically construed as pertaining either to bright young academics or campus unrest, though these may still, of course, be valid. Rotner, an architect who now works on installation art, explains her fascination with the spatial: what to fill in, how, and what to leave empty. Rich was to write: ‘The theater of any poem is a collection of decisions about time and space—how these words lie on a page, with what pauses, what headlong motion, what phrasing…’ (Rich 1993b: 87). It is tempting, therefore, to relate the first ghazal to the seventh, in which Rich evokes sculptural images: ‘Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon./ Flower cast in metal, Picasso-woman, sister’ (Rich 1993a: 345). In the first ghazal, Rich uses the matla and matla-e-sani, or the opening and second couplets, in the traditional way, establishing the overall mood of the poem. The electricity of the clouds lends the classical ghazal’s typical intensity to the burning lovers in the matla, and the blank wall of the matla-e-sani tells us that what remains unspoken is, after all, what really matters: ‘When I look at that wall I shall think of you/And what you did not paint there’ (Rich 1993a: 39). Intense emotion was a ghazal sine qua non. Rich translated a Ghalib makta thus: ‘Fire licks out from the rims of my eye, Asad/ when I look at a dry leaf it starts to smoulder’ (Ahmed 1971: 92), and herself wrote: ‘I tell you, truth is, at the moment, here/Burning outward through our skins’ (Rich 1993a: 343). True to the best ghazals, Rich’s poem operates in momentary but powerful flashes of illumination through an overlying obscurity. To say too much would be to mar that effect: ‘To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable/ Is to throw away the search for the one necessary word’ (Rich 1993a: 339).

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Touching the Grief of Ghalib Ghazals traditionally contain deeply metaphysical reflections on man’s position in the universe, his relationship with the world, with God, with himself. Ghazal I of 7/14/68 reads: ‘In the Theatre of the Dust no actor becomes famous/In the last scene they are all blown away like the dust’ (Rich 1993a: 341). Doty observes that the discontinuous autonomous couplets with their unexpected renga-like juxtapositions lend ghazals a surrealistic effect and cites Arberry, who holds that Hafiz in his later work consciously experimented with a variety of surrealism. Rich’s ‘prism staggering under the blows of the raga’, her pictures of apocalypse, and of the New York winter ‘First snow. Death of the city. Ghosts in the air./Your shade among the shadows interviewing the mist’, all partake unmistakably of the surreal (Rich 1993a: 339, 344). Many of Rich’s couplets, like those of traditional ghazals, free-float relatively independent of their context, allowing her to include the full complex of issues, both political and personal, that her life as a postmodern intellectual forced her to make terms with. She observes to Ahmed that Ghalib’s ghazals demand: (A) very different kind of unity … certain experiences needed to find both their intensest rendering and to join with other(s) not logically … or chronologically connected in any obvious way. I’ve been trying to make the couplets as autonomous as possible … allow the unity of the ghazal to emerge from underneath … through images … associations … a clear image or articulation behind which there are shadows, reverberations, reflections of reflections (Ahmed 1971: xxv). Nazms, the exceptional ghazals chosen for singing, could show a consistent thematic approach while qatas allow for a number of successive thematically linked lines with a looser overall unity. Rich’s ghazals can be situated somewhere between the qata and the nazm. Possibly in response to criticism, the 1994 ‘Late Ghazal’ reads: ‘Go back to the ghazal then/ what will you do there? Life always pulsed harder than the lines … Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words’ (Rich 1993c: 264–65). In writing

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this earlier homage, however, Rich takes fullest advantage of the prescription of non-linear unity and the almost formal disapproval of clear or bounded meaning, to bring together feminism, her thoughts on lesbian life, the political efficacy of art, academic integrity, urban alienation, global politics, social revolution, Black Power, Vietnam—in short, the 1960s. Without any of Ghalib’s several forms of access to the tradition, Rich produced ghazals that stayed true to the spirit of his poetry: How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces Has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi? When they read this poem of mine, they are translators Every existence speaks a language of its own (Rich 1993a: 353).

Note 1. ‘Re: Adrienne Rich’: Sheila Rotner’s e-mail to Sonali Barua, 12 November 2003.

References Books Ahmed, Aijaz (ed. and comp.). 1971. Ghazals of Ghalib. New York: Columbia University Press. Ali, Agha Shahid. 1997. The Country without a Post Office. New York: Norton. Arberry, Arthur J. (tr. and ed.). 1953. Hafiz. Fifty Poems: Texts and Translations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (tr. and ed.). 1968. Mystical Poems of Rumi: First Selection, Poems 1–200, translated from the Persian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gray, Elizabeth (tr. and ed.). 1995. The Green Sea of Heaven: Fifty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz. Ashland: White Cloud Press. Matthews, D. J. and C. Shackle. 1972. An Anthology of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics: Texts and Translations. London: Oxford University Press. Niyazi, Sarfaraz K. (tr. and ed.). 2002. Love Sonnets of Ghalib. New Delhi: Rupa and Co. Rich, Adrienne. 1993a. Collected Early Poems 1950–1970. New York: Norton. ———. 1993b. What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: Norton. ———. 1993c. The Fact of a Doorframe. New York: Norton. ———. 1994. Blood, Bread and Poetry. New York: Norton.

Adrienne Rich and the Ghazal 115 Russell, Ralph. 1999. How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature, and Other Essays on Urdu and Islam. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Schimmel, Annmarie (tr. and ed.). 1996. Look! This is Love: Poems of Rumi. New York: Shambhala Centaur Editions.

Articles Ali, Agha Shahid. 1995–96. ‘Transparently Invisible: An Invitation from the Real Ghazal’, Poetry Pilot: The Newsletter of American Poets, Winter Volume. ———. 2002. ‘Ghazal: To be Teased into DisUnity’ in Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes (eds), An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate The Diversity of Their Art. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 210–16. Das Gupta, Amlan. 2004. ‘Women and Music: The Case of Northern India’ in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women in India: Postcolonial Period. Calcutta: Centre For Studies in Civilizations. Khan, Hamid Ahmed. 1970. ‘Ghalib’s Vision of Man and Nature’, Asia Society Journal, Spring Volume. Molteno, Marian. 1999. ‘Ralph Russell: Teacher, Scholar, Lover of Urdu’ in Ralph Russell (ed.), How not to Write the History of Urdu Literature. Russell, Ralph. 1978. Review of Matthews and Shackle (eds), ‘An Anthology of Classical Urdu Love Lyrics: Texts and Translations’, South Asian Review 6(1).

Online Resources Avchat, Abhay. ‘What is a Ghazal?’ http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~navin/india/songs/ ghalib/ghazal.def.html in Abhay’s Aashi’aana, http://www.geocities.com/ Paris/LeftBank/4797/index.html, [last accessed on 27.6.2005]. Doty, Gene. 1996. ‘When I say “ghazal” I mean “ghuzzle”’, Lynx (online journal) XI, p. 2. Current and recent issues available at http://www.ahapoetry.com/ ahalynx/203HMPG.html.

Chapter Five

Two Occidental Heroines through Oriental Eyes Prodosh Bhattacharya ‘Orientalism’, as defined and analysed by the late Edward Said and his followers, reduces the East—Said tends to focus on the Middle East and the Arabs—to certain essential characteristics. These characteristics may often be mutually contradictory. For example, the Arab may become a sign for dumbness combined with over-articulateness, impotence combined with hyper-sexuality, poverty combined with excess (Said 2000 [1975]). The Orientalist discourse presents these contradictory traits as ‘already assembled images’ (2000 [1975]: 95). Said goes on to claim that: Orientalism with contemporary techniques (like psychoanalysis) merely increase complicity in the mythology of the Oriental, his mind, race and character. An accurate assessment would have to recognize the dialectic between the Orientalist and the Oriental (Said 2000 [1975]: 101). The last sentence of Said provides the point of departure for this essay, although in an indirect fashion. Two Bengali translators, both orientals, approach two English, occidental texts, both by the same author. Only, each translator has strong, and very different, ideological motives of his and her own.

Orientalizing the Occidental Woman in Thelma Kumaresh Ghosh published his translation of Marie Corelli’s 1887 novel Thelma in the 1960s.1 The translator’s preface is rendered here fully:

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Occidental society is today [inclined towards] brash progressiveness. And our oriental society is busy with blind imitation of that. At this [critical] juncture of [time/social change], Thelma, a girl from those countries, is made to stand in front of our girls through the medium of this delicate and beautiful novel by the able authoress Marie Corelli. It is hoped that, if they must imitate, may Thelma be their role-model [Bengali Appendix A]. This may sound innocuous. Oriental society is being misled into imitating certain negative aspects of occidental society. Therefore, an alternative role-model—‘delicate and beautiful’ rather than brashly progressive—is offered through the fictional personage of Thelma. However, the publisher’s advertisement, appended at the end of the work, reveals the aim of the translation project to be far more complex and ideologically loaded. Addressing the reader directly, the publisher claims that he or she will be ‘enchanted/overwhelmed [the Bengali word is mugdha] by reading [the reflexion of] Hindu ideals and culture in the character of this Norwegian girl, Thelma’ [Bengali Appendix B]. The premise seems to be what Sadiq Jalal al ‘Azm calls ‘Orientalism in Reverse’, in which ‘the Orientalist essentialistic ontology has been reversed to prefer one specific people of the Orient’ (al ‘Azm 2000 [1981]: 217–38). As an example, al ‘Azm cites Georges Saddikni’s claim that: The philosophy of Hobbes is based on his famous saying that ‘every man is a wolf unto other men’, while, on the contrary, the inner philosophy implicit in the [Arabic] word insân preaches that ‘every man is a brother unto other men’ (al ‘Azm 2000 [1981]: 231).2 Our translator and his publisher jointly suggest that the Oriental Self has been corrupted by the Occidental Other. To counter this negative influence, they, however, do not turn to oriental texts. Brash progressiveness, especially on part of girls, has traditionally been associated with popular culture. Therefore, Ghosh and his publisher select a text that once belonged to the ranks of English popular fiction. They declare that the oriental ideals corrupted by the Other will, paradoxically, be found in this text that has been

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produced by a different constituent of that same Other. In effect, the Self of the Orient is seen to permeate the Other so deeply as to be able to nullify any anti-oriental influence emanating from it. This seems to be a remarkable case of reverse-domination. Thelma is a young Norwegian woman born of a Roman Catholic mother. Her pagan father passionately believes in Thor and Odin. The British aristocrat Sir Philip Bruce-Errington meets her while on a yachting holiday to Norway and falls in love with her, as does his friend George Lorimer. Lorimer plays the role of silent and faithful Dobbin, and Philip and Thelma are married. In London, the couple arouses the jealousy of Lady Winsleigh, who has long been in love with Philip. One evening, Lady Winsleigh, Philip, Thelma and Philip’s secretary Neville pay a visit to the Brilliant Theatre. Neville discovers its corpulent star Violet Vere to be his long-lost wife, a fact that Corelli hides from her readers, and Philip hides from everyone else in the novel, including Thelma. He repeatedly visits Violet Vere to persuade her, in vain, to return to her husband. Lady Winsleigh and her paramour Sir Francis Lennox use reports of these visits to suggest to Thelma that Philip is keeping Violet as his mistress. Finally, a letter from Philip to Violet is procured by Lady Winsleigh, and its contents misinterpreted both by her and Thelma, to whom Lady Winsleigh shows it. Thelma rushes back to Norway, leaving behind the letter and a note, in which she apologizes to Philip for having read the letter, blames herself for having lost her husband’s love and promises to wait at her home in Altjenford ‘till you want me again, if you ever do’ (Corelli 1929[1887]: 479). Philip follows her to her home and finds her being nursed back from near death, brought about by under-nourishment during her long journey, and subsequently giving birth to a stillborn son. Husband and wife are reunited, all misunderstandings are cleared up and they return to England. Here ‘the glory of motherhood’ falls ‘like a new charm’ on Thelma, ‘investing both face and form with superior beauty and an almost divine serenity’ (Corelli 1929[1887]: 614). Her son is named after her father Olaf, and she names her daughter after herself, as she had been named after her own mother. Lorimer is rewarded for his ‘silent heroism of faithful, unuttered, unrequited, unselfish devotion’ (Corelli: 613) when this little girl grows up to be sixteen and marries him, ‘a man past forty’ (Corelli: 615).3

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The translation project that produced the Bengali Thelma claims that the eponymous heroine, though superficially belonging to the occidental Other, is permeated by oriental values. Oriental women are in danger of losing these values when they imitate undesirable aspects of the Other. Thus, Thelma is, in some ways, more oriental than those oriental women who are the target readers of the Bengali translation. For the translator, the ‘hinduness’ of Thelma is revealed when Lady Winsleigh confronts her with Philip’s letter to Violet Vere. Corelli’s original is as follows: (S)he … only pondered on one thing,—how should she remove herself from the path of her husband’s pleasure? ... She had the strangest notions of wifely duty—odd minglings of the stern Norse customs with the gentler teachings of Christianity,—yet in both cases the lines of woman’s life were clearly defined in one word—obedience. Most women, receiving an apparent proof of a husband’s infidelity, would have made what is termed a ‘scene’,—would have confronted him with rage and tears, and personal abuse,—but Thelma was too gentle … to resist what seemed to be Philip’s wish and will … Of course, she was weak —of course, she was foolish,— … It is much better for a woman nowadays to be defiant rather than yielding,—aggressive, not submissive,—violent, not meek.… To abuse a husband well all round is the modern method of managing him! But poor, foolish, loving, sensitive Thelma had nothing of the magnificent strength of mind possessed by most wives of today … (Corelli 1929[1887]: 458–59). Corelli places Thelma’s reactions in a cultural framework, which to her is rooted in a set of values that offers an alternative to the values and practices of women contemporary with her. The values, however, are unambiguously occidental to her. She chooses to trace them back both to Norse paganism and later Christianity. The Bengali translator deliberately suppresses all such occidental allusions, so that the image of Thelma is not associated with cultural systems that the oriental reader may identify as alien. Instead, the shrewish wife is, by implication, the typical occidental Other, against which Thelma stands as an apparently culturally neutral ideal. The suggestion is, of course, that Thelma is a Hindu ideal,

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worthy of emulation by Hindu women. This is how Ghosh’s Bengali version of the passage reads when translated back into English: Perhaps it is a mistake to bring an idea of this kind into the mind. Especially, today no wife harbours such an idea. Rather, in such situations they thrash out the matter with their husbands. Many do not hesitate to cry, reproach, or even to indulge in physical violence [the Bengali word used is maara-maari]. These are the most modern ways of keeping husbands in control. But, what are we to do, our Thelma is not that kind of wife. Is she a fool? Possible. Is she afraid? That too is possible. It is not an untruth that she lives for her husband (Ghosh: 158, my emphasis) [Bengali Appendix C]. Not only is the translation free, rather than literal; one should particularly notice how Corelli’s ‘personal abuse’ is converted into specifically ‘physical violence’ inflicted on the husband by the shrewish wife in the world of the Other. An earlier passage in Corelli now needs to be quoted, and its translation examined. Ghosh’s translation, as we have seen, is being used to promote certain so-called Hindu ideals and values, a purpose totally alien to Corelli. The method seems to be to retain, at one level, the distinction between the Western ‘Other’ and the Eastern ‘Self’ in the shape of Thelma, showing how she embodies and practises values which eastern women are in danger of losing when they imitate what Ghosh sees as the undesirable features of western civilization. At another level, this distinction between East and West seems to be obliterated, as the translator seems to imply that, as we noted earlier, Thelma is more Eastern than the eastern women who are the translator’s contemporaries. This assertion is implied in those passages where, in Corelli’s original, Thelma is shown to oppose the assertive and aggressive role that nineteenth-century women are said to play in relation to their husbands. For instance, a long conversation between Lady Winsleigh and Thelma in Corelli establishes the following points: Thelma will not allow herself to doubt her husband’s fidelity because to do so would make her unworthy of his love; and even if his unfaithfulness were proved, she would not blame him: Because, you see, it would be my fault, not his. When you hold a flower in your hand for a long time, till all its fragrance has

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gone, and you drop it because it no longer smells sweetly—you are not to blame—it is natural you should wish to have something fresh and fragrant,—it is the flower’s fault because it could not keep its scent long enough to please you. Now, if Philip were to love me no longer, I should be like that flower, and how would he be to blame? He would be good as ever, but I— I should have ceased to seem pleasant to him—that is all! (Corelli 1929[1887]: 417; my emphasis). Complaining that Thelma’s devotion and loyalty are excessive, Lady Winsleigh tells her: Thelma, you’re the oddest creature going—a regular heathen child from Norway! You’ve set up your husband as an idol, and you’re always on your knees before him. It’s awfully sweet of you, but it’s quite absurd, all the same (Corelli 1929[1887]: 418).4 This is how it reads in Ghosh: Clara: You do look upon your husband like a god, but is it right to do so in this age? Thelma: What can I do, that is the traditional upbringing of our country. We worship our husbands [the Bengali phrase is bhakti kori], we can never think of them as servants to carry out our orders (Ghosh: 134–35) [Bengali Appendix D]. Notice the choice of the Bengali word bhakti, with its connotation of worship, rather than shraddhaa, which is a more neutral word and could have been rendered by ‘respect’. While Ghosh suppresses all negative references to idolatry, because idolatry is central to Hinduism, he uses the suggestive bhakti to suggest the desired image of oriental devotion to the husband in the Bengali reader’s mind.5 Thelma is not a pagan (although her father is so); she is a Roman Catholic. However, her attitude towards her husband is identified by Lady Winsleigh as excessively outdated, an opinion which she expresses through the image of pre-Christian idol-worship. Thus, to Corelli, Thelma is an ‘Other’ who embodies values which Corelli sees as desirable but absent for so long that they appear alien to the ‘Self’ of London society. The use of the pagan image should have held a special appeal for the Bengali

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translator of the novel, as he presents Thelma as an ideal to Hindu women. His abridgement of the exchange between Lady Winsleigh and Thelma, however, is curiously muted because of Corelli’s use of the image of idolatry that normally carries anti-Christian, and therefore, negative connotations for the western mind. What the translator did not take into account is that the pejorative attitude towards idol-worship is expressed by Lady Winsleigh, an unsympathetic character. By implication, Thelma’s devotion to her husband, with its intensity bordering on the idolatrous, seems to be endorsed by Corelli.6

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Critique of Gender-based Oppression The Bengali Thelma was preaching in the 1960s what Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1882–1932)—celebrated pioneer in the movement to make Bengali Muslim women aware of their condition and their rights—identified in 1922 as the Indian (male) writers’ motivated propagation of ‘the ability of the powerless heart to endure’ what she identified as gender-based oppression.7 The preamble to her translation of Marie Corelli’s 1896 novel The Murder of Delicia notes the ‘remarkable similarity between the story of Delicia and women in our society’ (Hossain 1999[1922]: 115). Hossain goes on apparently to display the oriental woman’s ‘essentialism’ regarding her occidental Other: Of what kind is the life of an English woman? We think they are independent, educated/intellectual [bidushi], equal with men, respected in society (Hossain 1999[1922]: 115). However, such essentialist distinctions between the oriental Self and the occidental Other are soon demolished: In the land of civilisation and independence, London city, hundreds of ‘Murders of Delicia’ are acted out daily. Alas! Women are powerless everywhere on earth (Hossain 1999[1922]: 115). Hossain’s device to drive home the parallels between the lot of occidental and oriental women is to choose a ‘representative’

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of oppressed Indian womanhood whom she names ‘Majluma’. Thus, the dialectic between the oriental translator and the occidental text, which, in the Bengali Thelma was made explicit only in the translator’s preface and the publisher’s advertisement, pervades the entire translation of The Murder of Delicia. Delicia, Hossain says, is independent, belongs to the ruling race and is not confined indoors. Majluma has no independence, belongs to a subjugated race, and is imprisoned for a great sin (Hossain 1999[1922]: 115).8 Also, Delicia is an educated intellectual, whereas Majluma is illiterate. From the moment of her birth, Majluma is told, ‘You are born a slave; you will remain a slave forever’. This eventually enslaves her very soul, so that, even after being repeatedly trampled by male relatives, she does not desist from licking their feet (Hossain 1999[1922]: 116). The only difference between Delicia and Majluma, as Hossain’s comments make clear, is in the manner in which they react to gender-based injustice (my emphasis). The translation, as should be evident by now, is interspersed with the translator’s commentary. Near its end, Hossain singles out the moral courage of Delicia in freeing herself from her faithless husband with society and the law against her. Hossain also anticipates the argument on the part of her readers that Delicia’s freedom was made possible by her economic independence. Hossain speculates that, given her deep sense of self-respect, Delicia would have separated from her husband, even if she were penniless. She, suggests Hossain, would have become a schoolteacher, or a governess, or even a nurse on a meagre salary in some shelter for the destitute. Delicia’s education and economic independence make her aware of her own value as a human being. She can, therefore, threaten to shoot her philandering husband, should he dare to touch her against her will. Majluma, says Hossain, can only throw herself at her oppressor’s feet and beg for his mercy, and be repeatedly kicked while drenching his feet with her tears (Hossain 1999[1922]: 116). The end is, however, the same for both. They are both killed by gender-based injustice and oppression. One wonders whether Hossain’s analysis is either essentialist or simplistic. She has, without much difficulty, pointed out situations where Majluma—a triply disadvantaged social entity in being an oriental, a woman and a Muslim—fares worse than Delicia.

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However, despite the latter’s social advantages of education and economic independence, in certain other situations, Delicia fares worse than Majluma. Majluma’s dowry, which her husband squanders, is after all, not earned by her. It has been accumulated by her ‘forefathers’ (my emphasis; the Bengali compound used is purbapurush, again, my emphasis), in other words, by men. One man destroying the wealth of another man is perhaps bearable. But the unmanliness (kaapurushata) of squandering Delicia’s money, which she herself has earned, is intolerable. ‘Yet English society claims to be civilised. Is this being civilised? Is this chivalry?’ (Hossain 1999[1922]: 122). Again, in India, says Hossain, one does not see women being shamed by the promiscuity of their husbands. In fact, Indian husbands are embarrassed by the slightest error on the part of their wives. In England, a husband’s peccadilloes cause the wife to feel insulted. ‘This is another difference between that country and ours’ (Hossain 1999[1922]: 128). As it may be evident by now, in The Murder of Delicia, Corelli rewrote the Thelma–story with the important difference that Delicia’s husband is actually unfaithful to his wife, and exploits her both economically and emotionally.9 Like Thelma, Delicia at first ignores rumours regarding her husband’s affair, in this case with the danseuse La Marina. Unfortunately, while going to a jeweller to buy her husband a wedding anniversary present, Delicia sees a beautiful pendant which the jeweller, unaware of her identity, tells her has been reserved by Lord Carlyon for La Marina. Delicia’s reaction shows how Corelli’s attitude towards the worship of one’s husband like an idol has changed in the space of the nine years that separate Thelma and The Murder of Delicia: (S)he … looked straight at the sculptured Christ that faced her. ‘I have loved him too much’, she said half aloud. ‘I have made him the idol of my life, and I am punished for my sin. We are all apt to forget the thunders of Mount Sinai and the great Voice which said, “Thou shalt have none other gods save Me.” … I made of my beloved a god; he has made of me—a convenience!’ (Corelli 1963[1896]: 104). The translator of Thelma, Kumaresh Ghosh, planning to show in Corelli’s occidental heroine the reflection of Hindu culture

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and values, discreetly endorsed her idolizing of her husband, who, let us remember, was worthy of being loved by his wife, as Delicia’s husband is not.10 Hossain, the translator of The Murder of Delicia —who is a Muslim sharing the Judaeo-Christian antipathy to idolatry—enthusiastically seizes on this passage, and having condensed it in translation, proceeds to give her own comments on it. A translation back into English of the important parts of this section in Hossain is essential: ‘I loved him so much—I thought him an idol to be worshipped. This is punishment enough for my sin (of idolatry)!’ ... The bewitching idol that Delicia had established on the throne—adorned with the priceless gems of worship—of her heart, God shattered to pieces in front of her eyes. Delicia! Do not pick up the broken pieces of that doll. When idolators worship an earthen image, they have the faith that a deity is inhabiting it. At the end of the act of worship, when they feel that the deity has returned to its own abode, they immerse the image in water. Who would worship a doll, knowing it to be a mere piece of clay? If the worshipper comes to know that instead of a deity, a ghost or vampire [Bengali pishaach] is in the image, then? Can he [or she] then worship it? Not only that, that a vampire has been worshipped by being mistakenly taken for a god, such a thought, such shame—is unbearable (Hossain 1999[1922]: 125) [Bengali Appendix E]. This is a remarkable passage, which shows an understanding of the principles underlying the rituals of an alien religion and culture. The English translation of Hossain’s commentary is feeble when compared with the original. Hossain uses the word pauttalikata from Sanskrit for idolatry. The Sanskrit word puttalika is the origin of the Bengali word putul, which is translated into English as ‘doll’. The suggestion of utter triviality contained in putul and its Sanskrit original is missing in the English ‘idolatry’, which is why, when possible, the translation given above has used ‘doll’. In this context, it manages to convey the intended sense of contempt for triviality. Lotman, studying the average reader in his study of the principles of translation, had specified four essential

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positions of the addressee (Lotman 1970, cited in Bassnett-McGuire 1991: 77–78). One wonders whether we see in Hossain’s elaborate commentary on idol-worship something of the third position of Lotman’s reader, where the reader is said to be deliberately extrapolating one level of the work for a specific purpose. The intensity of Hossain’s anger at idolizing an unworthy object seems to exceed Corelli’s. This is to be expected because the triply disadvantaged Majluma is conditioned into slavish worship of not only her husband but all her male relatives. As seen in Thelma, such attitudes were already seen to be out-of-date in western society. Whether they actually were so, is a different matter.

Opposing Ideological Interpretations of Corelli’s Own Contradictions? The question is, why was such a radical novel like The Murder of Delicia translated in pre-independence India, whereas the 1960s saw the translation of a decidedly reactionary novel like Thelma? Hossain’s translation was followed in three years’ time by a Bengali novel inspired by Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did. The Bengali novelist Sourindramohan Mukhopadhyay, says in his ‘preface’ that he was criticized for choosing a subject that did not at that time exist in Bengali society—that of a couple deciding to live together without formally marrying. His reply to such objections was that it was a novelist’s business not to confine himself to the present, but to anticipate the future (Mukhopadhyay 1925).11 A simplistic explanation would be that pre-Independence India was open to occidental influences, which was making the educated Indian aware of the shortcomings of oriental society and its values. Hence—Hossain’s translation of The Murder of Delicia, which both lauds and shows the problems associated with economic and intellectual independence of women in society. By the 1960s, following over a decade of independence, a reaction had naturally set in in favour of conservative values, which would account for the choice of Thelma for translation. The truth is that radicalism and reaction have always coexisted. With the spread of western education for women in the nineteenth century came the lament of the poet Iswarchandra Gupta (1821–59), that they would now, having learnt AB (i.e., the English

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alphabet), dress up as ‘bibis’ (westernized women), and insist on speaking ‘biliti’ (i.e., English) words. Would they ever again, he wonders, recite traditional chants to (Hindu) gods and goddesses and maintain traditional (Hindu) rituals?12 In the generation that followed him, another Iswarchandra, this time Vidyasagar, campaigned for widow-remarriage. His contemporary Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who introduced the novel as a genre into Bengali literature, and who is otherwise traditionally associated with the Bengal Renaissance, could only give qualified support to such a move.13 Marie Corelli herself took up contradictory stances regarding women’s issues throughout her life. The difference in attitudes towards husbands in Thelma and The Murder of Delicia has already been noted. Again, while she advocated economic independence for women and claimed that women were intellectually equal, if not superior, to men, she vehemently opposed the suffragettes— an opposition which she recanted later in her career.14 If The Murder of Delicia reads like a feminist attack on certain aspects of a patriarchal and male chauvinist society, her most successful novel, The Sorrows of Satan, which was published a year earlier in 1895, through the character of Lady Sybil Elton, unambiguously condemns the New Woman as promiscuous and spiritually as well as intellectually barren.15 Also the novel of Corelli most frequently translated in Indian languages is her second, and misogynistic work Vendetta (1886).16 The story, with strong echoes of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, tells of the Italian Count Fabio Romani who is struck by plague during an epidemic, is presumed dead and buried alive. He breaks out of his coffin, finds a hidden treasure, and comes back in disguise to take revenge on both his wife whom he finds to have been faithless to him without his knowing so, and his best friend who had been her lover all along, also without his knowledge. There is no way of knowing whether either Hossain or Ghosh was aware of these contradictions in their chosen authoress. It seems each simply seized upon the novel that proved most suitable for her or his ideological intention. Hossain is more radical in her approach to her Occidental original, and her work is more than a rendering; it makes an explicit comparison between the Occidental Other and an Oriental Self which is specifically created

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and named (‘Majluma’) for the purpose. Hossain condenses heavily to make room for her polemical commentary, but there is hardly any instance of discreet suppression of features of the original, which might alienate the oriental reader. This is precisely because Hossain is attacking the status quo with, if anything, greater violence than Corelli. Therefore, there is no urge to ‘conform’. Ghosh, who wants his intended readers to conform, is more insidious in editing his original and making Thelma and her environment acceptable to the oriental reader. We have already seen how he evades the explicit mention of idolatry and totally eliminates Lorimer’s sarcasm regarding Buddhism.17 Before concluding, a final case of ‘censoring’ needs to be cited from Ghosh. There is no marriage between the over-forty Lorimer and the sixteen-year old daughter of Thelma at the end of the Bengali version, in case the 1960s’ middle-class Bengali finds it hard to accept. Instead, Lorimer seems to be avuncularly affectionate towards the teenager, and makes the following, deliberately ambiguous declaration: ‘So, at last I have been caught in her hands!’[Bengali: dhara parlaam eri haatey] ‘Mad little girl!’ said our old Thelma, the mother, with a mild smile (Ghosh: 213) [Bengali Appendix F]. Therefore, neither oriental translator is dominated by the occidental original. Rather, both use the occidental texts in their declared attempts to influence their own oriental society. Hossain’s translation addresses both oriental women and men. Her intention is to literally whip the former to rebel against gender-based oppression as Delicia did, and to shame the latter into changing their attitudes.18 Ghosh prefers to let his doctored version of Thelma have its intended effect on his audience without any explicit commentary outside his ‘preface’ and the publisher’s advertisement. His engagement with the original text is far more intrusive as he edits and suppresses elements that might impede his intention of influencing his readership. As Susan Bassnett-McGuire explains, the translator first reads/translates in the ‘Source Language’, and then through a further process of decoding, translates the text into the ‘Target Language’. Translation and interpretation do not, therefore, remain mutually exclusive processes, as the interlingual

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translation is bound to reflect the translator’s own creative interpretation of the Source Language text (Bassnett-McGuire 1991: 80–81).

Notes 1. As with many Bengali publications, the book is undated. It is marked as shelflisted in the National Library, Kolkata, on 12 February 1965. The publisher is Bharat Book Agency, Kolkata, whose sole agent is named Jyoti Prakashalay, also in Kolkata. 2. The quotation is from Saddikni, ‘Man, Reason and Synonyms’, al-Ma’rifa (October 1978, Damascus), pp. 7–17. Saddikni, we are told in al ‘Azm’s endnote no. 37, ‘was until very recently a member of the Ba’th Party’s National (pan-Arab) Command, and head of its Bureau for Cultural Affairs. He was also Syria’s Minister for Information for many years.’ 3. This is what an internet entry on the novel says: I wish that every girl will read it as early as possible to preserve her purity, honesty and innocence! And every boy will read it to know what to look for in a love relationship (see ‘Thelma by Marie Corelli’). 4. Thelma replies that she has heard such opinions ‘only since [she] came to London’: ‘In Norway it is taught to women that to be patient and obedient is best for everyone. It is not so here’ (Corelli 1929[1887]: 418). 5. Given how Ghosh’s translation is being used to promote certain so-called Hindu ideals and values, our translator understandably omits Lorimer’s sarcastic reference to ‘a fellow in London who writes poetry on Indian subjects and who, it is said, thinks Buddhism might satisfy his pious yearnings,—but I think Odin would be a personage to command more respect than Buddha …’ (Corelli 1929[1887]: 83). In other words, paganism, to be tolerated by Corelli, has to be European paganism rather than Oriental. Buddhism is, when confronted by orthodox Hindus at close quarters, a religion distinct from Hinduism. However, when the Oriental translator sees Buddhism being commented on by an Occidental, the equation for the translator seems to be Hindu = India = Buddha. Therefore, a derogatory reference to India generally, and Buddhism specifically, would subvert the purpose of this translation which purports to show how a western text actually embodies eastern (=Indian = Hindu) values. What we see here, therefore, is judicious editing—may one call it ‘censoring’?—of the original where it would subvert the translator’s purpose. It is curious, however, to note how Bengali translations of Corelli habitually omit her Indian references, even when laudatory. Thus, Sudhindranath Raha’s translation of The Secret Power omits crucial references not only to the nonBengali Sir Ronald Ross, who worked in what was then spelt ‘Calcutta’, but also to the renowned Bengali scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.

130 Prodosh Bhattacharya 6. Corelli’s attitude towards husband-worship would undergo a radical change in the next novel to be considered in this essay. 7. Hossain, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, ‘Delicia Hatya’ in Matichur, Vol. II (1922), rpt. in Abdul Quadir (ed.), Rokeya Rachanabali, ‘Complete Works of Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’. The phrase translated occurs on p. 116. I am indebted to my colleague Dr Chandreyee Niyogi for providing me with her copy of this book. I was previously unaware that such a translation existed. 8. Hossain does not specify what this ‘great sin’ is. One wonders whether it is the sin of being born a woman. 9. The obvious similarities in the storyline of the two novels are as follows: Both have women protagonists who at first repose implicit faith in their respective husbands. In each novel it is an actress/danseuse who is the cause of mistrust between the couple. In Thelma, it is Violet Vere, in Delicia’s case it is La Marina (actually ‘Jewlia Muggins of Eastcheap’). When mistrust is created between husband and wife, both women leave the vicinity of their spouses. Thelma’s Dobbin is Lorimer, Delicia’s is the actor Paul Valdis. In both novels, at some point the protagonist loses a child, who is either stillborn (Thelma) or dies an early death (The Murder of Delicia). The similarities, of course, serve to emphasize the important differences: Unlike Thelma, Delicia has both economic independence and social fame as a successful novelist. Unlike Bruce-Errington, Lord Carlyon is actually unfaithful to his wife. While Thelma is reconciled to her loyal husband, Delicia dies of heartbreak. Corelli’s biographers have suggested that The Murder of Delicia was Corelli’s reaction to the gender-based discrimination and injustice that she suffered both in her social identity as a popular but critically derided woman novelist, and as an individual woman. The latter relates to the behaviour of her halfbrother Eric Mackay who lived on her (just as Lord Carlyon lives on Delicia), pestered her to have his poems published and, envious of her popularity, told outsiders that her novels were actually written by him. This is a claim made in the novel by the long-haired aesthete and failed poet Aubrey Grovelyn, who writes laudatory reviews of his own work and hates Delicia for her popularity. It has been suggested that Grovelyn is a caricature of Andrew Lang. In 1914, Corelli rewrote the story yet again in the novel Innocent. The eponymous heroine, once agin a successful novelist, dies of heartbreak after being emotionally abused by her lover Amadis de Jocelyn. This was a reflection of the emotional abuse inflicted on Corelli by the artist Arthur Severn towards whom Corelli had developed an emotional attachment when she was fifty-two and Severn was sixty-four, married and the father of five adult children. These biographical correspondences may be looked up, among other books, in Ransom, Teresa, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (1999), pp. 89–90, 172, 190. 10. In fact, Corelli too, as noted above, endorsed Thelma’s husband-worship, though for very different reasons.

Two Occidental Heroines 131 11. One should note how the innuendo in Allen’s title is totally eliminated by the somewhat lyrical title in Bengali, Mukta Pakhi, which translates as ‘Free Bird’. Mukhopadhyay is, if anything, more sympathetic towards his heroine Deepti (the word means ‘radiance’) than Allen was towards Herminia. After the death of her partner Alan, Herminia’s novel is not a commercial success, although the Spectator, while condemning her values, recognizes her genius. Deepti’s novel achieves great popularity while being savaged by the journalist establishment. A particular ‘yellow’ editor hunts out details of Deepti’s personal life, and launches a scurrilous personal attack on her in print. In retaliation, her admirer Kshitish (Harvey Kynaston in the original) hunts out and thrashes the editor. This is an almost exact parallel to what Paul Valdis, Delicia’s admirer, does to the editor who publishes a similar attack on her. Corelli, of course, would have been horrified at the similarity between her heroine and that of a ‘New Woman’ novel. 12. Paraphrased from a poem by Gupta, quoted by Hemendra Kumar Roy in his essay entitled ‘Nutan Banglar Pratham Kabi’ (‘The First Poet of New Bengal’), Hemendra Kumar Roy Rachanabali, ‘The Writings of Hemendra Kumar Roy’ (Kolkata: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, no date), pp. 283–89. The poem appears on pp. 283–84. Roy chooses to associate Gupta with ‘new’ Bengal in spite of his backward-looking views simply because, according to Roy, no previous Bengali poet had dealt with the phenomenon of Bengali men and women picking up western habits of dress, food and speech (p. 283). 13. See, for example, the article entitled ‘Bahubibaha’ (Polygamy), Bibidha Prabandha, ‘Miscellaneous Essays’, Vol. II, rpt. in Bankim Rachanabali, ‘The Complete Works of Bankimchandra’ (Kolkata: Tuli Kalam, Bengali date: Kabipaksha, 1393, i.e., English 1986), pp. 394–99. I am indebted to Professor Shibaji Chattopadhyay for this reference. 14. For her views on the economic and intellectual status of women, see most of her fiction and a large section of her non-fictional works collected in the two volumes, Free Opinions (London: Constable, 1905) and My Little Bit (London: W. Collins & Sons, 1919). Regarding her changing stand on suffrage, see her pamphlets ‘Woman or Suffragette’ (London 1907) and ‘Is All Well with England?’ (London 1917). 15. It is an interesting fact that the earliest published translation of Corelli in the National Library, Kolkata, is Bhubanchandra Mukhopadhyay’s 1903 rendering of The Sorrows of Satan, which reads like a word-for-word translation of the original. The publishers of the Bengali Thelma say in their advertisement that a translation of The Sorrows of Satan by Kumaresh Ghosh is in progress. This would be a second translation of that particular Corelli novel, but one which I have been unable to trace. 16. The National Library, Kolkata, stocks the following translations: Bengali— Roy, Manomohan, Mriter Pratishodh, ‘Vendetta of the Dead’; Hindi—Koti, Baijanath, Paap ka Pratikar, ‘Revenge for Sin’; Oriya—Mahapatra, – ‘Bloodshed’. It was translated at least once again in Bengali, G., Raktapata, by Sudhindranath Raha in the 1970s in the popular magazine Nabakallol, published in Kolkata by Deb Sahitya Kutir. This translation simply retained the original title ‘Vendetta’. Lal, A. (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Indian

132 Prodosh Bhattacharya Theatre lists a Sindhi dramatization in 1920 by Nanik Ram Dharamdas Mirchandani, entitled Farebi Fitno, ‘Deceitful Brawl’. 17. See n. 5 above. 18. It is worth quoting an instance of Hossain addressing the Indian male. Delicia is dead. Her dog Spartan is then ascribed the following thought in Corelli’s original: If truth, fidelity and devotion are virtues, then dogs are certainly superior to men; if selfishness, cunning and hypocrisy are virtues, then men are certainly superior to dogs (Corelli 1963[1896]: 171). Hossain translates this and adds the following comment: What does the society of our Bengali brethren have to say in reply to this? This comment is made by an English lady. It is beyond the abilities of the powers-that-be in this country to say anything to her.… Then what will you do, brethren? Shed tears in silence? (Hossain 1999[1922]: 133) [Bengali Appendix G].

References Books and Pamphlets English Allen, Grant. 1895. The Woman Who Did. London: John Lane. Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. 1991. Translation Studies, revised edition. London & New York: Routledge. Corelli, Marie. 1886. Vendetta! or, The Story of One Forgotten. London: Bentley. ———. 1929[1887]. Thelma, rpt. London: Methuen [London: Bentley]. All quotations are from Methuen edition. ———. 1895. The Sorrows of Satan: or, The Strange Experiences of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire. A romance. London: Methuen. ———. 1963[1896]. The Murder of Delicia, rpt. Bombay: Wilco Publishing House. [London: Skeffington]. ———. 1905. Free Opinions Freely Expressed: On certain phases of Modern Social life and Conduct. London: Constable. ———. 1907. ‘Woman or Sufragette? A Question of National Choice’ London: C. Arthur Pearson. ———. 1914. Innocent: Her fancy and His fact. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ———. 1917. ‘Is All Well with England? A Question’. London: Jarrolds. Pamphlet reprinted in collection of essays—My Little Bit. ———. 1919. My Little Bit. London: W. Collins & Sons. (Rpt Bombay: Wilco Publishing House, 1962) ———. 1921. The Secret Power: A Romance of the Time. London: Methuen. Lal, A. (ed.). 2004. The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Macfie, A. L. (ed.). 2000. Orientalism: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Two Occidental Heroines 133 Ransom, Teresa. 1999. The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing Ltd.

Bengali and Other Languages Ghosh, Kumaresh (tr.). n.d. Thelma. Kolkata: Bharat Book Agency. Koti, Baijanath. 1954. Paap ki Pratikaar. Delhi. Lotman, Juri. 1970; 1972. Struktura Khudozhestovennogo Teksta. Trans. La struttura del testo poetico. Moscow: Isskustvo; Milan: Musia. – Mahapatra, G. 1963. Raktapata. Brahmapur: Das Brothers. Mukhopadhyay, Sourindramohan. 1925. Mukta Pakhi. Kolkata: D.M. Library. Quadir, Abdul (ed.). 1991. Rokeya Rachanabali (‘Complete Works of Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’), new edition (1st edition 1973). Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Raha, Sudhindranath (tr.). 1970. Vendetta, serially published in Nabakallol. Kolkata: Deb Sahitya Kutir. ——— (tr.). 1995. The Secret Power, rpt. Kolkata: Deb Sahitya Kutir. [Details of first publication not given]. Roy, Manomohan. 1922–23. Mriter Pratishodh. Kolkata: Union Press [Bengali year: 1329].

Articles English and Bengali al ‘Azm, Sadiq Jalal. 2000[1981]. ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’ in A. L. Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 217–38. [Rpt. from Khamsin (8), pp. 5–26]. Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. 1986. ‘Bahubibaha’ (‘Polygamy’), Bibidha Prabandha (‘Miscellaneous Essays’), Vol. II. Rpt in Bankim Rachanabali (‘The Complete Works of Bankimchandra’). Kolkata: Tuli Kalam. (Bengali date: Kabipaksha, 1393). Hossain, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat. 1999[1922]. ‘Delicia-Hatya’, Rokeya Rachanabali pp. 115–33. [Rpt. from Matichur Vol. II]. Roy, Hemendra Kumar. n.d. ‘Nutan Banglar Pratham Kabi’, Hemendra Kumar Roy Rachanabali (‘The Writings of Hemendra Kumar Roy’). Kolkata: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, pp. 283–89. Saddikni, Georges. 1978. ‘Man, Reason and Synonyms’, al-Ma’rifa, October. Damascus, pp. 7–17, cited in Sadiq Jalal al ‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’. Said, Edward. 2000[1975]. ‘Shattered Myths’ in A.L. Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 89–103. [Rpt. from Naseer H. Aruri (ed.), Middle East Crucible: Studies on the Arab Israeli War of 1973. Wilmett IL: Medina University Press, pp. 410–27].

Online Resource ‘Thelma by Marie Corelli’. Abacci Books. http://www.abacci.com/books/ book.asp?bookID=2322, last accessed on June 27, 2005.

134 Prodosh Bhattacharya

Bengali Appendix ‘Two Occidental Heroines through Oriental Eyes’ (A)

(B) (C)

(D)

(E)

(F) (G)

Û±(±Ó… ¸˜±Ê√ ’±Ê√ ά◊¢∂ ’¢∂·øÓ¬¬ı˛ ø√Àfl¡º ’±¬ı˛ Ó¬±¬ı˛˝◊√ ’g ’Ú≈fl¡¬ı˛ÀÚ ¬ı…ô¶ ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ õ∂±‰¬… ¸˜±Ê√º ¤˝◊√ ¸øgé¬ÀÚ ›À√˙œ Œ˜À˚˛ ëŒÔ˘˜±Àfl¡í ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ Œ˜À˚˛À√¬ı˛ ¸±˜ÀÚ “√±Î¬ˇ fl¡¬ı˛±ÀÚ± ˝√√íÀ˘± ¸≈À˘ø‡fl¡± Œ˜ø¬ı˛ flŒı˛ø~ı˛ ¤˝◊√ ø¶ß* ¸≈μ¬ı˛ ά◊¬ÛÚ…±¸‡±øÚ¬ı˛ ˜±Ò…À˜º ’±˙± ¬ı˛˝◊√ À˘±, ’Ú≈fl¡¬ı˛Ì ˚ø√ fl¡¬ı˛ÀÓ¬˝◊√ ˝√√˚,˛ ŒÔ˘˜±˝◊√ Œ˚Ú ’±√˙« ˝√√˚˛º ø˝√√μ≈ ’±√˙«, › ¸—¶‘®øÓ¬ ¤˝◊√ Ú¬ı˛Î¬◊˝◊√ Ê√±Ú fl¡Ú…± ŒÔ˘˜± ‰¬ø¬ı˛ÀS ¬Û±Í¬ fl¡ø¬ı˛˚˛± ’±¬ÛøÚ ˜≈* ˝√√˝◊√ À¬ıÚº ¬ı≈øÁ¡ ¤ Ò¬ı˛À̬ı˛ Ò±¬ı˛Ì± ˜ÀÚ ’±Ú± ˆ≈¬˘º ø¬ıÀ˙¯∏ fl¡À¬ı˛ ’±Ê√fl¡±˘fl¡±¬ı˛ ø√ÀÚ ¤ ¬ı˛fl¡˜ Ò±¬ı˛Ì± Œfl¡±Ú ¶aœ-¬ı˛±˝◊√ fl¡À¬ı˛ Ú±º ¬ı¬ı˛— ¤¸¬ı Œé¬ÀS Ó¬±¬ı˛± ¶§±˜œ¬ı˛ ¸Àe ¤fl¡À‰¬±È¬ Œ¬ı±Á¡±¬Ûάˇ± fl¡À¬ı˛ ŒÚ˚˛º fl¡±iß±fl¡±øȬ, ˜±Ú-’øˆ¬˜±Ú, ¤˜Úøfl¡ ˜±¬ı˛±˜±ø¬ı˛ fl¡¬ı˛ÀÓ¬› Â√±Àάˇ Ú± ’ÀÚÀfl¡º ¶§±˜œÀ√¬ı˛ ¬ıÀ˙ ¬ı˛±‡±¬ı˛ ‹ ¸¬ı˝◊√ ˝√√À26√ ’±Ò≈øÚfl¡Ó¬˜ ά◊¬Û±˚˛º øfl¡c øfl¡ fl¡¬ı˛À¬ı±, ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ ŒÔ˘˜± ‹ Ò¬ı˛À̬ı˛ ¶aœ Ú˚˛º Œ¬ı±fl¡± Œ¸∑ ˝√√íÀÓ¬ ¬Û±À¬ı˛º ˆ¬œè Œ¸∑ Ó¬±-› ˝√√íÀÓ¬ ¬Û±À¬ı˛º ¶§±˜œ ’ôL õ∂±Ì Ó¬±¬ı˛∑ ø˜ÀÔ… Ú˚˛ Œ¸ fl¡Ô±º flv¡±¬ı˛± – ëÓ≈¬ø˜ ¶§±˜œÀfl¡ Œ√¬ıÓ¬± fl¡À¬ı˛ Œ¬ı˛À‡À‰¬± ¬ıÀȬ, øfl¡c ¤˚≈À· ›ˆ¬±À¬ı ‰¬˘±È¬± øfl¡ øͬfl¡∑í ëfl¡œ fl¡¬ı˛À¬ı± ˆ¬±˝◊√ , ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ Œ√À˙¬ı˛ ø˙鬱˝◊√ Œ˚ ‹ ¬ı˛fl¡˜/ ¶§±˜œÀfl¡ ’±˜¬ı˛± ¶§±˜œ ¬ıÀ˘˝◊√ ˆ¬øMê√ fl¡ø¬ı˛, ’±:±¬ı˝√√ Ê√œ¬ı ¬ıÀ˘ ˆ¬±¬ıÀÓ¬› ¬Û±ø¬ı˛ÀÚºí ë’±ø˜ Ó“¬±˝√√±Àfl¡ ¬ıάˇ ˆ¬±˘ ¬ı±ø¸Ó¬±˜---- Ó“¬±˝√√±Àfl¡ ά◊¬Û±¸… ˜”øM«√ ˜ÀÚ fl¡ø¬ı˛Ó¬±˜º ’±˜±¬ı˛ ¬Û±À¬Û¬ı˛ [Œ¬ÛÃM√√ø˘fl¡Ó¬±¬ı˛] ˚ÀÔ©Ü ˙±øô¶ ˝√√˝◊√ ˘/í ... . . . Œ˚ Œ˜±ø˝√√Úœ ˜≈øM«√øȬÀfl¡ ŒÎ¬ø˘ø˙˚˛± ’˜”˘…-¬ıP˛ -‡ø‰¬Ó¬ ˝√√+√˚˛ ø¸—˝√√±¸ÀÚ ¶ö±¬ÛÚ fl¡ø¬ı˚ ˛ ±˛ øÂ√À˘Ú, Ó¬±˝√√± ÷ù´¬ı˛ Ó“¬±˝√√±ı˛˝◊ Ú˚˛Ú-¸˜Àé¬ ‰”¬Ì« fl¡ø¬ı˛˚˛± ŒÙ¬ø˘À˘Ú/ ŒÎ¬ø˘ø˙˚˛±/ Ó≈¬ø˜ Œ¸ ¬Û≈Ó≈¬À˘¬ı˛ ˆ¬¢ü ’—˙&ø˘ fl≈¡Î¬ˇ±˝◊√ ˚˛± Ó≈¬ø˘› Ú±º . . . Œ¬ÛÃM√√ø˘fl¡¬ı˛± ˚‡Ú õ∂øÓ¬˜± ¬Û”Ê√± fl¡À¬ı˛, Ó¬‡Ú Ó¬±˝√√±À√¬ı˛ ø¬ıù´±¸ Ô±Àfl¡ Œ˚ ˝◊√ ˝√ ±ÀÓ¬ Œ√¬ıÓ¬± ’¬ıÓ¬œÌ«± ’±ÀÂ√Ú,----¬Û”Ê√±À˙À¯∏ ˚‡Ú ˜ÀÚ fl¡À¬ı˛, Œ√¬ıÓ¬± ¶§¶ö±ÀÚ øÙ¬ø¬ı˛˚˛± ø·˚˛±ÀÂÚ√, Ó¬‡Ú õ∂øÓ¬˜±øȬ ø¬ı¸Ê«√Ú Œ√˚˛º Œfl¡¬ı˘ ˜±øȬ:±ÀÚ Œfl¡ ¬Û≈Ó≈¬˘ ¬Û”Ê√± fl¡À¬ı˛∑ ˆ¬Mê√ ˚ø√ Ê√±øÚÀÓ¬ ¬Û±˚˛ Œ˚ õ∂øÓ¬˜±˚˛ Œ√¬ıÓ¬±¬ı˛ ¬Ûø¬ı˛¬ıÀÓ«¬ ˆ”¬Ó¬ ø¬Û˙±‰¬ ’±ø¬ıˆ”«¬Ó¬ øÂ√˘, Ó¬À¬ı∑ Ó¬À¬ı øfl¡ ’±¬ı ˛¬ Û”Ê√± fl¡ø¬ı˛ÀÓ¬ ¬Û±À¬ı˛∑ Œfl¡¬ı˘ Ó¬±˝√√±˝◊√ ÚÀ˝,√√ Œ√¬ıÓ¬± wÀ˜ ø¬Û˙±À‰¬¬ı˛ ¬Û”Ê√± fl¡¬ı˛± ˝√√˝◊√ ˚˛±ÀÂ√ º ¤ ø‰¬ôL±----¬¤ ˘7¡¡¡± ’¸˝√√…/ ëŒ˙À¯∏ Ò¬ı˛± ¬Ûάˇ˘±˜ ¤¬ı˛˝◊√ ˝√√±ÀÓ¬í [˘ø¬ı˛˜±¬ı˛] ë¬Û±·ø˘ Œ˜À˚˛/í ˜‘≈√ ˝√√±¸˘ ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ ¬Û≈À¬ı˛±Ú ŒÔ˘˜±/ ˜±/ ¤ fl¡Ô±¬ı˛ ά◊M√ À¬ı˛ ’±˜±À√¬ı˛ ¬ıeœ˚˛ w±Ó‘¬¸˜±Ê√ øfl¡ ¬ıø˘ÀÓ¬ ‰¬±Ú∑ ¤ ά◊øMê√ ¤fl¡Ê√Ú ˝◊√ —À¬ı˛Ê√ ˜ø˝√√˘±¬ı˛/ Ó“¬±˝√√±Àfl¡ øfl¡Â≈√ ¬ı˘± ¤À√˙œ fl¡M«√ ±À√¬ı˛ 鬘Ӭ±Ó¬œÓ¬/ øfl¡Â≈√ ¬ıø˘À˘¤ ˝◊“√ ˝√ ±À√¬ı˛ fl¡_¶§¬ı˛ ¸±Ó¬ ¸˜≈^ ¬Û±¬ı˛ ˝√√˝◊√ ˚˛± Œ˘ø‡fl¡±¬ı˛ |¬ıÌ ø¬ı¬ıÀ¬ı˛ õ∂À¬ı˙ fl¡ø¬ı˛À¬ıÚ±º Ó¬À¬ı ’±¬ı˛¬ øfl¡ fl¡ø¬ı˛À¬ıÚ w±Ó¥ ·Ì Úœ¬ı˛À¬ı Œ¬ı˛±√Ú fl¡èÚº

Chapter Six

Orientalism and its Other(s): Re-reading Marx on India Chandreyee Niyogi The Postcolonial Critic versus the Marxist Scholar As the unsuspecting progenitor of Postcolonial Studies, Edward Said had proclaimed his departure from the tradition of Marxian and New Left scholarship by subjecting Marx, who was seen by Said’s methodological mentor Foucault as one of the ‘founders of discursivity’ (much as Said was on his way to becoming himself), to the scrutiny of a discourse analysis of Orientalism. Since then he has been seen as the first ‘postcolonial’ theorist to represent Marx as inadvertently complicit with the ideology of colonialism, more than anything else in his refusal to sympathize with the sufferings of the colonized people, who he acknowledged were being ruthlessly disinherited and expropriated, not to mention exterminated, in his articles on India. It is equally well known that Aijaz Ahmad was one of the first Marxists to question Said’s reading of the articles called ‘British Rule in India’ and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, which Marx contributed to the New York Tribune in June and July 1853. Ahmad correctly identified Said’s redefinition of Orientalism at bottom as a racial superiority discourse, the analysis of which could be seriously flawed due to Said’s underlying presumption of ‘sympathetic identification’ as the essential criterion of transcending Orientalist prejudice. Instead, Ahmad upheld the two general principles which he said ‘govern the principal historiographical traditions in India’.

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One is that the right to criticize is a universal right, which must be conceded to everyone, European and Asian alike; what is objectionable is not the Europeans’ right to criticize Asians, past or present, but those particular exercises of this right which are manifest and arbitrary exercises of colonial or racial or any other kind of prejudice. In other words, criticism itself must be evaluated from some objective criterion of validity and evidence. The accompanying principle, necessarily conjoined to the first, is that the archive which we have inherited from our colonial past is, like any substantial historical archive, a vast mixture of time bound errors and invaluable empirical information (Ahmad 1993: 234). It seems that in Ahmad’s scheme there is not much space for reviewing cultural archives from the pre-colonial past, as if our access to them have been rendered irrevocably contingent upon the structures of knowledge supported by colonial and postcolonial archives, in which case Ahmad’s invocation of ‘some objective criterion of validity and evidence’ becomes invalid. Elsewhere, in questioning Said’s quite un-Foucauldian borrowings from European High Humanism, Aijaz Ahmad even includes the ‘values’ that Said inherits from that tradition, namely ‘tolerance, universality, non-racialistic pluralism, liberalism, humanism, sympathetic participation in the emotional experience of the Other, etc.’ (Ahmad 1991: 141). Once again, it would seem that Ahmad holds such values exclusive to the European Humanist tradition, especially intriguing when he is much more ready to observe that it is not a European peculiarity to constitute itself by constituting the other as inferior and dangerous. ‘Assertions of those sorts of distinctions between the Orient and Occident, East and West, is by no means a trait of the European alone’, writes Ahmad, and makes the significant point that ‘the relationship between Brahminical and Islamic high textualities, the Orientalist knowledge of these textualities, and their modern reproductions in Western as well as non-Western countries’ (Ahmad 1991: 144–45) is much too complex to be subsumed under what Said chooses to represent as the ahistorical and monologic discourse of Orientalism. But in Ahmad’s method of inquiry the postcolonial stance of perpetual ‘respect’ for other cultures, whether spatially or temporally distant

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from the present, is at once to be held suspect for its refusal to historicize them1 (Ahmad 1991: 154). Interestingly, in his ‘Afterword to the 1995 Printing’ of Orientalism, Said still insisted on ‘the prevalence in the discourse itself of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away or discounted’, and on the basis of such underlying attitudes, went on to make an essentializing distinction between Orientalism and Hellenism as the serious study of other cultures. One of the reasons why Orientalism and Hellenism are radically incomparable, thought Said, was because ‘Orientalism expresses antipathy to Islam, Hellenism sympathy for classical Greece’ (Said 1995[1978]: 342–43). Yet Said showed himself aware that ‘the interest of Western academics in subjects such as multiculturalism and “postcoloniality” can in fact be a cultural and intellectual retreat from the new realities of global power’ (Said 1995[1978]: 351). He also stated quite vehemently that ‘Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each and every Orientalist’, in response to the critique of Albert Hourani that while Said had singled out the exaggeration, racism and hostility of much Orientalist writing, he neglected to mention its numerous scholarly and humanistic achievements. (Said 1995[1978]: 342). And Said recognized that one of the achievements of Orientalism was what Raymond Schwab had described as a vision of ‘integral humanism’, ‘fundamentally a phenomenon of difference, generating comparative techniques’, whereas Renaissance humanism ‘was essentially assimilative, in that it flattered Europe without disturbing Europe’s self-affirming cultural superiority’2 (Said 1984: viii, xviii).

Attending to the Text beyond Ideologies Trying to steer through the Scylla and Charybdis (or if you prefer, binaries) of sympathy and criticism, the oppositional moral attitudes to indigenous cultural tradition, which were most notoriously fought out in the clash of reformist and revivalist ideologies on Hinduism in late nineteenth century India, Marx in fact emerges a far more complex writer in his articles on India than Ahmad is willing to discuss. It is certainly true, as Ahmad observes, that ‘Marx’s denunciation of pre-colonial society is no more strident

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than his denunciations of Europe’s own feudal past, or of the Absolutist monarchies, or of the German burghers’ (Ahmad 1993: 224), and that in Marx’s mind the idea of the progressive potential of colonialism was linked ‘with the idea of a progressive role of capitalism as such, in comparison with what had gone before, within Europe as much as outside it’ (Ahmad 1993: 225–26). This gave rise to Marx’s famous vision of colonialism’s ‘double mission in India; one destructive, the other regenerating…’ which Ahmad criticizes Said for interpreting as the epitome of Marx’s ‘Romantic Orientalist Vision’ (Ahmad 1993: 234). Marx’s participation in a romantic orientalist vision, however, is hardly un-Marxist; it is a sign of the kind of involvement which Raymond Schwab would commemorate a 100 years later, marvelling at the historical coincidence of Romanticism and the rise of Oriental Studies. Initiating a debate about the meaning of ‘the Primitive’, which Said notes as the most significant observation of Schwab, ‘at the moment when a thirst for discord was spreading through Europe, fomenting the crises that spawned political revolution, oriental studies, masses fundamentally at odds with the West, began their own revolt’ (Schwab cited in Said 1984: x). Jung yields to the same romantic orientalist vision when he writes about the events surrounding Anquetil-Duperron’s translation of the Upanishads. ‘This was at the very time when’, writes Jung, ‘after almost eighteen hundred years, the inconceivable happened and the Goddess of Reason drove the Christian God from his throne in Notre-Dame’ (Jung 1984[1967]: 58). But it is in fact the other Oriental Renaissance, in which the ‘orient’ is the subject that Marx envisages, and to that extent, his aim is hardly different from that of Said. Ahmad argues that Marx’s position was ‘the exact opposite of what can accurately be called the Orientalist position in India’, and that Marx self-consciously dissociates himself from that position when he declares earlier in that very first dispatch: ‘I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindustan’. According to Ahmad then, the project of reviving a golden past of India is what characterizes true Orientalism and Marx is not collusive with it. Ahmad also thinks that Marx dissociates himself as unequivocally from the civilizing project of Anglicists like Macaulay when he writes, for example, that ‘the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially

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different and more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before’ (Ahmad 1993: 235). In nineteenth century parlance, the term ‘misery’ suggested a sense of disinheritance that was considerably more than social or economic ‘backwardness’. It is in the obvious gap between Said’s reformulation of Orientalism and Ahmad’s more conventional understanding of it, however, that there is scope for a close semiotic analysis of Marx’s actual texts. No matter how derisive Engels’s judgement on the colonialist ‘civilization-mongers’ may appear to Ahmad, Marx does seem to believe in a hierarchy of civilizations. It is the Romantic Orientalist in Marx who speaks out when he exalts native Hindu civilization over those of its conquerors: Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hindooized, the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects (Marx 1977[1969b]: 494–95). If Marx used the term ‘barbarian’ to describe what seemed to him the inferiority of conquering tribes in relation to the civilization of the conquered race or nation (demonstrable as a law of history rather than as the inherent superiority of ‘Hindu civilization’), he was also capable of using its adjectival noun as nonchalantly to describe ‘the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization’ in the same dispatch3 (Marx 1977[1969b]: 498). In all probabilities he uses the conventional term to distinguish these Asiatic tribes from conquerors of a Hellenic civilization. But of course one cannot describe a Hellenised European civilization as ‘barbarian’. That would be both historically inaccurate and a contradiction in terms. And so Marx writes, The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindoo civilization (Marx 1977[1969b]: 494–95). After this, Marx proceeds to make a very important, though typically Orientalist statement about the moral worth of a society, in spite of its decadent customs. It is another significant achievement of Orientalism that it could theoretically accommodate

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primitivism and civilization within the same social space. Implicit in Marx’s description of colonialism is also a genuine admiration for the so-called high cultural tradition of Hindu civilization, enriched by the assimilation of the cultures of its conquerors who were ‘Hindooized’, and Marx’s resigned but certainly disapproving statement of capitalism’s ‘leveling’ assault upon it. They destroyed it (i.e., Hindu civilization) by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by leveling all that was great and elevated in the native society (Marx 1997[1969b]: 495). When Marx moves on to refer to ‘all that was great and elevated in the native society’, he has already moved beyond his earlier reference to Hindu civilization, and is talking about India’s heterogeneous cultural accrual of the pre-British past. Yet significantly enough, he returns to the term Hindu in his startling prophecy about India’s ‘independence’, which Ahmad finds less embarrassing to acknowledge as credible, at least in Marx’s time, than the more utopian and totalizing liberationist prophecy latent in his rhetorical question: ‘The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?’ (Marx 1977[1969a]: 493). What Marx has to say about the regeneration of Indian society, and not merely its political independence, as Ahmad so readily assumes, is the following: The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether (Marx 1977[1969b]: 498).

’Hindoo Civilization’ and Evangelical Missions Certainly it is not too impossible to assume that Marx knew the difference between the category ‘Indian’ (which he uses at the beginning of the sentence) and the category ‘Hindu’ (which he uses in the end), as much as he was sensitive to the different

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connotations of the phrases ‘British rule’ and ‘the English yoke altogether’. One set of the categories is political, and the other set refers to conditions of cultural emancipation, or as Marx might have intended, of spiritual self-formation. Between them, the two sets of expression also serve to bridge the gap between modernity and tradition, as Marx is implying all along. There is no reason to assume that Marx is indulging in mere rhetorical synonymy if this line is read in the context of the rest of the paragraph, which Ahmad does not when he interprets Hindus as simply meaning the ‘inhabitants of that country’. Ahmad himself, in his article ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, assumes a Hindu nationalist (as distinct from a Muslim or politically fundamentalist Islamic) subject position when he refers to the differentiating and discriminating impulses of Hindu culture: Assertions of those sorts of distinctions between Orient and Occident, East and West, is by no means a trait of the European alone; any number of Muslims do it; and when Ayatollah Khomeini does it he does so hardly from an orientalist position; and in our own case of course (italics mine), Hindu spirituality is always posited against Western materialism, not to speak of Muslim barbarity. Nor is it possible to read our own (italics mine) old kavyas and Dharmasutras without noticing the way dasyus, shudras and women are constantly turned into dangerous and inferiorised others (Ahmad 1991: 144). Surely this is more than a mere strategic address to a predominantly Hindu Indian readership? Besides, it is logical to assume that if Marx is conferring agency upon a specific class, ‘the proletariat’ in the context of class struggles in England, he is being equally specific in referring to the Hindus as a community because it is within this fold that the ‘caste’ struggle, with its essentially religious underpinnings, is to be fought out. As an aside at this point I will refer you to a letter of Sister Nivedita, the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda, in which she explains his reinvention of Vedanta as a religion of egalitarianism. This was shortly before Vivekananda’s failed attempt to set up a Sanskrit university with the assistance of the Maharaja of Kashmir as it was vetoed down by the British residents:

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I am sure you agree with me as to the value of the light that Vedanta throws on all religious life: what one does not realize is that this light has been in the conscious possession of one caste here for at least 3,000 years—and that instead of giving and spreading it, they have jealously excluded not only the gentiles but even the low castes of their own race! This is the reform that Swami is preaching—and this is why we in England must form a source of material supplies4 (Nivedita 1982, Vol. 1: 5). This view was corroborated by Sir Charles Tegart, Special Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Branch, in a section of his report, entitled ‘Swami Vivekananda and the Unrest in India: A note on the Ramakrishna Mission’, dated 22 April 1914. The report submitted that Vivekananda endeavoured to unite his countrymen and awaken in them a sense of their power, as exemplified in their ancient history, through the Vedanta philosophy which taught the equality of all men and nowhere laid down the caste restrictions which subsequently grew up and formed the rock which disunited and split up the Indians in such a way as to enable a number of Englishmen—all of one mind—to govern three hundred millions of his countrymen (Samanta 1995, Vol. IV: 1345). Even as late as 1928, the published letters of Swami Swarupananda proved to be a source of nationalist inspiration in their Vedantic approach to reconciling the enlightenment debate between self-love and social on the one hand, and German idealist debates about the relation between self and other on the other hand, not to mention later debates on the integrity and fragmentation of selfhood: Come let us love ourselves endlessly for once this day.… We are not self-centred, base natured or contemptible. Our ‘me’ is not confined to, nor convicted in the blind chamber of superstition. Bearing all the pleasures and prosperity, as well as the immense burden of pain and sufferings of the body on our back, we are the complete ‘self’. Carrying with us the million lowlinesses of our nation and its dejected silence, and yet revelling

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in the fleeting delights that break out in moments of rare and rollicking laughter—we include all in our mature Self. This self desires to see itself a thousand, and to find a thousand within it. And if we cannot love that self, if we cannot place our faith in it, or be proud of our selfhood, then why did we ever acquire language, and why were we given the capacity for thought? (Swarupananda 1928: 11). Or, expatiating upon the relation between you and I: There is something precious in you that I lack. And to acquire it I become eager to know you. The fact that I seek you so eagerly and cannot remain enveloped in my own self is proof enough that the eagerness of my heart will not tremble into perfection except by the touch of the golden wand which, too, is a partial perfection of your inner being. The one has always desired the other, a being has forever belonged to another and a thing sought its proximity to another for its completion and perfection. Imperfection or the lack of beauty can never be the prayer of anyone (Swarupananda: 16). The first edition of these letters was published in 1920 by the Hindu Mission Vani Mandir and, strangely enough, advertised in a short-lived bilingual periodical called Karmi [i.e., worker] in 1922 (Karmi 1922: 76–77). The periodical was a mouthpiece of the nascent trade union and cooperative movements in India, especially Bengal, before the establishment of the official Communist Party of India. It also announced the publication of another series of Swarupananda’s letters on the problem of labour [‘srama-samasya sankranta’] (Karmi 1922: 78–79),5 and enthusiastically reported details of Gandhi’s charka movement as a sign of the revival of home-based manufacture and economic selfsufficiency. Marx’s most scathing comment on what he calls ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization’, is directed towards the duplicity of the colonial enterprise in which political alliance between forces of reaction can also erase the boundaries between orient and occident. To innocent observers, it may even appear as ‘sympathetic identification’ with Hinduism:

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While they combated the French revolution under the pretext of defending ‘our holy religion’, did they not forbid, at the same time, Christianity to be propagated in India, and did they not, in order to make money out of the pilgrims streaming to the temples of Orissa and Bengal, take up the trade in the murder and prostitution perpetrated in the temple of Juggernaut? (Marx 1977[1969b]: 498). On the other hand, as Engels suggested later in his ‘introduction’ to The Class Struggles in France, the dogmatism of early Christians pitted against the Roman Empire was distinctly different, particularly in its open aversion to hypocrisy, and its refusal to attend the ‘sacrificial ceremonies’ of the pagan established church, both of which contributed to the persecution of the Christians. When they were ordered to attend the sacrificial ceremonies of the pagan established church, in order to do the honours there, the subversive soldiers had the audacity to stick particular emblems—crosses—on their helmets in protest. Even the wonted barrack bullying of their superior officers was fruitless (Engels 1977[1969]: 203). It is perfectly possible to read Marx’s statement, in the vein of Said, and contrary to Ahmad’s reading of his other statement dissociating himself from the civilizing mission, as a tacit endorsement of the evangelical project that began with the motive of religious conversion and veered into educational hegemonization. I should think that Marx anticipates an end to the Anglicist project more in his contempt for ‘the English yoke’ at the end of the second article, still a distant vision in the future. But the point that Marx is raising here is that it is often advantageous for political beneficiaries of a system to disclaim their own religion and espouse that of others, whether it belongs to the colonizer or the colonized. The positivist Auguste Comte, a contemporary of Marx, wrote about the subjection of the spiritual to the temporal in European Christianity, that We must beware of attributing the vice of hypocrisy and hostility to progress to Catholicism alone. From the moment that Protestantism changed its natural attitude of simple opposition, it

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shared those vices to the full. Catholicism became retrograde against its nature, in consequence of its subjection to temporal power; and Protestantism, erecting that subjection to a principle, could not but be retrograde in at least an equal degree (Comte 2000[1896]: 134–35). It is also possible that Marx is referring to the early patronage of evangelical missions in India by members of the Clapham sect,6 whose transcultural agenda has usually gone unrecorded in history. Despite Halhed’s orientalist involvement in ‘the true spirit of commercial credit’ of London—which he saw as a Babylon where both slaves and souls are sold—Halhed concluded in his pamphlet On the Probable Consequences of Missionaries being sent from England to India that the exemplary lifestyle of Christians was the best way to convert people and not indoctrination (Rocher 1983: 216, 241). Even as late as 1882, Reverend William Hastie, the Principal of the General Assembly’s Institution in Calcutta, who was questioning the wasteful expenditure in a – sraddha (funeral) ceremony at the Shobhabazar Rajbari (The palace of the Rajas of Shobhabazar) in a series of open letters to the educated Hindus (Hastie 1882), apologized in his epigraph with a passage from the Corinthians that says: ‘Though I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel’ (I, Corinthians, 9, 16). While Halhed was assisting the formation of the future British imperial state in his codification of ‘Gentoo laws’, he was also one of the first to expand the scope of intercultural affinity in his ‘scientific’ study of the relation among Indo-European languages and, like William Carey, in concentrating on a project of developing the vernacular language, Bengali. But even though Halhed’s contribution to the missionary enterprise has been acknowledged, his English translation of the Upanishads remains still unpublished, while his contemporary Anquetil-Duperron’s French and Latin translations were published from France in the early nineteenth century. Again, while orientalist administrative philosophy was being undermined by the relentless opinion campaign waged by the abolitionist William Wilberforce and other members of the Clapham sect, John Shore, i.e., Lord Teignmouth, the Governor

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General of India after Cornwallis and a committed member of the group, worked on a translation of the Vedantic text Yogavashishtha notwithstanding his so-called anti-Hindu evangelical stand (Rocher 1994). This text, as Sudhir Kakar represents it, ‘was composed between the ninth and twelfth centuries in Kashmir, wherein Princess Cudala, setting out on her inner journey of exploration, deliberately eschews all Gurus and external authorities, and reaches her goal through a seven stage self analysis’ (Kakar 1991: 45). Notice the similarity of the theme with one of the objectives of the revolutionary movement as described by Marx’s anarchist contemporary Proudhon. Refusing to grant modern civilization any special status in terms of progress from the ethical standpoint, Proudhon had pointed out that ‘emancipated reason concludes with savage reason that the universe is a not me objectified by a me’ (Proudhon 1883: 22), and that the ‘collective me of humanity’ was aiming at ‘consciousness of itself through a thousand evolutions’ (Proudhon 1883: 11). Proudhon described this ethical ‘voice of reason’ and humanity’s search for self-knowledge in the image of Milton’s Eve (Proudhon 1883: 7, 11). Another Hindu text that was introduced to the West in this phase of cultural interaction was Bhartrhari’s Vairagyashatakam, a gospel of renunciation that attains a special poignancy in its commitment to family responsibilities7 (Kosambi 2002).

Intertwining Ideals as a Practical Critique of Religion and Tradition Marx certainly did not suffer from Hinduphily. He began his first article on India with that harsh indictment of Hindu religion which, to Said, would smack of orientalist racism unmitigated by any trace of sympathy. Comparing Hindostan with both Italy and Ireland, Marx seems to pass his ultimate sentence upon Hinduism and its ‘ancient traditions’ in the first dispatch on India: ‘And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan’, in which ‘sensualist exuberance’ and ‘self torturing asceticism’ are equally powerful components. Though the misery inflicted by the British

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upon Hindostan is of a qualitatively different kind than any it had suffered earlier, there is no doubt, in Marx’s mind, that there were oppressive regimes, both Hindu and Islamic, in India’s past. Britain’s unique contribution is ‘a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo’ in consequence of modern India being cut off from ‘all its ancient traditions and from the whole of its past history’ (Marx 1977[1969a]: 488–89). Even if these lines are read as an ironic critique of Hindu nostalgia, Marx, after all, has begun by taking apart the traditionality of Hindu religion, which harboured more contradictions than perhaps any religion of the world. He also suggests that it was, like Catholicism in Italy and Ireland, a religion both of the opulent and the dispossessed, and that this has its own significance in the formation of the Hindu cultural identity. By the end of the second article, Marx is clearly hinting at a secularized Hindu revival which must be founded upon (a) the elements of society [as distinct from Marx’s later emphasis on political economy] scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, and (b) all that was ‘noble and elevated’ in native society by reclaiming the past, not as a golden age of Hindostan, but as a repository of cultural memory or repressed spirit, as it were. In the first article, Marx feels that Hindostan is more pertinently comparable with Ireland than Italy not because of its national history of being repeatedly conquered and dismembered, but because of its social abjection. In the second dispatch, however, and in the passage that is generally read as Marx’s prophecy of India’s independence, Marx ends up comparing the Hindoos with the idealized types of classical European tradition. Even in the most inferior classes, these gentle natives are ‘more refined and more adroit than the Italians’, ‘whose submission even is counterbalanced by a certain nobility, who, notwithstanding their natural languor, have astonished the British officers by their bravery’. And among the higher castes, ‘they represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin’ (Marx 1977[1969b]: 498). The concept of ideal or ‘advanced’ types of all cultures played a crucial role in nineteenth century imagination, and Marx was not untouched by it. Ideal types signified the very obverse of the term ‘stereotypes’, which seems to dominate postcolonial theoretical discussions of other cultures at present, and they were

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supposed to represent to the romantic–orientalist the highest notions of human perfection available to any race. Certainly Marx was motivated by romantic tropes of ‘national/ racial character’ and India as ‘the mother of civilizations’. The question is not whether we should or not endorse the validity of his claims framed within those tropes, but to see how a different kind of orientalist agenda could be embedded in some Hindu revivalist efforts of the nineteenth century. It is the process of the gradual elision and suppression of the texts of Hindu radicalism, incorporating issues of class and gender relations, and their disappearance in the course of the struggle for political independence, that seems to me to be the immediate history to be recovered. Why did the radical texts of the early discourse of Hindu revival never surface? This question is never asked because it is assumed from the outset that all Hindu revivalist projects were potentially vulnerable to exclusionism, if not inherently patriarchal and fundamentalist. Just to show how an agenda of mutuality within the family could be inscribed within tropes of Hindu spirituality that dominated Bengal towards the end of the Swadeshi movement, I will cite part of a satirical article published in the periodical Sahitya, edited by Sureshchandra Samajpati, the grandson of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and now generally regarded as a conservative Hindu. This article, which attempts to instil respect for the reciprocity of love in a conjugal relation is certainly addressed to the male Hindu orthodoxy, but is far from conservative in its intent in that it urges the husband to take the commitments to his wife seriously. Its modernity and play of irony depend upon an understanding of the conflict between the dualistic and nondualistic schools of Vedanta in Hindu philosophy: There is a bit of a ‘you and me’ relation in human love, yearning (biraha), sighs and injured feelings (abhiman). That is the first sign of spirituality. Some believe that love is something that becomes nobler when it does not ask for return. ‘I have given you the love of my soul, and I don’t ask for anything in return.’ My little son gave me the broken head of a doll and said, ‘Here dad! Take this’. That is to say, when the head had no use for him, he thought it best to give it away. The Tarkalankar (a Brahmin Pundit specialised in the art of argument) gave away all his love to his wife and said, ‘I seek no return’. His wife

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retorted, ‘Don’t try to fool me with that. Of course you’ll have to accept a return.’ The Tarkalankar fearfully accepted. A return should always be accepted. In Varanasi, nobody takes charity from another. The price of love is love (Samajpati 1907–8: 491). Or another passage, combining a rhetoric of Vedanta with a rhetoric of Yoga, which concentrates on the practice of self-discipline and had, by then, come to displace the earlier emphasis on Adwaita (non-dualism) in the discourse of Hindu revivalism. This passage is at its depth an attempt to ridicule the male Hindu householder into refraining from domestic violence: According to the Sankhya philosophy, the eternal relation between Prakriti (Nature/woman) and Purusha (God/man) is mysterious. But much of it is solved in the practical field of domestic life. Prakriti is unreal, illusory, bereft of content, a misconception; all this follows from that dialectic. This is Jnana Marga (the way of Knowledge). But to attempt to assault such senseless illusions (maya)— bereft of content—with other creations of illusion (maya), like words and canes, and hope that it will be dispelled is singularly ridiculous. Those who wish to be recognised as Jnani (one who has acquired Knowledge) should rather practice selfrestraint. According to this formula, oppression of the weaker sex is a despicable sin. It is actually an act of ignorance (ajnana) to blame that which is unreal (Samajpati 1907–8: 492).8 For those who might consider this a conservative approach to the gender problem, it may be mentioned that in April 1909 the same periodical published an enthusiastic report entitled ‘The Improvement of Indian Women’, in which it briefly recorded the proceedings of an educated Hindu women’s conference in Madras and the possibility of a union of oriental and occidental women in the activities of the Lahore Purdah club. Hindu and Muslim women had expressed interest in learning English, while English women had expressed a similar desire to learn Urdu. It was the objective of this club to bring together Hindu, Muslim, Parsee,

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Indian-Christian and English women (Sahitya 1909: 34). The current official version of women’s movement in India, however, goes only to the point of tracing its origin back to the founding of the All India Women’s Conference by Margaret Cousins in 1927. There could, however, be more incisive excursions into a preBritish Hindu ‘tradition’ that attempted to question the very binaries of colonial knowledge formation. One example is the article analysing a controversy over romantic love in Tagore’s Chitrangada, which pointed out the vital role that sex played in classical Hindu representations of love in the face of debates taking place for, and against the nineteenth century Hindu custom of arranged marriage versus Victorian courtship. The article suggested that in Sanskrit kavyas women often had greater control over their sexuality than the modern Indian, or even the European woman did, reminding the modern Hindu reader that Shakuntala had taken the initiative in expressing her love for Dushyanta in a letter, which alludes quite clearly to her unquenchable sexual desire for him. Instead of seeing her fate as the just consequence of such forwardness, the article asserts that in this reversal of stereo-types it is the man who appears to be coy, and the woman the bolder partner (Sen 1909: 408). To go back to the 1850s again, there is no doubt that despite the limits of the epistemological framework within which Marx was writing, he was laying down the imperative of a Hindu cultural revival as surely as the imperative for political unification. We may reserve our skepticism about the temporal interests at work behind Marx’s imperative, but there is little doubt that the intention of Marx in these articles was to insinuate a potential line of socio-cultural, if not ‘spiritual’ revolution for India, and not merely the conditions for material transformation. At the end of the second article, Marx makes a clear distinction between two historic phases that he believes will not be conjunctural but successive. The first is the creation of ‘the material basis of the new world’, to be accomplished in the bourgeois period of history; the second phase is one where a ‘great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch’, giving rise to a system of internationally democratic control of the world market and modern powers of production. But it would also be based on an ethical negation of the necessity of sacrificial violence that

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Marx sees as an aspect of human progress, even after the Enlightenment. This vision of a future, that can only succeed the phase of bourgeois material revolution, is expressed in the metaphor of the transubstantiation of a pagan (and the reference is to a Hindu) idol in conclusion to Marx’s dispatch entitled ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’—referring not to a proximate, but a distant consequence of British rule in the future, following the regeneration of ‘that great and interesting country’ ‘at a more or less remote period’ (Marx 1977[1969b]: 498). When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced people, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain (Marx 1977[1969b]: 499). Progress, the highest ideal of European Enlightenment, thus becomes the image of a pagan idol associated with the mindless slaughter of its elect worshippers, and there is little to choose between them, unless there is a change in the social ethos resembling a change in the very perception of religion as Hindus (as a category of non-Christians = pagans) are accustomed to view it.9 Early Christianity, when Engels represented it in his 1895 ‘Introduction’ to The Class Struggles in France, took on an antiimperialist cast in its subversive spiritual strength: It is now almost to the year, sixteen centuries since a dangerous party of overthrow was likewise active in the Roman Empire. It undermined religion and all the foundations of the state; it flatly denied that Caesar’s will was the supreme law; it was without a fatherland, was international; it spread over all countries of the empire, from Gall to Asia, and beyond the frontiers of the empire10 (Engels 1977[1969]: 203). This party of overthrow, which was known by the name of Christians, underwent immense persecutions even after feeling ‘strong enough to come out into the open’, but eventually triumphed when Constantinople ‘proclaimed Christianity the state religion’

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(Engels 1977[1969]: 204). Engels’s analogy of socialism with Christianity reveals how fundamental was the idea of religion as a semiotic struggle against the dominant symbolic order in nineteenth century Marxist thinking, even if it could not salvage itself from processes of inevitable appropriation and displacement. The syntactic repetition suggesting that the early Christian movement was both ‘without a fatherland’ and ‘international’ might even leave scope for interpretation by analogy that socialism and Christianity were not only both international, but also movements predicated upon the commitment to a ‘motherland’,11 at least in their early stages.

Marx and Engels on the Fundamental Criticism of Material Conditions At the close of 1843, Karl Marx had articulated one of the significant paradoxes constitutive of the interests at stake in the study of religion: namely, that ‘the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism’ (Marx, cited by MacKendrick n.d.). Though the meaning of this statement is still contentious, Engels demonstrated a possible approach to this kind of criticism. He wrote in one of his last works, entitled ‘On the Early History of Christianity’ that the Book of Revelation was both the ‘most obscure book in the Bible’ and ‘the most comprehensible and the clearest’. Drawing upon recent German scholarship, he emphasized that the work should be clearly comprehended as an expression of rage against Rome and its persecution of Christians, who were overwhelmingly drawn from the humblest classes throughout the Empire. As such, it commands respect as an expression of resistance to oppression (Leupp 2004). Engels observes the parallels between ‘early Christian and workers’ socialism’ [not simply the ‘modern working-class movement’]12 in a systematic way, beginning with their origins in the anti-slavery movement, the movement of poor people deprived of their natural rights, and a simultaneous movement of colonized and diasporic populations. One significant point of analogy is the unjust persecution of socialists, both as religious apostles and social reformers, and the branding of saints as enemies of mankind.

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The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome.… Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead.… In their early stages, neither socialism nor Christianity is self-conscious. They see themselves rather as continuing phases of a traditional religious order. The early prophets of Christianity, for example, perceived themselves as attempting to purify Judaism, and did not call themselves Christians …. Here it is therefore not a case of conscious Christians but of people who say they are Jews. Granted, their Judaism is a new stage of development of the earlier but for that very reason it is the only true one (Engels 1957[1894–95]). Engels also pointed out that there was no uniform dogma binding the nineteenth century socialist international, which was as divergent as the early Christian sects. The only common agenda that could be achieved after the First International13 was a Marxist programme of economic reform, which merely included some external aspects of transformation, and was achieved at the cost of a definite separation with the anarchists, hinting perhaps, that it was more of a strategic choice: There was among the early Christians the same division into countless sects, which was the very means by which discussion and thereby later unity was achieved. Was the International held together by a uniform dogma? On the contrary … It took a whole quarter of a century from the foundation of the International before the separation from the anarchists was final

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and complete everywhere and unity could be established at least in respect of most general economic viewpoints. And that with our means of communication—railways, telegraph, giant industrial cities, the press, organized people’s assemblies. (Engels 1957[1894–95]; italics mine). What Engels seems to emphasize in this passage is the lack of a uniform dogma in the First International, which was a belief and a principle so overwhelming that it took twenty-five years to bring about an organized ‘separation from the anarchists’. A similar lack of self-awareness and mutual distrust had made unity impossible for the early Christians, which also made discussion possible among the divided sects and led to their later unity. But for the nineteenth century International, it grew into a consensus to unify along the lines of ‘materialistic’ Marxian economic reforms at the expense of separation from the idealistic anarchists. Insofar as they were mass movements, the end was not always perceived as the same, to the extent that their dissensions led to internecine slaughter. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets—although there are prophets enough among both of them—they are mass movements. [Italics mine] And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible (Engels 1957[1894–95]). [Engels’s use of past and present tenses in the same sentence, which conflates Christianity and a ‘workers’ socialism’ predating the ‘modern working-class movement’, both of which existed in the past and still exist at the time of Engels as apparently independent movements but moving towards the same end, is intended to show how confused the mass perception of ‘socialism’ can be].

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In this section Engels drew attention to the problem of tracing socialism as a movement of faith to identifiable originary figures, like Jesus Christ or his twelve apostles, who had gone down in ecclesiastical history as the founding fathers of Christianity. This vital difference between the history of a spiritual revolution involving the contribution of many thinkers, philosophers and believers, and an institutionalized ecclesiastical history tracing the origin of a religion to the founding fathers of a clerical order had already been pointed out by Edwin Johnson in Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins (1887), a radical reading of early Christianity at the stage of its separation from Judaism. Many of the issues about the history of a movement of faith that were reinvented to serve the ends of church and empire are raised in this work, to which Engels alluded obliquely in his article. Engels, however, is not one to uphold ‘mass movements’ as the exclusive, or even the most worthwhile means of advancing the cause of what he calls ‘workers’ socialism’. As one who is committed to ‘the unrelenting struggle against the enemy both within and without’ (italics mine), even after dismissing the prophets in the early stage of the movement, Engels sees the early Christian organizer as a kindred soul to ‘one of the prophetically minded enthusiasts of the International’, referring to himself, and again suggests that there is a more rational meaning to prophecy than meets the skeptical eye: That is all the dogmatic content of the messages. The rest consists in exhorting the faithful to be zealous in propaganda, to courageous and proud confession of their faith in face of the foe, to unrelenting struggle against the enemy both within and without—and as far as this goes they could just as well have been written by one of the prophetically minded enthusiasts of the International (Engels 1957[1894–95]). Finally, Engels’ conclusion to this article is once again a semiotic directive to the understanding of modern history in terms of religion, in which dogma, prophets, scholars, leaders and masses all have their distinctive roles to play: The core of the universal religion is there, but it includes without any discrimination the thousand possibilities of

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development which became realities in the countless subsequent sects. And the reason why this oldest writing of the time when Christianity was coming into being is especially valuable for us is that it shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is western, Greco-Roman addition. It was only by the intermediary of the monotheistic Jewish religion that the cultured monotheism of later Greek vulgar philosophy could clothe itself in the religious form in which alone it could grip the masses. But once this intermediary found, it could become a universal religion only in the Greco-Roman world, and that by further development in and merging with the thought material that world had achieved (Engels 1957 [1894–95]). For Engels, the individualistic flexibility of including ‘the thousand possibilities of development’ without any discrimination constituted the unifying core of the universal religion (which was later lost), but the phrase ‘without any discrimination’ that accounts for later Christian sectarianism, perhaps also emphasizes the lack of any comparative and critical tradition of evaluation within that religion as distinct from the scholarly tradition of Judaism. However, the value that this case study of early Christianity has for socialism is that it was made possible by the strong influence of a conquering Hellenic culture on Judaism in polytheistic Alexandria, through philosophers like Philo and Seneca. It was this that made early Christianity a true product of oriental and occidental components, in which the domination of the occidental element was achieved by ‘further development in and merging with the thought material that world had achieved’, and so, implicitly, could be remoulded by reinfusing that ‘thought material’ with the ‘thought spiritual’ that had become subservient in, and eventually excluded from Christianity as the heretical traces of an other world. In the historical context of the emergence of post-enlightenment socialism, a crusading British evangelism came into contact with monotheistic Islam and the polytheistic Hindu cultural tradition of India in the same historical period. But in the case of early Christianity, the intermediation of a Jewish religion of ‘differentiated monotheism’, that Engels mentions earlier as the Protestant

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inheritance of the Jewish religion (which is not the same as the spiritual quest of a scholarly, reformist Judaism in its Alexandrian phase that later resulted in the separation of Gnosticism from Catholic Christianity), was also at once the basis of the worldwide movement’s solidification into one religious ‘form’, that came to represent the ‘cultured’, but ‘vulgar’ (i.e., public, commonplace) later Greek monotheistic philosophy meaningful only to the denizens of the Greco-Roman first world. Engels here seems to be indicating again that a more scholarly philosophical culture of comparative evaluation was deliberately excised from early Christianity in order to give it a popular, ‘vulgarised’ form, increasingly acquired from the civilized Greco-Roman culture, rather than from its original textual sources. From that point, Christianity could only move towards a dogmatic institutionalism, having lost sight of the unifying spiritual faith capable of sustaining the wide diversity of beliefs permitted in first century Judaism that were later branded as heretical. In this article, Engels gives an account of the dominance of a Jewish–Christian tradition of monotheism supervised by a Hellenic civilization behind the rise of the modern European mind. The reference to an excess of Greek ‘vulgar’ monotheism in the later development of Christianity is also perhaps an implicit comment on the Jewish religion turning monotheistic by eschewing its own popular traditions of mother-goddess and nature worship.14 If Edwin Johnson is a source of Engels’s article, he clearly distinguishes three strands of religious development in the earliest phase of Christianity developing from Judaism; one, the orthodox Jewish religion that eventually disowned Christianity; two, the new Christian religion which was mostly authenticated by gentile sources and eventually separated itself from the Jewish religion; and a third, less remembered strand of revolutionary spiritual movement that could be misinterpreted as both a revival of Judaism directed against the legalistic power of the orthodoxy, as well as a new religious movement hardly differentiable in its beliefs from Christianity, except for a few heresies like the refusal to accept Christ as the son of God, and therefore a cut above the rest of humanity. At the same time, this new Judaism refused to endorse the Jewish view of Israel as ‘the chosen people’, and much like the early Christians, sent out a diaspora of prophets

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and apostles all over the world in search for the true observers of divine law among other religions (Johnson 1887). In the article ‘Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity’, published in 1882, Engels specified some aspects of scholarly Christianity in its earliest phase as distinct from the popular Christian religion that came to supersede it: The numerous writings attributed to Philo which have reached us originate indeed in a fusion of allegorically and rationalistically conceived Jewish traditions with Greek, particularly stoic, philosophy. This conciliation of western and eastern outlooks already contains all the essentially Christian ideas: the inborn sinfulness of man; the Logos, the Word, which is with God and is God and which becomes the mediator between God and man; atonement, not by sacrifices of animals, but by bringing one’s own heart of God, and finally the essential feature that the new religious philosophy reverses the previous world order, seeks its disciples among the poor, the miserable, the slaves, and the rejected, and despises the rich, the powerful, and the privileged, whence the precept to despise all worldly pleasure and to mortify the flesh (Engels 1882). The keystone that needed to be added to make Christianity a religion for the masses was the idea of ‘the incarnation of the Word become man in a definite person and his sacrifice on the cross for the redemption of sinful mankind’. It was the introduction of this keystone that eventually paved the way for ‘a shallow and vulgarized’ representation of Christianity to the masses, and only this popular form of Christianity surfaced in the formation of the first Christian state. Like Edwin Johnson, Engels too, is most critical of the idea of necessary human sacrifice as a ransom to evil and distinguishes it from the allegorical significance of animal sacrifice, a ritual that may have originated in the idea of a sacrifice of the elements of bestiality in oneself. It is remarkable that during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal—a movement that can now be identified as the first visible uprising against colonialism—one of the songs composed by Mukunda Das around 1908 sought to warn against a fanatical craze among young Bengali terrorists to take and offer life as ‘sacrifice’ to the Mother by invoking,

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as the song goes, the ‘significance’, or semiotic implications of bali as animal sacrifice: Everybody joins the clamour for sacrifice, but nobody understands its significance; does not reflect on the import of the word sacrifice.… The poor man says—he who offers up sacrifices consisting of wild beasts (sic) does not know what a number of beasts is harboured inside their own houses. O! Mind you, offer sacrifices—sacrifice of buffaloes represented by anger and malice, sacrifice of human victims represented by greed and lust, sacrifice of goats represented by idle and vain misgivings (Samanta 1995: 164).15 This song, included among the ‘terrorist documents’ of British Indian government, strongly suggests a return to the semiotic content of the ritual, and in the Bengali government translator’s insistence on turning inside out the symbolic value of both animal and human victims of sacrifice, through a reiteration of the phrase ‘represented by’, rather than ‘representing’, argues for the valorization of an allegorical meaning of sacrifice over the literal, and more popular one.

Devising a Methodology of Reading between Discourse and Counter-Discourse What I hope to have suggested in this essay is that just as Marx is liable to be interpreted as an Orientalist in the sense that Said calls him, no matter how much Ahmad would like to gloss over the problematic passages in Marx’s texts on India, so also it is not imperative that Marx’s susceptibility to writing within the discursive limits of Orientalism be interpreted as potential fracture lines in his anti-imperialistic humanism. No discourse or counter-discourse, whether Orientalist or Marxist, can retain for itself a consciously radical agenda of universal liberation. So if postcolonialism has emerged as Said’s much desired counter-discourse to orientalism, there is always a space for questioning its assumption that the so-called Oriental Renaissance was always altogether an elaborate mythology woven

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around imperialistic economics. It is almost forgotten that Said’s Orientalism, after all, was conceived to supplement, and not entirely to challenge, Raymond Schwab’s book The Oriental Renaissance, which insisted upon the significance of India as a cultural influence in the making of modern Europe. Said points out in his ‘Foreword’ that ‘Schwab sees the Judaeo-Christian component in Western culture as being forced to submit to the discovery of an earlier civilization’ (Said 1984). Marx, too, relies on ‘the mythological chronology of the Brahmin himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world’ (Marx 1977[1969a]: 488). Schwab believed that the introduction of Indian thought into Europe in the late eighteenth century onwards and its integration into the cultural and philosophical concerns of the period amounted to a cultural revolution of the same order as that of the Renaissance of fifteenth century Italy, and that the revival of an atmosphere in the nineteenth century brought about by the arrival of Sanskrit texts into Europe—produced an effect equal to that produced in the fifteenth century by the arrival of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine commentators after the fall of Constantinople (Schwab 1984). But if Said’s Orientalism is only a guide to the reading of western texts to unravel the imperialist politics at work behind it, then where does one look for the politics of anti-imperialism, as Aijaz Ahmad so incisively observes? Said, of course, wishes to inspire a fundamental critique of ‘the development of a historicism which is expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of Western imperialism’ in its connection with ‘the actual practice of imperialism’ (Said 1986: 223).16 It is significant that Said warns against conflating imperialism with ‘the West’. Aijaz Ahmad cannot forgive Said for representing historicism itself as the twin of ‘the actual practice of imperialism’ (Ahmad 1993: 154, Fn 16). But Said is questioning the process of development of a particular kind of historicism rather than historicism per se. J. A. Hobson, from whose work Lenin derived his theory of imperialism, had long ago observed about early twentieth century historicism that

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imperialism is based upon a persistent misrepresentation of facts and forces chiefly through a most refined process of selection, exaggeration and alteration, directed by interest cliques and persons so as to distort the face of history (Hobson 1902).17 The politics of counter-imperialism, paradoxically, is embedded in the politics of empire itself, except that its interstitial location can only be identified at those historical moments where the ethical or spiritual beginnings are encroached upon by the political. Most histories of Orientalism, from Raymond Schwab to Edward Said, do not consider it significant to take into account the intellectual contribution of native scholars and patrons like Dara Shukoh to the formation of Oriental Studies, which is not synonymous with Orientalism.18 In the case of Said it is a meaningful silence, because he cautions the oriental reader at the outset that ‘what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroachments’ (Said 1986: 216). Surely what Said meant by this was not so much a counter-discourse, like Postcolonial Studies, but the recovery of a history of studies and interpretations of oriental cultures by both western and eastern people, which had always already resisted (and is not therefore simply a postSaidian cultural agenda) the ideological and political authority of Orientalism?

Notes 1. Ahmad questions the structuralist anthropology of Levi-Strauss, which, according to him, encourages an attitude of uncritical respect for other cultures including one’s own past. Lacking any sense of continuity or contiguity, not only cultures, ‘but even periods of culture, are said to be discrete, and all one can do is respect them; the worst one could do would be to historicize them’. Ahmad does not seem to consider the possibility of being able to respect cultures as discrete, as well as historicize them in the context of European history, which Marx was evidently doing in his dispatches on India. 2. The second Renaissance, according to Schwab, ‘combined India and the Middle Ages and thereby displaced the centuries of Augustus and Louis XIV. The job of displacement was apportioned to the great capitals: Calcutta provided, London distributed, Paris filtered and generalized.’

162 Chandreyee Niyogi 3. ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’ 4. Letter to Mr And Mrs Eric Hammond dated 10 February 1898. This interpretation of Nivedita does not corroborate the recent view of her biographer Sankariprasad Basu (as expressed in a personal interview with the author), and Sunil Gangopadhyay (in his historical novel Pratham Alo) that Vivekananda wanted to set up a Sanskrit Math (monastery) at the end of the nineteenth century for a rationalist reading of the Vedas, to deny their authority as a source of all that was being passed as scripturally sanctioned by the ideologues of Hindu cultural chauvinism. 5. Somewhat mysteriously, the announcement stated that as the Swami was engaged in solitary meditation at the time, ‘from where and when the letters were written would remain unpublished’ (nibhrita sadhane rohiachen bolia, kon sthan hoite kabe kon patrakhani likhita hoiachhilo taha aprakashita thakibe). The publishers’ advertisement to the enlarged edition of Swamijir Patra, 1335 (Bengali year) acknowledged that all the letters compiled in the volume had been written before the Bengali year 1327, which was the year of publication of the first edition of this volume. If this Swarupananda was the same as Vivekananda’s disciple who looked after Vivekananda’s early publications, he was dead long before 1327 (1920). Whoever the Swami was, although it was never mentioned that he was no longer alive, all the letters published under his name were dated before 1327. 6. The Holy Trinity Church of Clapham opened for worship in 1776. Its early members included John and Henry Thornton, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, James Stephen, John Shore, Charles Grant and Henry and John Venn. Actively involved in the anti-slavery movement, they also supported political emancipation for non-conformists and Roman Catholics. The Clapham sect also founded the Church Missionary Society and after much struggle, secured permission from the East India Company to allow missions to India. 7. The passage I refer to is in Bhartrhari, Vairagyashatakam (Shloka 21) trans. Swami Madhavananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2004), pp. 18–19. See also D.D. Kosambi’s article on Vairagyashatakam, which first makes this observation in the context of a critical Marxian analysis of the poem. 8. Such ethical directives to the mutuality of love and self-discipline in marriage are rare in so-called ‘traditional’ Hindu texts, and its early traces are to be found in some Christian texts written roughly in the two centuries before and after Christ, as Foucault discusses in The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3. This is the time that Marx and Engels also seem to be discussing in their critiques of later Christianity. What is significant in this context is that the mutuality of love in the first ‘orthodox’ Hindu representation is seen as a contract, and defined by economic laws of exchange rather than scriptural sanction. 9. Once again, I will remind the reader, that in the period of early Christianity’s emergence as reformed Judaism, i.e., in Alexandria before and after the death of Christ, one of the main debates between Christian and pagan scholars was over the necessity of human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.

Re-reading Marx on India 163 10. Referring to the Christians as a clandestine and ‘dangerous party of overthrow’ of the Roman Empire, Engels suggested a comparison between the imperial repression of their ‘emblematic’ activity and that of contemporary socialists who bore the insignia of their belief, in an emphatic slip of the tongue that draws attention to itself in a literary text: The Emperor Diocletian could no longer quietly look on while order, obedience and discipline in his army were being undermined. He interfered energetically, while there was still time. He promulgated an anti-Socialist— beg pardon, I mean to say anti-Christian, law. The meetings of the overthrowers were forbidden, their meeting halls were closed or even pulled down, the Christian emblems, crosses, etc., were, like the red handkerchiefs in Saxony, prohibited. 11. The title of Edwin Johnson’s 1887 work on the early history of Christianity, which was probably a source of Engels’s article ‘On the History of Early Christianity’ is Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins. It begins with the following quotation from ‘The Life of Mr A. Cowley, by Dr Sprat’: He had an earnest intention of taking a review of the original principles of the primitive Church: believing that every true Christian had no better means to settle his spirit, than that which was proposed to Aeneas and his followers to the end of their wanderings, Antiquam exquirite Matrem. Marx, like many other orientalists, consistently refers to India as ‘she’ in his second dispatch, while comparing Hindostan with Italy and Ireland in the first, both countries renowned for their national image as ‘motherland’. In the second dispatch, Marx also compares British rule in India with the stereotypical mode of women’s exploitation by men, suggesting that the British ‘millocracy’ is thriving on India’s transformation into ‘a reproductive country’, while her own ‘productive powers’ are paralysed due to the isolation and lack of communication of the stereotypical village units. This may be understood, even in the context of 1853, as an allegorical representation of Indian society along the lines of gender-based imbalance of power, in relation to the political imperatives of the Empire. 12. Comparing this with my earlier reference to the Bengali periodical Karmi (literally ‘worker’), and the obvious distinction that has to be made between this term and the now commonly highlighted ‘Marxian’ agent of revolutionary transformation, the ‘working-class’ labourer, or sramik (in Bengali)— note the reference in Karmi to the imminent publication of Swarupananda’s letters on the ‘labour’ problem (‘srama-samasya sankranta’ in Bengali, where srama means labour)—the reader will understand the significance of Marx and Engels’s repeated deployment of the term ‘worker’, as in the famous slogan ‘Workers of all countries, unite!’, rather than the more limited expression ‘working-classes of all countries, unite’. 13. The First International was founded in 1863 primarily as a federation of English and French labour leaders, resolving to create a continuing political and economic cooperation. They invited representatives of other continental nations to join them. It was not specifically called a socialist or working men’s international as it was composed of various elements, among which were

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

Proudhonists and Blanquists leading the Frenchmen, as well as non-socialist democrats of Mazzini’s persuasion among the Italians. Among the British, non-political unionists and radical reformers—some of whom were followers of Comte—worked side by side. Later Marx and his followers came to assume command of the International when he became the head of its General Council and the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867, claiming to lay bare the ‘economic law of motion of modern society’ (Coser 1977: 65–68). See for example, the passage ‘… to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem’ in Jeremiah 44:16. This song is only available in its English translation in the British Police Records. In my article ‘Trials, Translations, and Exorcising the Ghost of Macaulay’ (Niyogi 2003) I have discussed how the British colonial government’s policy of repression was directed against selected songs and specific writers of the Swadeshi movement, so that some of them were lost in their original Bengali versions, and other songs entered into later anthologies with certain lines and stanzas missing (in comparison with the translated versions of these songs appearing in the police records). The songs might have been lost altogether if they had not appeared in the official government records, as oral history is considerably more difficult to retrieve. This is one of the songs which have not been anthologized in any of the standard Bengali collections of the songs of Mukunda Das, to the best of my knowledge. At any rate, it was not one of the four songs for which Mukunda Das was prosecuted; and the British records list it as one of the less popular songs of the poet. Said’s extremely complex and nuanced sentence reads: ‘What … has never taken place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of western imperialism and critiques of imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, the actual practice of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenization of histories is maintained.’ Such distortions, as Said did not acknowledge in public, could only be removed by the guidance of supra-personal forces waiting to reveal themselves. Around the middle of the seventeenth century Dara Shukoh translated the Upanishads in Persian; Montesquieu published his Persian Letters in 1721 (referring to a group of Persians who were living in his house), and in 1775 Anquetil-Duperron made his translation of the Upanishads from Dara Shukoh’s Persian translation. For the view that Shukoh was given permission by the Brahmans (not ‘Brahmins’, though) to translate the Upanishads, see Charles Johnston, ‘The Heritage of the Brahmans’, at http://www.sacredtexts.com/hin/cjw/cjw15.htm [This undated paper has been attributed to Charles Johnston by the Theosophical University Press Online Edition Website (http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/crest/crest-hp.htm). Another website of JYIMTA: ODPUSA, listing ‘(American) Oriental Department

Re-reading Marx on India 165 Papers (W.Q. Judge)’ delivered between 1891 and 1897 lists the paper entitled ‘The Heritage of the Brahmans’ as anonymous (dated 15 January 1894), although the name of Charles Johnston appears in this list as the author of another paper entitled ‘The Dream of Ravan’ in 1897. Rather curiously, the initials CJ also appear against another lecture delivered on the same date as ‘The Heritage of the Brahmans’, i.e., 15 January 1894, under the title ‘The Symbols Used’. It is hardly likely that the same person would deliver two papers on the same day. A very large number of papers on Hindu Vedantic philosophy in this list are labelled ‘anon.’, and the names of many Hindu speakers, with the exception of Swami Vivekananda, who was in America during most of this time, appear on this list]. See http://www.austheos.org. au/indices/ODPUSA.HTM In February 1891, William Q. Judge, the Secretary of the American Section of the Oriental Department (of the Theosophical Society), who listed these papers, had announced that the Department would take up ‘the investigation of Aryan and other religions, sciences, and literature’, with a view to ‘bringing about a closer union between East and West’. See http://www.blavatsky.net/ theosophy/judge/articles/oriental-department.htm for this announcement.

References Books and Periodicals English Ahmad, Aijaz. 1993. In Theory. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Coser, Lewis A. 1977. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd edn. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc. Foucault, Michel. 1990[1986]. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3. Tr. Robert Hurley from the French, Le Souci de soi (1984). London: Penguin Books [New York: Pantheon Books]. Hastie, Reverend William. 1882. Hindu Idolatry and English Enlightenment: Six Letters Addressed to Educated Hindus Containing a Practical Discussion of Hinduism. London: Thacker, Spink and Co; Edinburgh: David Douglas. Hobson, J. A. 1902. Imperialism—A Study. London: James Nisbet and Co. Kakar, Sudhir. 1991. The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism. London: Viking. Kosambi, D. D. 2002. Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings. Ed. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble).1982. Letters of Sister Nivedita 1898–1902, 2 vols.; Vol. 1, ed. Sankariprasad Basu. Kolkata: Nababharat Publishers. Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. 1883. System of Economical Contradictions or The Philosophy of Misery, Vol. I. Tr. Benjamin Tucker. Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker. Rocher, Rosane. 1983. Orientalism, Poetry and the Millenium: The Chequered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, 1751–1830. Columbia: South Asia Books; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

166 Chandreyee Niyogi Samanta, Amiya Kumar (ed.). 1995. Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents, Vol. IV. Calcutta: Government of West Bengal. Schwab, Raymond. 1984. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880. Tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bengali Karmi. 1922. Pratham Varsha (1st year), Ekadash Sankhya (11) Ashadh (July– August). [Bengali year: 1329]. Sahitya. 1909. Varsha 20. Baisakh (April–May). [Bengali year: 1316]. Swami Swarupananda. 1928. Swamijir Patra, arthat Paramahamsa Srimat Swami Swarupananda Likhita Katipay Patra. (‘The Letters of Swamiji; Meaning, Some Letters Written by the Paramahamsa Swami Swarupananda’) 2nd edition, enlarged (Bengali year: 1335). Calcutta: Hindu Mission Vani Mandir. [1st edition, 1920 (Bengali year: 1327)].

Articles and Chapters (English and Bengali) Ahmad, Aijaz. 1991. ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism: Anthropological Knowledge of India’, Studies in History, Summer 7(1), pp. 135–63. ———. 1993. ‘Marx on India: A Clarification’ In Theory. Engels, Fredrick. 1977[1969]. Introduction to The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, by Karl Marx, 1895 edition, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 1 (4th reprint). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Jung, Karl Gustav. 1984[1967]. ‘Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam’, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Tr. R. E. C. Hull. London: Ark Paperbacks, pp. 53–62. Marx, Karl. 1977[1969a]. ‘The British Rule in India’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 1 (4th reprint). First published in 1853, New York Daily Tribune, No. 3804, June 25. ———. 1977[1969b]. ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, in three volumes, Vol. 1 (4th reprint). First published in 1853, New York Daily Tribune, No. 3840, August 8. Niyogi, Chandreyee. 2003. ‘Trials, translations and exorcising the ghost of Macaulay’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri and Swapan Chakravorty (eds), Jadavpur University Essays and Studies, XVII, pp. 105–20. Rocher, Rosane. 1994. ‘British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government’ in Carol. A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Post colonial Predicament. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 215–49. Said, Edward W. 1984. Foreword to Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880. ———. 1986. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Diana Loxley (eds), Literature, Politics and Theory. London: Methuen, pp. 210–29. ———. 1995[1978]. Afterword to the 1995 Printing: Orientalism. London: Penguin, pp. 329–54.

Re-reading Marx on India 167 Samajpati, Sureshchandra (ed.). 1907–08. ‘Darparigraha’, Sahitya, Varsha 18, Sankhya 9, Paush (December–January) 1314. Samanta, Amiya Kumar (ed.). 1995. ‘Bengali songs listed in Political Branch: Translations of Songs’, Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents, Vol IV. Sen, Priyanath. 1909. ‘Chitrangada’, Sahitya, Varsha 20, Sankhya 1, Baisakh (April–May), 1316.

Online Resources Comte, Auguste. 2000[1896]. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, with an Introduction by Frederick Harrison, in three volumes, Vol. III. London: George Bell and Sons; rep. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Electronic document. http://socserv. mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/comte/Philosophy3.pdf. Engels, Frederick. 1882. ‘Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity’, published May 4–11,1882 in Sozialdemokrat. http://eserver.org/marx/1882-early. christianity.txt. Engels, Friedrich. 1957[1894–95]. ‘On the History of Early Christianity’, From Die Neue Zeit Vol. 1, pp. 4–13 and 36–43. Online Version: Translated by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, USSR, 1957 from the newspaper copy. [Transcribed for the Internet by [email protected]]. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity. Johnson, Edwin. 1887. Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins. London: Trubner & Co. http://www.radikalkritik.de/antiqua_mater.htm. Johnston, Charles. ‘The Heritage of the Brahmans’. http://www.sacred-texts.com/ hin/cjw/cjw15.htm. Leupp, Gary. 19 July 2004. ‘Book of Revelations is a Must Read’, Counterpunch. org. http://www.countercurrents.org/culture-leupp190704.htm. MacKendrick, Kenneth. n.d. ‘The Study of Religion: An Introduction and Provocation’, The Canadian Corporation of Studies in Religion. http://www.ccsr. ca/mackendrick.htm. [All sites were last accessed in July 2005]

Chapter Seven

Reading ‘the Poverty of India’: A Critical Engagement with the Saidian Interpretation of Orientalism Sudeshna Banerjee This essay focuses on a discursive world that emerged during the 1870s and crystallized in the writings of Theodore Morison (Morison 1911), Vera Anstey (Anstey 1929) and L. C. A. Knowles (Knowles 1928), published between 1911 and 1929. This discourse, directly addressing the theme of material poverty, derived epistemic coherence from a studied silence about the role of British imperialism in what it represented as a poverty that is organic to, and therefore pervasive in, India—note the linguistic turn in ‘poverty of India’ as distinct from the idea of poverty in India. This ‘poverty of India’ was understood as relative to the ‘prosperity’ of the countries of the West. There had been several allusions to the existence of poverty in India ever since the late eighteenth century,1 but the ‘poverty of India’, as the authors of this discourse used the expression, was intended to represent India as a whole as a poor country in terms of its national product, per capita income and purchasing power. This discourse coheres in representing ‘the poverty of India’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a consequence of the supposedly peculiar, age-old structural, cultural and environmental features that characterized India and its people. Thus, India was poor because of the legacy of the allegedly repressiveexploitative Oriental Despotism (Knowles 1928[1924]: 269); the isolation supposedly built into the enduring structure of the Indian village community that precluded modern division of labour (Morison 1911: 153), deep-seated cultural traits that militated

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against industriousness and thrift (Knowles 1928[1924]: 273), a reproductive culture that produced an unwieldy population (Anstey 1929: 39–42), a spirit of fatalism allegedly fostered by the Hindu religion inhibiting spirit of enterprise (Anstey 1929: 2–3), and the capricious nature of the Indian monsoon (Knowles 1928[1924]: 277–78; Anstey 1929: 434). The attendant refrain was that this poverty was too structurally and environmentally irreversible for the British Indian state to do anything about it. A probe into the specifics of this discourse gives us an occasion to critically engage with Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism (Said 1978). While it is essential to deconstruct this discourse for the Orientalist assumptions underlying it, it is equally important to take the opportunity to raise the question whether Orientalism should be construed in a totalistic manner, regardless of the specificities of particular historical contexts. Should we not, even while recognizing the strains of the universals of Orientalism in every imperialist moment, also recognize the particulars which variegate and complicate the world of Orientalism, making it multivocal and heterogeneous with their distinctive and dissimilar histories?2

‘The Poverty of India’: Identifying the Discourse As early as the late eighteenth century, even as stories about fabulous riches in India abounded in Britain, the British who came to work in India either as missionaries or in the Company’s administration, often registered ‘misery’ in Hindostan. For example, Charles Grant observed in 1792 that the people in Hindostan were ‘sunk in misery by their vices in a country peculiarly calculated by its natural advantages to promote the prosperity of its inhabitants’. The juxtaposition of prosperity and misery might give the impression that Grant was using misery to indicate material poverty measured in quantitative parameters. But a closer look at the passage reveals that this ‘misery’ denoted a lack of, not so much material as moral and civilizational; Grant was anxious to represent the people in Hindostan as ‘degenerate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation, yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent

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and licentious passion, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners’ (Grant 1792, quoted in Stokes 1959: 31). Overtly Orientalist, the above representation of ‘misery’, however, is arguably distinct from, and prior to the discursive formation created by authors like Morison at a historical juncture different from that of Grant’s. James Mill, too, touched upon the poverty of the Indian masses, incidentally and cursorily, in his History of British India published in 1817. But unlike Morison’s or Anstey’s, Mill’s focus was not directly on poverty understood strictly in terms of material parameters but, rather like Grant’s, on the ‘culturally retrograde’ condition of the people of India, of which material poverty was seen as just an outward manifestation. While both Grant and Mill believed that the East India Company’s administration could—indeed, should—reduce this generic ‘poverty’ by initiating reforms, Morison, Knowles and Anstey, not to speak of Curzon, carefully elided envisaging any fundamental role for the British Indian state in the eradication of such poverty. Why this essay selects the discourse on ‘the poverty of India’ probably calls for an explanation; historians, in particular, may question whether this discursive formation was representative enough to influence the course of history. Admittedly, this was not the only British discourse initiated in the late nineteenth century on poverty in India. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century a section of the British officials in India strongly asserted that India under British rule was prosperous, while some others claimed that even if not prosperous in absolute terms, the country’s economic condition was definitely improving under British rule. The discourse we are studying here is therefore only one of the justificatory discourses of British paramountcy in India produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, however, there is reason to believe that this discourse was influential particularly at the India Office and generally in the metropolis. Though initially evolving in a somewhat fragmentary and impromptu manner among British official circles in the face of criticism of British economic policies, the discourse soon acquired sophistication and cogency and—what weighed heavily in upper-class British public opinion—academic authorship. Both Theodore Morison3 and Vera Anstey4 were academics. Morison,

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moreover, came to be appointed a member of the India Council by Morley in 1907, symbolically bridging liberal academia with the India Office. It is important to appreciate that while Morison, Anstey and Knowles produced the most cogently argued, academically presented and comprehensively developed examples of this discourse, they were by no means isolated or exceptional in their attitude. Their basic ideas were shared, indeed often anticipated, by a sizeable section of the British officials in India during the late nineteenth century and thereabouts, as well as by most apologists of British imperialism situated in the metropolis. Lord Curzon was probably the most prominent among the representatives of this discourse in Anglo India. But numerous civilians at the provisional and district levels too, shared the basic assumptions of this discourse. For example, F. L. Brayne was concerned about the poverty of the peasants of Gurgaon district near Delhi where he was posted as the deputy commissioner during the 1920s. But instead of working towards any radical change in the British agrarian policy in the district, Brayne, an evangelical, acted upon his assumption that the Indian peasants were themselves culturally and morally predisposed to be poor. His sincere commitment to the goal of rural reconstruction, therefore, did not proceed beyond moral uplift—a recipe of thrift, industry and hygiene—among the peasants of Gurgaon.5 The prominence of this discourse can also be inferred from the seriousness, force of conviction and vehemence with which radicals and anti-imperialists in contemporary Britain and America wrote in implicit or explicit contestation of this discourse. For example, William Digby’s naming of his book Prosperous British India (1901)—rather than Prosperous India— was an emphatic assertion that British rule was instrumental in India’s contemporary poverty, thus evidently undermining the claim that such poverty stretched back structurally into the precolonial past. Reverend J. T. Sunderland, a member of the AntiImperialist League in the United States, in his book India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom, published in1928, specifically used the term ‘the present poverty of India’ and attributed the poverty to British rule. He was certainly not willing to entertain the idea of a ‘natural’ and trans-historical ‘poverty of India’, the genesis of which had no role for British rule to play.

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Finally, though best represented in the speeches and writings of Morison, Anstey and Knowles, the influence of the ‘poverty of India’ discourse in imperialist circles in Britain should not be imagined as confined to a handful of academics. It is essential to look beyond the genre of academic theses and other forms of serious prose, and look for resonance in more popular genres. Indeed, it is interesting to find a resonance of the imperialist poet-laureate Rudyard Kipling’s justificatory stance in Morison’s prose, albeit in an academic form. The discourse appears to have germinated among a section of the British officialdom. For example, almost two decades before Morison came up with a more elaborate and academic exposition of the discourse, Sir George Tomkyns Chesney, a former military member of the governor-general’s council, remarked in 1894, ‘…we found India poverty-stricken as it always had been before’; he then went on to claim that things were improving under British rule (Chandra 1977[1969]: 31). Chesney’s construction of an ‘endemic’ poverty in India must have been influential as a position in Britain as his views on India, contained in his book Indian Polity: A View of the System of Administration in India (1868), and attracted wide attention, even while he contributed articles on ‘Indian Famines’ in prominent periodicals like Nineteenth Century. Lord Curzon, too, repeatedly harped upon this theme of ‘endemic’, ‘age-old’ poverty of India, though one has to thread through his speeches to piece his contention together. Curzon was anxious to prove that under the British there was ‘an increasing margin of wealth and comfort in the country’ (Curzon quoted in Chandra 1977[1969]: 34).6 Yet this official British tone of self-congratulation coexisted with a deeper conviction that poverty in India was inevitable—an inevitability that was culturally determined, and therefore, ultimately beyond erasure, whatever the short term trends to the contrary. Thus, for example, he perceived a cultural difference between the reproductive practices in the West and those in India and argued that ‘the size and growth of population’, increasingly disproportionate to the means of subsistence, made poverty inevitable in the subcontinent (Chandra 1977[1969]: 41)7 Again, Curzon perceived a tendency among the Indian ryots to take frequent recourse to law courts, and this, according to him, was the starkest manifestation of a general

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thriftlessness that supposedly characterized the people of India (Chandra 1977[1969]: 45–46).8 Curzon was not prepared to look upon the spurt of famines in India in the second half of the nineteenth century as a consequence of any impoverishing impact of British policy. In his view —as in the view of many British officials—it was largely the Indian famines that engendered Indian poverty, rather than British policy causing famines; and these famines, in their turn, were the consequences of the inexorable ‘caprice of nature’ (Chandra 1977 [1969]: 29). Referring to the huge loss of production wrought by a typical ‘great Indian drought’, Curzon argued that no government could control the skies or take any step ‘to anticipate the consequences of a visitation of nature on so gigantic and ruinous a scale’ (Chandra 1977[1969]: 49).9 This deployment of the idea of the ‘caprice of nature’ along with the notion of deep-seated cultural traits of the Indian people—including reproductive practice—conveniently absolved the colonial government of any complicity in the alleged impoverishment of India, about which the contemporary Indian nationalists were crying hoarse. Curzon said, ‘But to ask any government to prevent the occurrence of famine in a country, the meteorological conditions of which are what they are here and the population of which is growing at its present rate, is to ask us to wrest the keys of the universe from the hands of the Almighty’ (Chandra 1977[1969]). If famines were endemic to India, as Curzon claimed, then by his own logic so was poverty, as the consequence of famines. Curzon took care to point out that the utmost that a government could do in such circumstances was to mitigate their severity.10 These kindred observations that Chesney, Curzon and many other British officials made about the ‘inexorable’, ‘endemic’, ‘natural’ poverty of India, in which colonial domination had no causal role, went to form the grid upon which Morison, Anstey and Knowles constructed a final structure. According to Morison, India was poor relative to Western Europe because India belonged to an earlier stage of development. And this backwardness, Morison argued, could be explained at least in part by the ‘isolation of the Indian village’ and ‘the archaic diffusion of the population among isolated villages’, an ‘old economic organisation’ that has transpired to be of ‘prolonged duration’ in India, thus preventing the division of labour—one of the prerequisites of economic modernization.

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For Morison, this structural impediment to modernization of the economy had social, cultural and infrastructural correlates. Rack-renting, which Morison represented as integral to ‘the old economy’, allegedly nurtured a tradition of avaricious landlordism, supposedly uncommon in the West. ‘The old economy’ in Morison’s reckoning also had a built-in role for usury, which gave the rapacious moneylender a cultural legitimacy in the Indian village. The ‘archaic structure’, moreover, sustained a primitive ‘rule of the thumb’, the very opposite of the spirit of ‘intelligent adaptation of means to end’ that supposedly characterized Western attitudes. The ‘isolated, self-sufficient’ village community also engendered a systemic lack of—and disinterest in—information dissemination networks and long-distance transport facilities, further impeding economic modernization. Morison further took care to discern another structural correlate of the ‘old economic order’—famines. And, like Curzon, he was anxious to relegate the whole question of famine to the domain of the volatility of environment, away from the domain of state responsibility; the seasons failed to be ‘invariably propitious’, with the consequences that ‘harvests occasionally failed, and when they failed the population dependent upon them necessarily starved’ (Morison 1911: 92). Though the two women authors, L. C. A. Knowles and Vera Anstey had their own distinctive comments to make on the economic situation in India in the nineteenth century, the epistemic convergence of their views with Morison’s does not escape our attention. First, the motif of the self-sufficient, isolated village community enforcing a primitive caste-based division of labour and inhibiting the emergence of a modern efficient economy was also present in Knowles’s or Anstey’s characterization of the Indian economy. Like Morison, Knowles and Anstey were eager to show that the stark poverty of contemporary India was largely an inexorable legacy of propensities that were so deeply ingrained in indigenous culture and institutions, deriving from the pre-colonial past, that it was beyond the power or even the jurisdiction of the colonial state to change. Thus, the ‘appalling uncertainty of life and property that prevailed [in India] up to the 19th century’ constituting ‘another cause of the relatively static condition of India’ was partly the result of so-called ‘oriental despotism’, characterized by ‘pillage and plunder, combined with gross extravagance and luxury at the Court for which the money was wrung

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from a poverty-stricken peasantry’ (Knowles 1928[1924]: 269). The resultant disincentive to economic investment, Knowles argued, engendered a further cultural impediment to capital accumulation —thriftlessness, mainly in the form of extravagant spending on ceremonies. It was supposedly a foregone conclusion that such ‘appalling uncertainty of life and property’ would also engender ‘a habit of listless working’ (Knowles 1928[1924]: 273). Between the two of them, Knowles and Anstey variously identified the following as cultural impediments to India’s economic modernization and prosperity—the sway of superstition and an ‘inherent’ ‘lack of scientific spirit’ (Anstey 1929: 4); subordination of the individual to the ‘joint family’ and the community (Anstey 1929: 4; Knowles 1928[1924]: 286); the caste-system inhibiting modern division of labour; a reproductive culture of unplanned conception; Hindu preoccupation with the next world at the cost of material progress in this world (Knowles 1928[1924]: 282–83, 285–86; Anstey 1929: 2–3, 39–45); an overall atmosphere of conservatism sustained by almost every religious faith in the country (Anstey 1929: 2, 46–47; Knowles 1928[1924]: 284–85). Finally, Knowles and Anstey forcefully echoed—even more than Morison— Curzon’s thesis about the inexorable environmental conditioning of India’s poverty. Knowles wrote, If the monsoon fails, there is a lock-out in the agriculture industry. There may also be too much rain and the silt of the Ganges valley is then washed away by floods, so that the crops cannot be sown. Too long rains brings out hordes of insects which destroy vegetation or the cold water rains may produce blights … In April great uncertainty arises from the hail storms which often sweep away the fields of grain or stamp them flat (Knowles 1928[1924]: 278). At a time when the economic policies of the colonial government in India had started being blamed for India’s poverty (Chandra 1977[1969]: 1–54), the authors of this discourse were anxious to argue that ‘in a predominantly agricultural country [that India is] … the monsoon has been of primary importance’; and Anstey took care to state that no other single factor, not even ‘change in economic policy … can compare in importance with the monsoon’ (Anstey 1929: 434). The author obviously implied that where

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the natural power of the monsoon was the principal arbitrator of India’s economic destiny, there was not much point in blaming the colonial state’s economic policy for the poverty of India.

Mill and Morison: Orientalist Voices of the Same Imperial Moment? A deconstructive reading of the discourse on ‘the poverty of India’ as developed by Curzon to Morison, Chesney to Anstey reveals an Orientalist core that seems to conceptually derive, to a large extent, from one of the influential foundational texts enunciating the fundamental difference and inferiority of India—James Mill’s History of British India. Not only Morison, but even Knowles and Anstey writing more than a decade after him, pursued the same disciplinary strategy that Mill had resorted to as far back as 1817— by giving India an essentially different history from that of the advanced Western countries; the latter being represented as securely poised on a trajectory of unceasing progress away from the medieval into the ever-expanding vista of modernity. The intention of such differential historicizing was to inferiorise India in terms of a universalist paradigm of linear progress towards modernity. Like James Mill, who had represented India as a ‘rude society’ stuck in the stage of development in which medieval Europe had been centuries back, the authors of the discourse under review found the word ‘medievalism’ appropriate for characterizing the contemporary condition in India. They assigned India’s contemporary poverty-ridden condition to a lingering medievalism, which Western Europe had supposedly left behind in the sixteenth century in its surge towards modernity. Furthermore, for every author in this discursive segment, the imagining of the medievalism of Indian economy and culture needed just a small push to frequently slip into an imaginary ‘primitivism’. Thus, Knowles considered the residents of India as predominantly ‘a medieval agricultural people’, and the ‘economic structure of India during the past century as primitive and medieval….’ (Knowles 1928[1924]: 291, 266). Anstey, in her turn, characterized India as a country ‘which is still essentially medieval in outlook and organization

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and which is a byword throughout the world for the poverty of its people’ (Anstey 1929: 2). In the same breath, Anstey articulated her concern about ‘the primitive methods of agricultural and industrial production’ that still predominated in India. Again, like Mill, these authors also deployed the common correlates of the binary opposition between medievalism and modernity posited by Western post-enlightenment rationality. Against that supposed rationality, enlightenment and knowledgeability of the West, they imagined the people of India as irrational, superstitious, ignorant and, therefore, poor. Yet, it cannot be lost upon a history-sensitive reader of the discourse under review that considerable time and significant historical developments had intervened between the moment that had produced James Mill’s History of British India, and the moment that produced Curzon’s comments, Morison’s, or for that matter, Knowles’s or Anstey’s writings on the specialized theme of ‘the poverty of India’. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century defense of British paramountcy in a ‘poverty-stricken’ India needed a context-specific orientalist rhetoric, to which the early Utilitarian Orientalism of James Mill could merely supply the barest framework. The skeletal basics needed to be nuanced with new concepts and strategies that the challenges of the new imperial moment demanded. It should not be overlooked that at the end of the nineteenth century British imperialism had started facing discursive challenges, that too from different quarters; and the theme of the ‘poverty’ of the Indian people had emerged as a common component of these otherwise distinct discourses. Mill’s discursive thrust was on imagining an essential cultural difference between India and the West; poverty in India featured in his History of British India only as an aspect of that essential difference. But the discourse under review directly and primarily addressed the theme of poverty of India. The authors of this discourse did reiterate the notion of essential cultural difference and inferiority of India but with the focused agenda—unlike that of Mill—of explaining the economic ‘backwardness’ of India. Again, while Mill had prescribed that the East India Company’s government in India should tackle the problem of poverty through far-reaching reforms, Curzon, Morison, Knowles and Anstey made the colonial state invisible, whether in their history of, or prescriptions about ‘poverty’. Furthermore, unlike in the case of Mill, who

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had mainly deployed history to explain industrialized Europe’s superiority in relation to India, Morison and the others seemed to regard the deployment of history as necessary but inadequate. In Mill’s representation, industrialized Europe was superior and India inferior because while the former had historically progressed in terms of economic advancement and rationality, the other had supposedly got stuck in primitivism, which foreclosed the possibility of historical evolution. But the discourse under review heavily overlaid this notion of historical difference with a sense of ‘natural–environmental difference’ in explaining ‘the poverty of India’. Taking queue from colonial administrators like Lord Curzon, Morison and even more prominently, Knowles and Anstey, were anxious to represent the roots of India’s poverty largely in terms of the environmental, which could be easily represented as beyond political–economic intervention. This derivation of the bare fundamentals of Mill’s Orientalism and their repackaging into what, however, was a new Orientalist discourse of ‘the poverty of India’, prompts a close look at the discursive situation at the end of the nineteenth century that seems to have made a simple reiteration of Mill’s views inadequate for the defense of the British Raj. The contours of the discourse of ‘the poverty of India’ seems to suggest that the most primary challenge that framed the precise imperial moment of its articulation came from the emerging world of anti-colonial nationalism in India. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Dadabhai Naoroji, R. C. Dutt and a host of other Indian nationalists invested the best of their intellectual and oratorical energies on arguing that there was widespread abject poverty in contemporary India as a consequence of economic policies pursued by the British in India. A number of factors made this anti-colonial nationalist charge too challenging for the pre-existing justificatory discourses of British rule to take on board. One, the empirically incredible, almost fantastic discourse claiming that British India was a gratifying picture of prosperity simply had to beat a retreat in the face of energetic nationalist presentation of contrary empirical evidence. Furthermore, in the context of an unprecedented succession of famines in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century —which the nationalists did not fail to cite in favour of their argument—made it increasingly difficult for the apologists of British rule in India to construct any justificatory discourse that

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cursorily bypassed the issue of poverty, as if it were an accidental material adjunct of the more relevant issue of India’s cultural difference. Material poverty in India had to be addressed by colonial discourse as a full-fledged issue in its own right.11 R. C. Dutt, the nationalist leader and noted economic historian demanded, ‘…why should there be so many famines in India, why such a terrible death-rate from starvation? They never heard of such famines in any other civilised country of the world’ (Dutt 1904: 36). What made the discursive challenge even more serious was that Indian nationalist authors like Naoroji, Dutt, Bholanath Chandra, G. S. Iyer and Alfred Nundy heavily garnered empirical evidence and cited statistics in substantiating their point, and thus meeting the expectations of ‘objectivity’ and ‘authenticity’ in western rationality’s own terms. But probably the most disconcerting aspect of this challenge was the zeal with which Indian nationalists carried their campaign to Britain itself and made numerous public presentations there on the allegedly impoverishing impact of British rule on India. Naoroji, in particular, ‘made poverty “his special subject” and stumped the whole of England for years to fulfil his “life-long mission” of awakening the British public to the true condition of India’. As years progressed and the number of his speeches on the subject delivered in England reached triple figures, Naoroji became more and more denunciatory (Chandra 1977[1969]: 8). R. C. Dutt’s Economic History of India, in two volumes, was a well-researched historical account of the degenerative impact of British economic policy on Indian agriculture and industry. It is significant that both the volumes were first published in London, where they ran into second editions within five years.12 Dutt directly addressed the content of his book to the conscience of the ‘average Englishman’, and implicitly challenged him to live up to his acclaimed commitment to social justice, economic progress and the ideal of welfare. Implicitly undermining the assumptions of Mill’s type of historicization involving a binary opposition between Indian primitivism and Western Europe’s progressive modernity, Dutt wrote in the ‘preface’, Therefore, the line of inquiry which the economist will pursue is the same which he adopts in inquiring into the wealth or poverty of other nations. Does agriculture flourish? Are industries

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and manufactures in a prosperous condition? Are finances properly administered so as to bring back to the people an adequate return? Are the sources of national wealth widened by a Government anxious for material welfare of the people? These are the questions which the average Englishman asks himself when inquiring into the economic condition of any country in the world; these are questions which he will ask himself in order to ascertain the truth about India (Dutt 1976[1960]: xxv). It is also significant that Dutt had already made his way into the aural world of the educated British public even before the publication of his Economic History of India. On retiring from the Indian Civil Service in 1896, Dutt had settled in England with the intention of making the British public aware of the economic condition of India under British rule and of influencing the British parliament, through its members, to initiate reform in the British economic policy regarding India. He found an additional channel for working towards those goals when he was appointed a lecturer in Indian history at the University College, London—a post which he held till 1904. The disturbing potential of the Indian nationalist voice on ‘the poverty of the Indian people’, however, must have been far out of proportion to the handful of Indians actually travelling to England to assert it; imperialist susceptibilities must have anxiously situated this challenge within a wider context of anti-colonial nationalism emerging among the educated upper classes in India. The British Indian authorities were aware that in that ‘formative period of Indian nationalism’ the ‘poverty problem’ occupied the centre stage in Indian politics. ‘There were few subjects of contemporary interest on which a greater gulf separated the opinions of the rulers and the ruled and hardly any discussion which aroused more anger and violent denunciation’ (Chandra 1977[1969]: 7).

Answering the Challenge of ‘Impoverishment’ with ‘Pre-British Poverty’ A close reading indicates that, in constructing their counterpoise to the Indian nationalist discourse of poverty, the authors of the discourse under consideration found the Indian nationalist thesis

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about India’s ‘impoverishment’ most challenging. Naoroji and other nationalists were repeatedly harping on the ‘continuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country under British rule’ (Chandra 1977[1969]: 2). Retrieving the theme of ‘the poverty in India’ from an essentialist culturalism spawned by imperialist discourse and relocating it in the terrain of economic history, R. C. Dutt historicized India’s ‘impoverishment’ in terms of an extortionist land revenue policy inaugurated by the British, and the destruction of indigenous Indian manufactures under British rule. Again, Indian nationalists in general condemned what they termed as ‘the drain of wealth’—the export of a substantial part of Indian national wealth to England without India getting adequate economic/material returns (Chandra 1977[1969]: 636–708). What was particularly disturbing about such nationalist historicizing of ‘the poverty of India’ was that it directly and seriously undermined the legitimacy of British rule in India. It could not have been missed that Indian nationalist discourse was replete with the metaphors—like ‘un-British rule’—that signified the fall of British rule from the grace of paternalistic masculinity.13 Thus, the debate about poverty swiftly shifted from an affirmation/denial of poverty to a more explosive question,—were the British responsible for what the nationalists were representing as the impoverishment of India? (Chandra 1977[1969]: 26). The discursive situation became all the more critical for the apologists of British imperialism when, in 1901, the Secretary of State, George Hamilton somewhat dramatically accepted the challenge, ‘I admit that if it could be shown that India has retrograded in material prosperity then we … ought no longer be trusted with the control of the country’ (Chandra 1977[1969]: 27). Probably the most effective way of addressing this challenge was to emphasize more systematically and substantively than ever before that the genesis of India’s poverty was fundamentally preBritish in origin. James Mill’s genealogy of India’s ‘backwardness’ could be drawn upon—as indeed it was by authors like Knowles— to push back the genesis of Indian poverty to the pre-British period. It is true that Mill’s essentialisms like the ‘irrationality’ of the Hindu faith and way of life and the ‘arbitrariness’ of ‘oriental despotism’ was nothing but a case of imagining a people (in this case the people of India), without history. But it is important that such essentials could at least be represented as pre-colonial traits.

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However, a close reading of the writings of Morison and the like reveals an anxiety to move beyond Mill’s construction of essential difference. Clearly, their discourse was largely generated by an additional concern absent in Mill’s Orientalist turn—an anxiety to deny that India’s poverty was ‘preventable’. With Indian nationalists projecting British rule as potentially able but practically unwilling to prevent the ‘present poverty of India’, it was not unusual for justificatory discourses of British rule to develop a counter-discursive urge that portrayed India’s poverty as too deeply structural to be preventable. An essential cultural difference of the kind constructed by Mill was probably unequal to the challenge of the ‘preventability’ thesis, particularly with Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt forcefully claiming the theme of India’s poverty for the empirical domain of economic history, away from the ahistorical and essentialist world of cultural determinism.14 So cultural difference, in order to appear convincingly historical, probably needed in this environment of challenge, the postulation of a distinctive structural grid, from which India’s cultural difference could be shown as inexorably derived. Thus, the essential cultural difference invented by early Utilitarian discourse was repackaged to face the Indian nationalist challenge with a significant additional conceptual input—the peculiar ‘age-old’ institution of the Indian village community. The ‘Indian village community’ with its supposedly archaic, in-built ‘isolation’, ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘caste-based division of labour’ ( as distinct from the modern Western variety of division of labour), was thus used by every author of the discourse under review to implicitly suggest that British policy was not capable of fostering, that too from above, a fundamental shift towards modern industrial progress (and prosperity) in India—a shift that was anyhow fore-closed by the very structure of the indigenous economy and its attendant cultural mores. Of course, it was a convenient intertextual conjuncture that made possible in the first place this deployment of an ‘age-old institution’ as the fundamental structural cause of India’s ‘backwardness’. The concept of ‘Indian village community’ had recently emerged in learned British discussions about India. Henry Sumner Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West published in 1876, and frequently reprinted before the turn of the

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nineteenth century, was probably the first elucidation of the concept of the Indian village community to make a mark on the English reading public.15 The concept, however, acquired a more elaborate and empirical materiality in B. H. Baden-Powell’s Indian Village Community published in 1896, followed in 1899 by The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India by the same author. It may not be wrong to suggest that for Morison and his likes, the early utilitarian imagining of Oriental Despotism as an institutional determinant of India’s backwardness was inadequate, if not problematic, for countering the nationalists’ ‘impoverishment’ thesis, especially as almost a century of British paramountcy had intervened between the supposed sway of oriental despotism and India’s contemporary economic reality. More problematically, if oriental despotism as a form of political authority could be claimed to have generated backwardness through an exploitative and appropriative use of surplus, then an unavoidable corollary would be that the colonial state, long since in political authority, was accountable for the contemporary poverty in British India. Thus, the concept of the Indian village community as constructed by authors like Baden-Powell helped authors like Morison, Anstey and Knowles to locate the ultimate root of the poverty of India in an institution that could be portrayed as structurally more fundamental and historically ‘unchanging’, relative to the colonial state with its short history and its ‘externality’ to the structure of the indigenous economy. In order to undercut the nationalist effort to historicize ‘the present poverty of India’, the discourse concerned thus reconstituted the pre-existing Orientalist discourse of cultural difference by equipping it with a counter-discursive edge; the pre-existing notion of cultural difference was now made more inexorable by superimposing it on an underlying material base of structural difference. And as this supposed material base was something as ‘age-old’, ‘isolated’ and ‘unchanging’ as the ‘Indian village community’, the possibility of any historical transformation was conveniently foreclosed. But the challenge of the ‘impoverishment’ thesis was probably much more anxiously registered than what we can imagine today. We can infer the perceived enormity of the challenge from the way in which Morison and others, following Lord Curzon’s line, tried to take the genesis of India’s poverty even further from the domain

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of history, indeed into the domain of the ‘natural–environmental’. Maybe, to allow the question of India’s poverty to lurk in the domain of history, and therefore, of transformability, was to risk the question why British India was not actively intervening to eradicate poverty. What could better serve to shove the genesis of India’s poverty into the domain of the extra-historical than the construction of an Indian monsoon—so naturally too capricious that political economy was powerless to combat it! As this environmental argument does not derive from James Mill’s repertoire of India’s essential difference, we need to understand why Morison, Anstey and others so urgently drafted environmental difference into their discourse on India’s poverty; in other words, what was the specificity of the imperial moment framed by the challenge of the ‘impoverishment’ thesis that India’s environmental ‘peculiarity’ had to be deployed as a motif? One, the Indian nationalists had made the late nineteenth century famines in India the leitmotif of India’s steady ‘impoverishment’ under British rule. Apologists of British rule, therefore, badly needed to attribute the famines to something else—preferably something more inexorable—than the political economy of the colonial state. Two, famines as the leitmotif of India’s ‘impoverishment’ spilled over—dangerously for British imperialists—from the domain of Indian nationalist criticism to find unmistakable echoes in radical circles in Britain, and even more embarrassingly, among the critics of British imperialism—like the Anti-Imperialist League—across the Atlantic. For example, Jabez T. Sunderland, who was the Minister of the Ann Arbor Unitarian Church between 1878 and 1898, visited India at the turn of the nineteenth century. His study of the late nineteenth century Indian famines was published in 1900 (Nicholls 1993). Sunderland dismissed the argument that failure of monsoon was the cause of these famines. He argued that the real cause of famines was ‘the extreme, the abject, the awful poverty of the Indian people’, which he attributed to the ‘enormous foreign tribute’ annually remitted from India to England (Nicholls 1993). Thus Sunderland’s analysis of Indian famines concurred with that of the Indian nationalists. What is more, William Digby, the British author who subscribed to the impoverishment thesis, cited the American Unitarian minister’s findings and observations to argue that it was only apparently the nature but really British policy

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that was responsible for the high incidence of famines in India in the late nineteenth century (Nicholls 1993).16 Indeed, for various historical reasons, the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century witnessed a surge of antiimperialist opinion, not only in British radical circles but also on the other side of the Atlantic. The American Anti-Imperialist League was founded in 1899 in protest against American occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Though the members of the League formed a small minority in an America that predominantly favoured overseas expansion, many remarkable minds of the day like Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie were members of the League. Significantly for the present discussion, Sunderland, too, was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League. For the anti-imperialists in the West, India as the ‘jewel in the crown’ was the classic case of imperialist exploitation, and for anti-imperialists in the United States in particular, British exploitation of colonial India was the very paradigm of inhumanity that America should be prevented from replicating in the Philippines and Latin America. Thus, it is important to emphasize that both Sunderland and Mark Twain visited India at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Indian nationalist criticism of British imperialist policies, in turn, also gravitated towards this intertextual web as most noted nationalist leaders of the day, articulate in English, were capable of participating in this discursive development, especially those who often visited England at that time. Thus a close look at the intertextual convergences, exchanges and resonances between the three geographical sites of anti-imperialist protest helps us to realize why it was so urgent for Curzon, Morison and others to work towards a counterpoise to the impoverishment thesis. The perceived enormity of the challenge thrown up by the convergence of the Indian nationalist position with radical positions in the West permeated the imperial anxiety underlying Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (Kipling 1899). Indeed—I suggest—the specific repertoire of tropes deployed in this poem by the late Victorian imperialism’s poet-laureate was mainly chosen to respond to the charge of ‘un-British’ rule and its ‘impoverishing’ impact on India. Ostensibly written to laud the American takeover of the Philippines, the poem had two subtexts. One,

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Kipling’s emphatic call to the United States to take up the ‘white man’s burden’ in the Philippines had an unmistakable ring of contempt for the campaign of the American Anti-Imperialist League against the United States’ imperialist designs upon Philippines. Two, the poem took on board, image for image, metaphor for metaphor, the damage done to the legitimacy of the British Raj by the ‘impoverishment’ thesis and its supporters in the West. This latent counter-discursivity begins from the title itself (and recurs in the refrain), with the trope of ‘burden’—a trope reiterated elsewhere in the poem as ‘heavy harness’. From the 1870s the Indian nationalists had started harping on the enormity and rigidity of the ‘burden’ of British-imposed land revenue on the agricultural classes in India, who were represented as ‘crushed’ in the process.17 The British public was acutely aware of this charge by 1899, because not only had Indian nationalists energetically disseminated it in Britain, but anti-imperialists in the West too, were reiterating it. In such circumstances, it is significant that Kipling did not resort to the clichéd rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’; instead he transferred the trope of burden to the white man, severally repeated it in the refrain and additionally infused it with humility to give imperialism a human face. The counter-discursive component becomes clearer when we keep in mind that the usual contemporary imperialist usage of ‘civilising mission’, despite its unmistakable suggestion of an uprightness of (moral) posture so well suited to justifying colonial dominance, was replaced in the poem with a new coinage woven around the sense of burden, which only projected the colonizer in a bent, distorted posture in relation to the colonized. This readiness to appear burdened, a new turn in imperialist poetic imagery, can be contextualized even better when read in conjunction with the lines, ‘And reap his old reward:/ The blame of those ye better’. The poet’s charge of ungratefulness is obviously directed at the colonized in general, but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century the voice that sounded most ungrateful to British imperialists and yet was undeniably well-argued, was that of the Indian nationalists who articulated the impoverishment thesis and the drain theory with an impressive back-up of statistics and evidence. The lines, ‘To seek another’s profit,/And work another’s gain’ seem to be in counter-discursive dialogue with the Indian nationalist’s charge of ‘drain’—that a part of India’s national

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wealth was being exported to England for the latter’s gain.18 Again, in comparing the ‘burdened’ white man to a serf and sweeper, Kipling seems to construct a counterpoise to the way in which Naoroji had already likened Indians under British rule to slaves and helots (Naoroji cited in Chandra 1977[1969]: 24). Finally the trope of unmanliness implicit in Naoroji’s charge of ‘un-British rule’ and the hint of swindling implicit in the nationalist charge of unreciprocated ‘drain’ was sought to be countered by Kipling in the lines, ‘Come now, to search your manhood/ Through all the thankless years’. The latent dialogue between the impoverishment thesis and Kipling’s poem was not lost on discerning contemporaries in England. Thus, even while many American anti-imperialists parodied the poem with American imperialists in mind, the British author William Digby parodied it in his ‘Prosperous’ British India, which focused entirely on the role of British imperialism in India. And the tenor of the brown (Indian) man’s retort in Digby’s parody clearly indicates that Digby was acutely sensitive to Kipling’s intention of using ‘The White Man’s Burden’ to counter the ‘impoverishment’ thesis. So Digby, in supporting the impoverishment thesis, assumed the voice of the brown (Indian) native to parody Kipling, Our bodies lie on dreary waste While our homes are bare If blood be the price of England’s rule Lord God, we have paid in full (Digby 1901:220).

Poverty of a Different Kind The specific imperial moment that produced the discourse under review, however, needed more than a simple deployment of difference, merely postulating that a structural–cultural difference with the West accounted for the poverty of India. The poverty (of India) itself now needed to be represented as different. This was because the conjuncture that produced the discourse under review was also marked by growing public discussion in the metropolis about the ‘poverty’ of the English lower classes. With the theme of poverty introducing a hint of similarity between the poor in India

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and the poor in the metropolis, the ideology of colonial difference was in discomfiture. One could, therefore, expect a growing imperialist anxiety to add a new dimension to the discourse of colonial difference—that the poverty in England, though disturbing in its rapid increase, was somehow different from the ‘poverty of India’. Somehow a distance had to be posited between an Indian poverty, structurally–culturally–environmentally conditioned to be ‘inexorable’, and an English working-class poverty that was socially generated and therefore, socially changeable. Thus, it may be suggested that the discourse of an ‘age-old’, ‘inexorable’ Indian poverty probably served another vital purpose besides constituting a counter-discourse to the Indian nationalists’ poverty thesis; constantly reiterated, it had the potential to foreclose any affinity or even empathy for the Indian poor among the British working class. It should not be overlooked that at a time when trade union politics was gaining ground in England amidst an unprecedented rise in working class poverty, the English ruling class was particularly anxious to draw the British working class into a sentimental sweep of popular imperialism. While the following discussion will try to substantiate this vital construction of ‘difference in poverty’, it is important to point out that this construction also gives us the opportunity to complicate the Saidian perspective. Said himself elided the role of class in the production of Orientalist discourse. But this study demonstrates the way in which class politics in England reflected on the Orientalist construction of the ‘other’. Indeed, the interface between class and race characteristics of a white, upper-class imperialist discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century showed, that under the impact of class interests the same discourse of power could be uneasily negotiating two different constructions of the ‘other’—both equally significant— the ‘other’ in the metropolis and the other in the colonial situation. Also, the ‘other’ in the colonies could no longer be constructed in isolation from a metropolitan reality—i.e., the increasing strength of trade union politics in Britain since the last decades of the nineteenth century. The scale of the problem of poverty was rapidly growing not merely in the late Victorian cities but also in the English countryside. From the mid-1870s agriculture in England was slithering into the great depression; the wages were low and unemployment

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was widespread (Ensor 1936: 111; Dewey 1996[1993]: 33). Public discussions in the metropolis were replete with the theme of ‘unprecedented’ poverty in England. With the thorny issue of rising poverty in England so much in the public eye, England’s imperialist self-projection of racial and developmental superiority was in discomfiture. Moreover, at a time when vivid descriptions of the living conditions of the poor in England had the effect of blurring the neatly constructed racial dichotomies, imperialists must have been unnerved by a particular development among British radical circles, where anti-imperialism was already visible. From the 1880s, London witnessed a new social trend among the educated middle classes—slumming, as it was popularly called. A whole range of people, from the philanthropically oriented to the radically inclined, eager to redeem their middle-class ‘limitations’, and often thirsting for some vague notion of liberation from the industrial capitalist ethos, took active interest in visiting slums for a first hand impression of how the poor lived.19 Not only did slumming bring the issue of poverty in England even more forcefully into public attention, but also threatened to make poverty a conduit through which social curiosity and redemptive concern could spill over and excite a direct interest in the poverty in the colonies, particularly India. And there was the possibility of radical minds interpreting the ‘poverty of India’ with the same economic–historical parameters as the ones used to understand contemporary poverty in England. Such a possibility was anathema to the imperialists who were anxious to represent India’s poverty as endemic. Furthermore, as slumming was often generating demands for pro-poor reforms in England, any romantic extension of this frame of mind could generate a demand among a section of the British public for propoor reforms in India. Such a development would be highly embarrassing for the colonial state in India which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, found it convenient to appeal to the ‘invisible hand’ and not interfere in favour of the poor in India. A typical exposition of the attitude of the colonial state could be heard in Lord Curzon’s voice, lecturing to the starving Indian villagers in the aftermath of the El Nino disaster of 1899–1900. any government which imperiled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open

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to serious criticism but any government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralized the selfreliance of the population would be guilty of public crime (Curzon quoted in Davis 2001: 2). This was a year in which most of North India was drought-stricken but the counterbalancing bumper harvests in Bengal and Burma could have saved the starving villagers had the colonial state cared to stop the ‘invisible hand’ from exporting the surplus produced in India and Burma (Davis 2001: 2). Given this thrust of the colonial political economy, social curiosity of the ‘slumming’ type had to be prevented from peering into the ‘poverty of India’. I suggest that the construction of the ‘poverty of India’ as essentially different served this purpose, as much as it served to distance the poverty among the ruling race from that of the Indian poor, besides countering the nationalist strategy of studying India’s poverty under the rubric of economic history. Of course, the contours of the essential difference of ‘the poverty of India’ were framed in the light of the transformation that was coming about in British attitudes to poverty in Britain. The period between the 1830s and the outbreak of the First World War was marked by a shift in the characterization of poverty; predominantly represented as a natural phenomenon in the earlier period of British history, poverty now came to be increasingly looked upon as a social condition, historically constituted.20 Charles Booth’s work probably represented a high watermark in the transformation of attitudes to poverty in England, from emphasizing the natural to the social. Booth studied the poverty in London in terms of material indicators and used the method of social survey to make an impressive foray into the social mapping of poverty. There was another ideological development in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England that symbiotically interacted with the transportation of the idea of poverty, from the domain of the natural to the social and historical. Even as urban demolition and suburbanization was leading to the consolidation of the working-class residential districts in the large cities of England, amidst heightened class feelings in the late nineteenth century, there was a countervailing anxiousness among the liberal thinkers in England to tone down class polarization through the propagation of ‘improvement’ and ‘self-help’ (Wright 1988: 150–82).

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By thus emphasizing the capacity of the poor in England to ‘selfimprove’, liberal thinkers reinforced the notion of poverty in industrial England as a socially negotiable and historically transformable condition. In the context of such characterization of poverty as a social development, historically conditioned to be a passing phase, India’s poverty as its ‘other’ could now be best represented as natural and, therefore, inexorable. I suggest that the environmental determinism of the construct of the ‘poverty of India’ as different from that in England, primarily deployed as a counterpoise to the historical tenor of the impoverishment thesis, doubled up to prevent poverty from levelling the ‘poor’ of the master race with the colonial ‘poor’. The need to represent the poor in India as different was, thus, reinforced by the anxiety to co-opt the English working class into the sweep of racism and popular imperialism, at a time when the working class had come to constitute the majority of the electorate, thanks to the Third Reform Act of 1884 (Wright 1988: 153). The question of race is germane here. The increasing public disclosure of the extent of filth and unsanitary environment in the lower class habitats in both urban and rural England threatened to undercut the discourse of racial superiority—so essential to the legitimacy of British rule in India. The Indian poor as the ‘other’ was represented by authors from Curzon to Anstey, as bodies innately conditioned to be poor by something as inexorable as the environment. Knowles, for example, in attempting to explain the late nineteenth century Indian famines in terms of the failure of rains (Knowles 1928[1924]: 277), observed that the Indian people ‘failed’ to overcome this environmental problem because of their ‘slackness’, and portrayed the body of the Indian peasant as perpetually seized by malaria and fever, drained of the energy needed to carry out agricultural work (Knowles 1928[1924]: 281). Theodore Morison, in explaining the appalling famine mortality in India, found it convenient to draw upon the already congealed colonial discourse that represented the Indian body as naturally embedded in a reservoir of filth and disease, unlike the Western body. What was conveniently omitted by Morison was that the body of the poor in contemporary England was found no less infested with lice and disease, as can be substantiated on the basis of contemporary British official reports themselves (Wright 1988: 154; Stedman-Jones 1971).21 The body politics of the discourse

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of colonial difference deployed another kind of silence in characterizing India’s poor as different. A district officer, on being asked by the famine commission to explain why the mortality was so high in the Gujarat famine of 1899–1900, said, The Gujarati is a soft man … accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour. Very many among the poorest had never taken a tool in hand in their lives (Davis 2001: 2). This projection of the Gujarati as a ‘soft man’ was in effect a silencing of the long history of a people’s industrious struggle for survival in a rugged terrain, and Orientalism in its most ethnocentric and representative form, which hinged upon the sexual body politics of a binary opposition between the manly Occidental and the effeminate Oriental.

Feminising the Orient? One of the ways of making Said’s interpretation of Orientalism more sensitive to the wide and complex repertoire of gendered symbolisms in Orientalist discourses is to keep in mind the complex interrelationship between notions of space and the body in the weave of these discourses. The discourses configured gendered bodies on the one hand, and gendered spaces (or environments) on the other in constructing the milieu of the colonized. Though the one might transform into or overlap with the other, latent symbolisms of not merely femininity, but also of effeminacy followed their respective trajectories in the writings of Curzon, Morison and other authors of the discourse on ‘the poverty of India’. The femininity invested on India’s natural environment was metonymically represented in the monsoon, and effeminacy was predicated on the body and attitudes of Indian males, particularly those from the plains and the coastal areas. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, the possibility of the colonized Indian male population achieving masculinity somehow also lurked in the discourse. The key to the paradox probably lies in the political imperatives of British colonialism at that specific juncture in history.

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The interface between class and race was further complicated by a gendered representation of India’s poverty as effeminate, rather than feminine, against the masculine ethic of ‘self-improvement’ that was propagated, particularly by the evangelicals, among the metropolitan poor in England. In the face of the Indian nationalist charge of ‘impoverishment’ by an ‘un-British rule’, however, the colonial discourse legitimized the claim to moral superiority of the master race by latching on to the image of responsible Victorian manliness that supported the role of the white man as moral educator of the colonized male—and this image became particularly ubiquitous after the turn of the nineteenth century. As if to carry this rhetoric of legitimacy to its logical conclusion, there had to be some room for the ‘effeminate’ Indian male to gradually ‘develop’ into manliness, provided his apprenticeship to his manly white mentor was obedient, disciplined, humble, sincere, and of course, long enough. The future possibility of India achieving nationhood (and implicitly, manhood), was thus shown as vitally dependent upon the colonizer’s educative role and the colonized male’s faithful, even feminine, capacity to accept that tutelage. Vera Anstey, for example, emphasized the need to ‘educate’ the Indian peasantry and implicitly upheld the British colonizer as the natural educator. Anstey, who was silent about the role of British colonialism in the making of India’s poverty, ascribed the latter mainly to inefficient agriculture. She blamed the alleged ignorance, indolence and fatalism of the Indian peasant for this inefficiency. Her suggested solution to this problem was to introduce the Indian peasantry to the cooperative movement. The responsibility to introduce the concept, nevertheless lay with the ‘white man’! While most imperialist accounts of India’s poverty legitimized the unique ability of the British to impart moral and technological education to the ‘natives’ towards their improvement, but saw it as a distant possibility for the ‘effeminate’ Indian, Anstey, who devoted an entire chapter in her book The Economic Development of India to the cooperative movement and emphasized the educational and character-building functions of the cooperative (Anstey 1929: 185–206), was not writing off in a distant future the Indian peasant’s capacity to acquire a strength of character—supposedly conducive to the spirit of enterprise under the tutelage of a people acclaimed as the first industrial nation.

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In contrast to England’s imagining the poverty in its own territory as predominantly material, and changeable through initiative and enterprise, the discourse on the ‘poverty of India’ represented India’s poverty as various kinds of lack, many of which were far from material. Thus, even while the discourse extensively used the concepts of the Indian village community and the failure of the rains as structural and natural grids underpinning India’s ‘inexorable’ poverty, it also drew upon pre-existing Orientalist discourses to conflate this structurally–naturally conditioned poverty with an imagined mental terrain that was supposed to be peculiarly Indian. Morison and others carefully dotted this peculiar mental climate with cultural and behavioural characteristics that made this mental world look very different from that of the poor in England, as represented in the accounts of self-help and moral uplift in England written by evangelical pastors. The evangelism that was put into practice in rural India by two civil servants, F. L. Brayne and Malcolm Darling, differed in their ideological orientations, with Brayne subscribing to the Gospel of Uplift and Darling to the Cult of Friendship (Dewey 1996[1993]:12), but both sought to address the problem of poverty by trying to improve the peasants’ morals (Dewey 1996[1993]: 12, 78). Both exempted British rule in India from any responsibility for rural poverty in India, and both, in their own ways, believed that the poor peasants in India were responsible for their own poverty as they were supposedly too indolent, extravagant and morally deficient to overcome the ‘inefficiencies’ of traditional agriculture, or avert the exploitative clutches of moneylenders and the landlords (Dewey 1996[1993]: 12–13; Brayne 1928[1927]: 2, 5–6, 9–10,116–20, 139–54; Darling 1977[1925]: 61–71, 93–110). Brayne and Darling thus initiated programmes of community development in rural India with the assumption that ‘successful behaviors’ may be diffused among the India peasantry by introducing them to habits such as thrift (Dewey 1996[1993]: 12–13). In Darling’s analysis, India’s rain-fed agriculture rewarded moderate effort with abundant rain when the monsoons were timely and adequate, but if the rains failed, extreme diligence was denied returns and appeared futile. This, according to him, caused extravagance in the trail of occasional bounty and fatalism during drought and famine (Darling 1977[1925]: 61).22 The hot, moist

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climate and alluvial soil across vast stretches of India were represented as having an enervating effect on the male Indian peasant, virtually like an opium-induced, tame submission to the mysterious and overpowering femininity of India’s environment. Knowles, too, saw a lack of manliness in the Indian male’s ‘fatalistic’ acceptance of natural disasters and the ‘social ostracism’ of the caste system; and these, among other factors, determined what she regarded as India’s poor performance as an economy. Like Darling’s description of the ‘fickle bounty’ of the riverine tracts of India, Knowles described the behaviour of the Indian monsoon as ‘one great cause of uncertainty’ in Indian agriculture and economy (Knowles 1928[1924]: 277). She referred to the idea of a ‘perfect monsoon’ but stressed how rare it is in reality: ‘the mon-soon varies in strength and incidence and it is very rarely that all India gets a perfect monsoon’. Knowles described the impact of the ‘caprice’ of monsoon as follows: If the monsoon fails, there is a lock-out in the agriculture industry. There may also be too much rain and the silt of the Ganges valley is then washed away by flood so that crops cannot be sown. Too long rains bring out hordes of insects which destroy vegetation … (Knowles 1928[1924]: 278). Though Knowles did not explicitly feminize the Indian monsoon, the sense of the feminine was implicit in her description. Knowles’s notion of the ‘perfect monsoon’ conjured up the image of the potential bounty of the monsoon. Again, the same monsoon was imagined as variously withholding its bounty and unleashing devastation, thus invoking a sense of wild irrationality. The implicit gendering became clearer when Knowles posited the male primary producer in India at the receiving end of this wild, overwhelming femininity; the unpredictability of the monsoon does ‘not merely affect man, it also affects his animals, which are essential to him for well-work, ploughing and transport’ (Knowles 1928[1924]: 278). Knowles was close to an explicit evocation of the wild femininity that mysteriously withholds a bounty that it naturally possesses, but Darling made the most explicit use of these tropes of capricious femininity and effeminacy when he

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observed that ‘the nature is capricious as well as generous and man is improvident’ (Darling 1977[1925]: 65). This notion of a wild, inscrutable femininity of nature contributing to India’s ‘endemic’ poverty did not go uncontested, either by Indian nationalists, or by western proponents of the impoverishment thesis like Digby and Sunderland. They argued that ‘there was no evidence that rains fail now any oftener or in greater extent’ than they did 100 years ago when famines were much fewer in India, and contended further that rains ‘never failed in India over areas so extensive as to prevent the production of ample food for the entire population’ (Sunderland 1928: 12). Not unexpectedly, therefore, the unpredictability ascribed by colonizers to the Indian monsoon glided towards this imaginary femininity through a typically gendered conflation of unreason (unpredictability) with the ‘feminine’ and its threatening intensification by colonial reason. The proponents of the rhetoric probably expected to sideline the staid, dispassionate, statistically oriented Indian nationalists’ position on the role of the Indian monsoon with a pictorially evocative personification of the monsoon as wildly ‘feminine’—which was calculated to appeal to contemporary British imagination conflating madness with the wild, elemental femininity of the tropics, supposedly manifested in the tropical environment and the women alike. Thus, while the manliness of the Victorian and post-Victorian British colonizer was seen as inhering essentially in his individual spirit of enterprise and readiness to face challenges, the Indian male was portrayed, by contrast, as indolent, slack, fatalistically submissive to adversity, especially in the discourse on the ‘poverty of India’, where he had to appear responsible for his own poverty. His essential difference was, therefore, readily imagined in this discourse, as in other colonial discourses, in the trope of effeminacy. And it is in this connection that the elemental femininity invested on the environment in India had a crucial role to play. The Indian male primary producer was represented as surrendering to the whimsical femininity of the Indian environment— particularly of the monsoon—and getting emasculated by its unpredictable rotation of spoiling bounty and devastating denial. While the politics of difference was reflected in the juxtaposition of this emasculation to the full-blooded masculinity of the Western man, what is particularly important here is that the masculinity

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of the ‘Western’ spirit of enterprise was portrayed as a derivative of the challenging severity of the environment in the West. According to the authors of the imperialist discourse on the ‘poverty of India’, the rugged masculinity of the western environment challenged the men in the West into cultivating morally elevated masculinity of a highly enterprising type. It is interesting how inclemency (read poverty) of the rugged terrain was supposed to endow the Western man with a rare richness of spirit—individualistic, enterprising and innovative. On the other hand, the moist and potentially bountiful, but really ‘fickle’ environment in monsoon and river-dominated India appeared to Darling and others as enthralling Indian men with its dangerous femininity, ‘sapping human character of its finer traits’ (Darling 1977[1925]: 61–65). Darling identified the Jat Sikh—a rare Indian type—as the most ideal recipient of his moral education package, insofar as he was built in the image of the manly European, and noted with great admiration the ‘sturdiness’, ‘grit’, ‘industriousness’ and ‘spirit of enterprise’ of the Jat, reflecting upon his essential difference from the peasant communities of the alluvial riverine tracts in India. The masculinity of the Jat in the newly developed canal colonies23 was imagined as bringing out the fertility lying dormant deep underneath an outwardly arid surface by the sheer strength of physique. Darling observed that Grit, skill in farming and a fine physique are characteristics common to all, and in his new environment the Jat Sikh has reached a point of development probably beyond anything of the kind in India. In less than a generation he has made the wilderness blossom like the rose (Darling 1977[1925]: 117). References to the ‘virginity’ of the hitherto fallow soil of the tablelands, now converted to fertility by the grit and enterprise of the Jat Sikh who had ploughed deep, whereas other communities had merely scratched the surface (Darling 1977[1925]: 33), carried unmistakable resonances of wooing nature by a ‘manly’ use of sexuality, and being in turn roused to a pure energy that ‘passed into his veins and made him almost a part of the forces of nature which he has conquered’ (Darling 1977[1925]: 117). The discourse, however, also dragged in a disconcerting question in the end. The argument that the environment-induced

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effeminacy of the average Indian male was a major determinant of his poverty, and the inexorability of the ‘poverty of India’ might have sounded convincing by itself. But given the comparative and differential framework of the discourse, a thorny question was bound to arise: If, by contrast, the ‘white man’, challenged by his rugged environment, was the epitome of manly initiative, why did he fail to eradicate poverty by combating the unpredictability of the environment with his full-blooded masculinity of the spirit of enterprise that had also engendered the industrial revolution? It was perhaps to save the white man’s masculinity from the disgrace of failure, that Lord Curzon represented the dark and wild unpredictability of India’s natural environment as amenable only to the control of the Almighty and his inscrutable will.24

Notes 1. See for example, Reverend Frederick Lugard’s letter to his daughter Emma dated 16 June 1863, quoted in Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Adventure, London, 1956, pp. 16–17. 2. See also Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, 1991. 3. Morison served as the Principal of Aligarh College before being appointed to the India Council. 4. Anstey was an economist who taught at the London School of Economics between 1921 and 1964. 5. For a detailed account of Brayne’s project of village uplift see Clive Dewey, The Mind of the Indian Civil Service, Delhi, 1996, pp. 45–100. 6. According to Bipan Chandra, the quotation is from Curzon’s Speeches, Vol. II, p. 450. 7. The quotation, according to Bipan Chandra is from Curzon’s Speeches, Vol. III, p. 149. 8. Chandra quotes from Curzon’s Speeches, Vol. III, p. 149 and Vol. II, p. 166. 9. Chandra quotes from Curzon’s Speeches, Vol. I, pp. 313–14. 10. Chandra quotes from Curzon’s Speeches, Vol. III, p. 160. 11. ‘The series of famines, beginning with that of Orissa in 1865–66, which held India in their grip during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the appalling extent, gave jolt after jolt to the complacent picture of a peaceful India progressing in an orderly fashion under the benign foreign rule and directed attention to the important subject of the condition of the people’ (Chandra 1977[1969]: 2–3). 12. The first edition of the first volume (The Economic History of India under Early British Rule) was published in 1901 and the second volume (The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age) in 1903. Both went into

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

their respective second editions in 1906. See D. R. Gadgil’s ‘Introduction’ to the first Indian edition (1960), reprinted in Dutt, The Economic History of India, Vol. I, Delhi, 1976, p. x. Dadabhai Naoroji’s famous monograph—indeed, his magnum opus—on the impoverishing impact of British rule was named Poverty and Un-British Rule in India and was first published in 1901 from London. Recent research has brought to light the likelihood of Naoroji having been drawn definitively towards the epistemology of economic history by the influence of James E. Thorold Rogers (1829–1890), a leading British historian of the day. Naoroji met Rogers in 1887 and probably felt inspired to organize his already initiated research within a more rigorous framework of economic history, using substantial statistics in the way Rogers did. See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Daridrachinta: Aupanibeshik Bharate Tinti Dhara (Bengali), Calcutta, 2000, pp. 12–13. Though James Mill had used the term ‘Indian village republics’ in his History of British India, the notion of the Indian village as a distinct, self-contained, structural unit of production, labour-utilization and distribution was initiated in the late nineteenth century in the writings of Maine, Marx and Baden-Powell. Sunderland’s views on India’s impoverishment, articulated from time to time in the form of speeches and articles, can be accessed from the book in which he brought them together in 1928. See, Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland, India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom, Calcutta, 1928. Naoroji, for example, said in a speech, ‘The British first take away their [the Indian cultivators’] means … reduce their wants to the wretched means that are left to them and then turn round … and tell them: “See, you have few wants. You must remain poor and of few wants … It is we who must have great human wants and human enjoyment, and you must slave and drudge for us … as our beasts of burden.”’ See Chandra, Rise and Growth, p. 24. For the nationalist use of the word ‘crushed’ in relation to the overtaxed Indian cultivating classes, see a letter from the Secretary of Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, in the Journal of Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 1879, Vol. III, no. 1, pp. 37–39. For a detailed discussion of the nationalist position on the drain, see Bipan Chandra, pp. 636–708. For a detailed critical study of ‘slumming’, see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton, 2004. For an insightful account of this shift, see David Englander, Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914, 1998. The Sadler Committee’s Report on the condition of textile workers, Ashley Commission’s Report on the condition of miners, Chadwick’s Report on sanitary conditions in working class habitats were replete with references to the extreme unsanitary and disease-ridden conditions in the workingclass areas in Britain. Also see Gareth Stedman-Jones, Outcast London, Harmondsworth, 1971. Knowles, Morison, Anstey and a host of other British civil servants interpreted peasant behaviour in India along the same lines. Thus in this colonial

200 Sudeshna Banerjee discourse there was a pervasive representation of the poor Indian peasant enervated by the whims of the monsoon. 23. The canal colonies were established in the Punjab between the 1880s and the 1920s by irrigating the hitherto arid tableland between the rivers Jhelum and Chenub, and the Chenub and Ravi. The British officers in charge of this ‘colonisation’ largely populated the colonies with the ‘most desired colonists’, i.e., the ‘industrious’ Jat Sikhs with a track record of agricultural enterprise in the harsh environment of the submontane districts of the Punjab. 24. See quotation from Curzon cited earlier in this essay.

References Books and Pamphlets English Anstey, Vera. 1929. The Economic Development of India. London: Longman’s Green. Baden-Powell, B. H. 1896. The Indian Village Community Examined with Reference to the Physical, Ethnographic and Historical Conditions of the Provinces: Chiefly on the Basis of the Revenue-Settlement Records and District Manuals. London: Longman’s Green. ———. 1899. The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India. London: Charles Scribner. Brayne, F. L. 1928[1927]. Village Uplift in India. Allahabad: The Pioneer Press (for The Rural Community Council, Gurgaon). Chandra, Bipan. 1977[1969]. The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership 1880–1905. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House (First published in 1966). Chesney, George Tomkyns. 1868. Indian Polity: A View of the System of Administration in India. London: Longmans. Darling, Malcolm. 1977[1925]. The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, reprint. Delhi: Manohar. Dewey, Clive. 1996[1993]. Anglo Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service. Delhi: Oxford University Press [London]. Digby, William. 1901. Prosperous British India: A Revelation from the Official Records. London: Allen Unwin. Dutt, R. C. 1901. The Economic History of India, Vol. I: Under Early British Rule, 1757–1837. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner. ———. 1903. The Economic History of India, Vol. II: In the Victorian Age. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner. ———. 1904. Speeches and Papers on Indian Questions, 1897–1900. Calcutta. ———. 1976[1960]. The Economic History of India, 2 volumes. Delhi: Govt. of India Publications Division. [Reprinted from the 2nd edition, London, 1906] Englander, David. 1998. Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914. London: Addison Wesley Longman.

Saidian Interpretation of Orientalism 201 Ensor, R. C. K. 1936. England, 1870–1914, The Oxford History of England xiv. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grant, Charles. 1792. Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain Particularly with Respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving It, Mss. Eur. E. 93; British Library, Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collection, India Office Records. ———. 1813[1792]. Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain Particularly with Respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving It—written chiefly in the year 1792. London: House of Commons. Knowles, L. C. A. 1928[1924]. The Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire, vol. 1. London: G. Routledge. Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1876. Village Communities in the East and West. London: John Murray. Mill, James. 1817. History of British India, 3 vols., (1st edition). London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock and Jay (by C. Baldwin). Morison, Theodore. 1911. The Economic Transition in India. London: J. Murray. Naoroji, Dadabhai. 1901. Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Perham, Margery. 1956. Lugard: The Years of Adventure, 1858–1898. London: Collins. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stedman-Jones, Gareth. 1971. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stokes, Eric. 1959. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sunderland, Rev. Jabez T. 1928. India in Bondage: Her Right to Freedom. Calcutta. Wright, D. G. 1988. Popular Radicalism: The Working-Class Experience, 1780– 1880, Studies in Modern History. London: Longman.

Bengali Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi. 2000. Daridrachinta: Aupanibeshik Bharate Tinti Dhara (‘Thoughts on Poverty: Three Trends in Colonial India’). Calcutta: Paschim Banga Itihas Sansad.

Articles, Chapters and Poems Dutt, R. C. 1976(1960). Preface to The Economic History of India, vol. I (1901). Delhi. Gadgil, D. R. 1976[1960]. Introduction to Dutt, The Economic History of India, Vol. I. Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. ‘The White Man’s Burden’, McClures Magazine, February.

202 Sudeshna Banerjee Secretary, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. 1879. Letter in Poona Sarvajanik Sabha quarterly, vol. III, no. 1, pp. 37–39.

Online Resources Davis, Mike. 2001. ‘Ghosts in the Dust of Gujarat: India is Still Trying to Dig Itself Free from the Legacy of the British Raj’, Guardian Unlimited (6.12.2004). [Originally published as Special Report: Natural Disasters, in The Observer, Sunday, 11 February]. http://www.guardian.co.uk/naturaldisasters/story/ 0,7369,436513.00.html. Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. ‘The White Man’s Burden’, Internet Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.html. Nicholls, Neville. 1993. ‘Impacts of ENSO’, in Harold Brookfield and Yvonne Byron (eds), South-East Asia’s Environmental Future: the Search for Sustainability. Tokyo: United Nations University Press and Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80815e/ 80815E0k.htm (online edition).

Chapter Eight

Imaging the Nature of the Orient: Some Contradictions behind Colonial Forest Policies in India Subhasis Biswas In writing the environmental history of India, Said’s much debated thesis of Orientalism is particularly crucial as the term ‘environment’ itself is a construction of the European thinkers, which the colonial government used and abused in accordance with its own choice. The concept of ‘nature’ developed in the subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with the development of orientalist ideas and it had a new perspective that was different from that of the pre-colonial times. The experience of the ‘mystic’ world of the East, emblematized in the untramelled abundance of its forests, changed, reshaped and redefined ideas about India’s environment that helped the British Government to set up forest and environmental policies in India. These policies, in turn, changed the fate of the Indian forests and forest people. The present essay discusses orientalist European ideas about Indian nature by analysing the writings of some British Forest Officers in India. It also tries to expose, through a reading of the contradictions in their attitudes to British Forest Policy, how orientalist constructions of Indian nature barred the introduction of a proper forest policy in India, and how such constructions helped the government to treat Indian forests and their people differently. Europe’s political domination started in Asia, Africa and America when the concept of ‘ordering nature’ came up as a dominant idea in the European mind. Through their geographical discoveries, Europeans tried to consolidate this idea of nature in order to gain political control and to maximize the use of resources of the

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new and the old world. Without the ordering of these resources, it was not possible for the Europeans to exploit it; and the industrial revolution could not have taken place without exploiting the resources of the colonies. Disciplined exploitation also needed a proper ordering of the idea of ‘oriental nature’ in the mind of Europe. So the perspective of nature in the European mind changed not only due to expansion of knowledge but also in response to the immediate resource needs of Europe. This essay is an exploration of contradictions in the ideas of nature and environment that constitute the colonial attitude of European naturalists on the one hand, and are a testimony to their individual, but shared perception of the limits of colonial policy on the other. It analyses the activities and writings of some European foresters who served the British Forest Department in India, to show that despite considerable variations, there was a great deal of similarity in the perceptions of these European thinkers. The diaries, private papers and memoirs of foresters like F. Canning, F. W. Champion, A. P. F. Hamilton, C. E. Hewetson, Sir Herbert Howard, Sir Lawrence Mason and E. A. Smythies clearly reveal how certain orientalist attitudes on the part of the British government helped to change the face of the Indian forests, their flora and fauna and the lives of their traditional residents.

F. Canning F. Canning was a member of the Indian Forest Service from 1903– 37, and was the Chief Conservator of Forests, Uttar Pradesh, from 1929 to 1937, i.e., towards the end of the colonial period (FRI 1961: 37). Records of his interaction with the forest people and his ideas about the flora and fauna of Indian forests give the picture of a perfect European officer. Canning commented ironically that he began his career as a forest officer and at the end of his service he became a public servant (FRI 1961: 40); this perception of a transformation in personal identity is very important in understanding the dilemma of many British forest officers. After taking their training, particularly from Germany, most European officers were inclined to think positively about preservation. They tried to serve the interest of the forests in the initial years, but ultimately served only the interest of the colony in the later period,

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particularly when they were promoted to higher posts. F. Canning had a similar history. The appointment of these forest officers was made through the Secretary of State for India and the posts were advertised in English newspapers as ‘Vacancies for Woods and Forests’.1 When Canning applied for his job there were twenty-four applicants for nine posts. After his selection, Canning was trained at Coopers Hill in Germany under the supervision of the famous conservationist, Dr William Schlich. Subsequently a tour was organized in the German forest areas. From his experience of this tour Canning realized that the development of knowledge of forestry required more practical expertise than theoretical reading. After the training programme in Germany, the officers were placed in different parts of India. According to Canning, who was placed in the Uttar Pradesh forest, it was the most preferred posting by all appointed officers and only the high rankers were placed in the United Provinces (present Uttar Pradesh) forest area. He believed that it was because forestry was more developed in the Uttar Pradesh region than in the other parts of the country, but if we look beyond this belief we come across a very different picture. The exploitation of forest resources in Uttar Pradesh had already begun in an organized way. The Kumaon and Garhwal regions in particular, suffered most from the extensive felling of trees. A large area was cleared by the European officers with the help of local labourers to supply timber to the railway companies. So an officer who was posted in Uttar Pradesh received more honour from the government, and promotion to higher posts was also relatively easier from this region. Four conservators of the UP forest area— Mason, Gloves, Howard and Champion were honoured by the government with the much-coveted knighthood. Two of them went on to become Inspectors-General of Forests later on. But the forest preservation movement also began in Uttar Pradesh, and the Forest Research Institute was eventually founded in Dehradun. All these factors helped the government to maximize resource exploitation in the forests of Uttar Pradesh. The forests of this region, moreover, had plenty of wildlife, which was very satisfactory to the European officers who could carry out hunting games to their hearts’ content. Hunting was so popular a British practice that even the Governors-General of

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the British Raj preferred these areas for hunting. The number of tigers was, thus, rapidly declining in the Uttar Pradesh region and the first national park known as the ‘Hailey National Park’ was founded in Kumaon to arrest this trend. The lavish hunting grounds of the forest, as well as the hill stations and good climatic conditions of Uttar Pradesh attracted the newcomers in forest service and other groups of Europeans to this area. The career of F. Canning is particularly interesting as he was promoted unusually faster than others to higher posts. He was in the post of Assistant Forest Officer for one and a half years, in the post of Divisional Forest Officer for thirteen years, Conservator of Forests for eight years, Chief Conservator for eight years, and finally officiated as Inspector-General of Forests for six months. When, in the initial years, Canning was in charge of the Bahraich Forest Division, he himself admitted that the Forest Department had no working plan and the forest was open to timber merchants (FRI 1961: 37). But Canning quite enjoyed his days in the forest as he wrote, ‘Bahraich was a wonderful experience’. A very fine old Forest Ranger, approaching retirement, was my guide and mentor and a tremendous help to me, particularly as I did not have the experience of holding charge of a Range. Shooting was very good and I put in on this any spare time I could make out in the forests. Game was plentiful and tiger came in from the adjoining Nepal forests as soon as there was room for them in our forests. Six tigers in the twelve months and six panthers and I could have had more but for my programme for the field work of the Working Plan plotted out day by day… (Canning 1961: 38). This account of F. Canning is all the more remarkable because there were a number of movements against hunting precisely at the time that he was writing. But most of the forest officers continued their hunting games, and the law was enforced only on the Indians who had always enjoyed a traditional right of hunting in the forest areas. Canning’s rather grudging admission that there was no proper working plan is also significant. In practice, all working plans were made by the government. The trained forest officers, with all their conservation ethics, did not enjoy any right

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to protect the forests in the way that they had learnt in Germany. In a real sense then, the theory of conservation had no value in the context of the activities of forest officers; they just acted as mere machines of the Empire. Canning was transferred to the Kheri region in Uttar Pradesh in 1907. There was a drought in 1907 and 1908 and the entire forest area of Kheri suffered from it. According to Canning, the famine relief arranged by the Government was wonderful; service was provided to all the affected areas, everyone went all out for it and the red tape disappeared (Canning 1961: 38) for the time being. Although the common people suffered from the drought, the problems of forests and loss of forest resources did not affect them much because the forest acts had already taken away all their rights over their forest lands. They had been reduced to the status of woodcutters of timber contractors on a daily wage basis. Forests of this area, however, were badly affected, and the Sal trees in particular were extensively felled. By 1912, 10,000 acres of Sal forests were destroyed and 55,000 acres were seriously affected in the Kheri Trans Sarada forests, where the average fall in the subsoil water level was 10 feet and the maximum registered was a fall of 26 feet.2 This was, however, a model forest, and a regular visiting place for the students of the Forest Research Institute of Dehradun. Though the loss of forest resources was a tangible loss to the government, it had practically no effect on the adibasis (native tribals) of this area, for they no longer enjoyed their traditional right over these resources. So the people most affected in reality were the timber merchants. At the end of the famine years the contractors had large unsold stocks. The British Government refunded Rs 150,000 of purchase money which the contractors had already paid, and Canning wrote, ‘Most of this money was used by contractors to finance the next years’ working and the goodwill established was very valuable’ (Canning 1961: 38). Canning was actually recording the story of an organized destruction of forest resources, which was carried out by him as a forest officer in the way the government needed. He was promoted and transferred to the Pine forest area of Kumaon at a time when the Forest Department was directed by the government to take over the administration of the Kumaon forests. Canning was given

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the charge of locating those forest areas that could be used to supply timber to the railway companies. Justifying this, he wrote that ‘in the more remote areas vast numbers of large pine trees were mature, dying and rotting away unutilised. A felling scheme was absolutely necessary’ (Canning 1961: 39). As a forest officer, he was expected to prepare a proper ‘felling scheme’ that would not violate the principles of conservation, although it was palpably against the conservation ethics of the government that initiated the first Forest Act of 1865 and applied it in this area after 1878. As an officer Canning, however, was not given the charge of conservation but of preparing a proper ‘felling scheme’. This was the paradox of colonialism. As a conservator of the Forest Department, Canning, of course, received resistance from the local people, particularly from the village communities. But all forest areas, including the village forests, were taken over in the process of time. Exploitation of forests in these areas proceeded rapidly and Canning’s account of such exploitation is extremely radical: The great increase in pine timbers resulted in large departmental open tank creosoting installation designed to treat over a million railway sleepers in three years. The first work was interrupted but when, twenty years later, I was taken as Inspector General of Forests by the Railway authorities on a tour of inspection of treated sleepers, those first early supplies were shown and considered some of the best received. After the war the treating work was taken up by the Railways and the market for our pine timber confirmed (Canning 1961: 41). This gives a clear picture of maximizing the exploitation of forest resources to meet the requirements of the railway companies, and Canning himself gave leadership to this programme at that time. Even as a conservationist, he seemed more interested in having a confirmed market for the pine timber rather than in preserving it. But Canning was quite conscious of the agitation of the forest people against such trends. He mentions that the reservation and protection of forests must generally, and particularly in the early stages, involve some ‘limitation of the amenities of the people

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living near them’ (Canning 1961: 45). Here the expressions ‘early stages’ and ‘involve some limitation of amenities’ are nuanced. The forest people never treated the forest resources as a source of somewhat dispensable ‘amenities’; rather they were altogether dependent on those resources. Hunting was not a game to these people but a source of their food. In all his papers, Canning never writes about the people who live inside the forests—he only writes the story of the people who ‘live near the forest’. This was the attitude of the Raj itself. Canning’s account continues: In Kumaon the breaking of forest laws, including the burning of forests, was the way resentment was shown on the spot, while voting reduction of the Departmental Budget occurred in the Departmental Legislative Council (Canning 1961: 48). The point is made even more clearly in the following lines: The Forest Department was for progress. There was much criticism in the legislative council, but those were friendly and constructive. Long before I left it was possible to say without any reservation—The ‘Forests’ would be favourably and safely treated, whatever powers over them were granted to any new form of Government. Actually, the progress that has since been made is vast and more than we even hoped for in those days (Canning 1961: 48). Even as the Chief Conservator of forests till 1937, Canning does not seem to realize how rapidly the forest tracts in India were declining. All the statistics of the great crisis in Indian forests were available to him and he had himself signed many of the forest records and agreements. Despite his awareness of these details, however, he did not hesitate to describe the achievement of the forest department in terms of ‘progress’. Canning began his career as a person with all the knowledge of conservation that he had learnt in Germany. But in the end, he became one of the many imperial officers who merely wanted to maximize the profit of the Raj by ruthlessly destroying the valuable forest treasures of India. This was the tragedy of his colonial predicament.

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F. W. Champion F. W. Champion was another member of the Indian Forest Service in Uttar Pradesh and one of the earliest environmentalists of India. He preferred to take photographs of animals rather than killing them. Champion was also a pioneer in the field of wildlife photography. He spent a long time in India in the 1920s and 1930s, initiating the wildlife preservation movement, and was one of the very few forest officials who lectured on it. He also wrote two famous books on Indian wildlife. The first book, With a Camera in Tigerland was published in 1927 and a second book, The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow was published in 1934. Champion wrote a number of articles on Indian wildlife3 in which he argued that wildlife preservation was more important than hunting animals. Emphasizing the aesthetic value of wild animals, he romanticized Indian forests, particularly its wildlife. If we study the ideas of F. W. Champion more critically, we find the same contradictions that we can trace in Jim Corbett. Champion wrote in his memoirs in 1961, I will say little about that, the most important aspect of a forester’s work, except to note that subsequent experience in forestry in East Africa and in Britain confirmed my original idea that our forests in India were managed well enough to compare favourably with management in many parts of the world. And now, after a century of scientific management the forests of India have become a priceless asset that must be the envy of many less fortunate countries (Champion 1961: 40). Champion was writing this at a time when the forest area in India was already much reduced. Although he was a preservationist of the early era, Champion ignored this great crisis of the Indian forests and tried instead to highlight the achievements of the British Raj, to the absurd extent that he compared Indian forests with the forests of England, a country which never had any significant forest area, even in the ancient times. There was a debate in the colonial period about the management of the flora and fauna of the forests. Many conservationists argued that game specialists should preserve the fauna separately and

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that the forest department should not interfere in game preservation, so as to enable good hunters to find an easy way for their hunting games, which was sometimes difficult for the forest officers to obtain. But F. W. Champion argued differently, and believed that the Forest Department should have the responsibility for wildlife preservation. Champion argued: Indeed, there is much to be said for having chosen forest officers in charge of the wild life in their forests because the forest officer, sympathetic to the wild creatures that lived in the forests with him can fairly balance the needs of the forests against the inevitable damage done by some wild animals. A few forest officers, desperately keen on natural regeneration, may feel at times that certain wild animals do too much damage to the forests. On the other hand, the average game officer has no conception of the needs of the forests (Champion 1961: 43). Champion did not want to reduce the right of a forest officer in the forest areas, for, having been a forest officer himself, Champion thought that forest officers could be more sympathetic to the needs of the forests. But more significantly, he stated that the British Raj exercised absolute powers and enjoyed absolute rights over the forest resources through these forest officers. Any interference from the game specialists could be a threat to their absolute control. Also, Champion seemed more concerned about the fact that some ‘wild animals do too much damage to the forests’. It is particularly ironical because F. W. Champion was known as one of the greatest animal lovers in the colonial period. He did not, however, mention how exactly a wild animal can damage the forest, even though he must have known that wild animals were an integral part of the forests and maintained the ecological balance automatically. The definition of forest resources and the concept of damaging it, however, were two entirely different things to the Raj, and admittedly, wild animals could sometimes create problems for the exploitation of these resources. For example, man-eating tigers could become a threat to the timber merchants and contractors in the Kumaon and Garhwal regions. Tigers, therefore, became a damaging factor to the government and the latter often declared prize money for killing them. Champion seems to be suggesting

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here that this type of damage could be checked by the forest officers who were good hunters and capable enough of checking such damages, even without the assistance of game specialists. But in reality they controlled these damages in such a way that many of the ‘damaging’ wild animals became endangered species and some of them, like the cheetah, became extinct in the Indian forests. The personal shooting experience of F. W. Champion was much less than that of any ordinary European forest officer of his time. He never participated in big game hunting and only once did he kill a tiger in the Kumaon area in the early days of his career. Later he described his stand in the following words: Many of my friends, both Indian and European, have found it difficult to understand that from the moment of killing my first tiger 35 years ago or more, I have lost all desire to kill wild animals. Not that this has proved any loss to me because I have found that big game and wild life photography provide all the thrills and excitements of hunting. Not only that but one can shoot any particular tiger, for example once only, but one could if clever and lucky enough, take one hundred photographs over a series of years of this particular beast and yet the hundred and first photograph might prove to be far better than all the previous efforts (Champion 1961: 45). It is clear that F. W. Champion personally did not like shooting animals. But that does not mean he was against big game hunting. On the contrary, he developed the idea of ‘big game hunting’ photography at a time when hunting was enjoyed by many Europeans as well as Indian Maharajas. Champion participated in it not with a gun, but with his camera. He even photographed the animals in chase before they were killed by hunters and their corpses displayed as trophies—as the hunters wanted to keep records of their big games to show their mastery over the ‘art of hunting’. It was the best symbol of displaying the power of rulers. Hence, photographs were a very important document to them. The walls of many European hunters’ houses were decorated with tiger skins and photographs of hunting scenes, and before the introduction of photography, it was quite common to commission paintings that captured scenes of a tiger hunt to keep records of such a display of power. Though Champion had never hunted

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tigers, excepting that one instance, he participated with the hunters and apparently enjoyed their hunts of big game. Even as an environmentalist, Champion never campaigned against taxidermy. Photography as an art was also developing at this time, and in Champion’s later days colour photography had just come up. He was interested in this art form and his subject of specialization was wildlife. So there was no specific transition from rifle to camera in Champion’s mind if we think in terms of preservation ethics. Only the area of his personal interest seems to have changed. Champion wrote long essays on Indian forests, but he never mentioned the life of the forest people with whom he had had direct interaction as a forest officer for fifteen years. He only once mentioned that I was a good many years ago in the Garwal district of Uttar Pradesh—a district that runs from the lowest foothills up and up through the Himalayan mountains to the eternal snows, containing a wonderful and extremely varied fauna and flora and producing a splendid race of hillmen whose military prowess is such that they earned several v.c.s, Britain’s greatest honour in the course of the two world wars (Champion 1961: 47). Champion emphasizes the martial prowess of the hill people in conventional orientalist idiom, set against the picturesque backdrop of the sublime Himalayan mountains, and the way they served the British Empire during the two world wars. This attitude makes it difficult to differentiate his personal vocation as an environmentalist from the imperial geopolitics of orientalism. Despite all limitations however, Champion’s credentials as an early defender of world animals against hunting were, if anything, more impeccable than that of his more famous contemporary, Corbett. Having served in the First World War, he was among those who ‘saw far too much killing ever to want to see any more’ (Rangarajan 2001: 73). Sometimes Champion criticized the sportsman. Licence was easy to obtain from the colonial government and overkilling was routine. In Champion’s area, legal hunters accounted for fortytwo tigers, thirty-two leopards and about a hundred each of chital and sambhar in only five years on a forest division of 300 square miles. In a later work, Champion warned his people on how wildlife

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was being imperilled by modernizing development. Keen shikar lovers were being aided in their hunting by the construction of good roads, motor transport and even the new invention, the telephone. Tigers entering Indian territory from adjacent forests in Nepal did not long survive the bullet. The mentality of most sporthunters was that—‘If I don’t shoot it, someone else will’ (Rangarajan 2001: 76).4 But departmental loyalties ran deep in the mind of F. W Champion. When foresters as a class came under criticism for overkilling in the land under their charge, they found in Champion a strong defender of their record. He insisted that diminution of wildlife was taking place despite the best efforts of forest officers, who were fighting to stem the decline, not aiding and abetting it in any way. Little big game had survived outside the reserved forests except in a few large private estates. Most complaints about excessive shooting by foresters were based on hearsay. Champion spoke out even in favour of killing deer in timber forests. Tigers had the right to live, but no forester worth his salt could permit deer to breed to an excessive degree. Selective killing of deer by officials was not responsible for the depletion of their herds. It was outside the state forests that herds of antelope were dwindling. Unlike Corbett, he felt that, ‘the sanctuary idea could be overdone’. After all, one tiger could kill more deer in a year than all the sportsmen who could shoot them in the same stretch of forest. Champion was not in favour of no-go zones where all sports were prohibited, though he was critical of big game hunters for shooting too much. Interestingly, he argued that the number of tigers was rising due to effective protection by foresters and the absence of big game hunters during the First World War. Here his view was opposed to that of Corbett, who blamed the Forest Department for wiping out deer in large tracks of forests to enable the regeneration of timber trees. Champion also warned that tigers were not increasing in number; the impression that they were, was a misleading one. On the contrary, the paucity of wild prey was leading to increased attack on cattle (Rangarajan 2001: 77). As a naturalist, Champion never criticized the timber-centric management of forests. His senses were finely tuned to appreciate nature but the value of timber production was too deeply ingrained in him; he was not able to stand apart from it. Despite having no

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personal stakes in hunting, Champion felt impelled to defend the records of his fellow officials. His deep confidence in foresters as sound stewards of the land found expression in his defence of Shooting Blocks and Reserved Forests, although he differed from the priorities of most fellow foresters. He was not sympathetic to those who lived along the fringes of the forest (Champion 1934, 1939). Having been a forester of the colonial government, Champion did not wish to continue his work in India after the end of the colonial rule. Interestingly, he left India just after independence in 1947. Corbett also left India in the same year. F. W. Champion went to East Africa and continued his work in the colonies for six years after leaving India. It is very clear that his love for the forests of India was very much related to colonialism. He did not think of pursuing his passion in the Forest Department of independent India. But after leaving India, Champion continued to write extensively about Indian forests and its wildlife. Most of his reminiscences, however, portray how successful the British forest policy was in protecting Indian forests and their wildlife. He ignored all the statistics of decline and decay. On the other hand, he justified the governmental policy of timber felling. In East Africa, he joined the same governmental activities. If his love for Indian forests and its wildlife was an earnest one, he could have stayed on in Indian forests after the colonial rule was over. It is also possible, however, to read his agenda of environmental sensitization as a project that he had undertaken to transcend the limitations of his government employment, and it was the same agenda that he took up in East Africa as an employee of the colonial government there.

A. P. F. Hamilton A. P. F. Hamilton was a member of the Indian Forest Service and he later became the Inspector-General of Forests in the British colonial government. His service to the government was almost the same as that of the other officers of his time. But Hamilton was one of the earliest persons who thought about the water problem in India. Hardly anyone before Hamilton had been able to identify this depletion of nature. The rainfall records up to 1940

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show that there was a crisis in the amount of rainfall, and that the rivers were also drying up. From the available statistics till 1940, we find that Assam had the highest figure of rainfall (2,605 mm annually) and Rajputana (West) had the lowest (282 mm annually). The eastern part of the United Provinces, where Hamilton worked for a long time, had an annual rainfall of 1,005 mm. In the West United Provinces it was 968 mm annually. There was a rapid decline in the amount of rainfall as shown by statistical figures after that point. Hamilton, although a forester by profession, was one of the first few who pointed out this crisis. The river courses in India were also changing. As the Inspector-General of Forests, Hamilton had to look after the entire forest circles throughout the country and he found that there was a problem with the amount of water in the riverbeds too. The ideas of Hamilton in the colonial period indicate a significant change in the environmental history of India. Before him only flora and fauna were treated as important factors, but Hamilton highlighted the climatic issues, which became major points of discussion for Indian environmentalists after independence. The History of Climate was already an important subject of study in the Continent and also in the United States of America. Fernand Braudel started writing The Role of the Environment as early as the 1930s. In his study of the climatic records of the Mediterranean world between 1550 and 1600 Braudel clearly showed the climatic changes of this Mediterranean world since the sixteenth century ‘…everything changes, even the climate. Nobody now believes in the invariability of the elements of physical geography’ (Braudel 1972[1949]: 267). India, the nature of which was treated as subcontinental by geographers and climatologists, underwent rapid changes in its climatic factors during the colonial period. In the course on Forestry in Germany, climate and weather changes were treated as a very important issue, but most of the foresters trained in Germany forgot it after joining the service in India. A. P. F Hamilton was an exception to this rule. Hamilton treated water in particular as a ‘great fertiliser’. He described India’s water resources and its soil in an elevated language, reminiscent of the early orientalists: What are now her mountains were lofty soilclad hills, her sandy plains of the present day were once full of rich soil and her

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mountains were heavily forested, a fact of which there are still visible traces. These mountains, which can now support nothing but bees, were clothed not so very long ago with fine trees producing timber for roofing the largest buildings, the roofs hewn from the timber are still in existence. There are also many fine cultivated trees, while the country produced boundless pasture for cattle. The annual supply of rainfall was not lost then, as it is at present, by being allowed to flow over the denuded surface into the sea, but was received by the country, in all its abundance, into her bosom where she stored in her potters earth, and so was able to discharge the drainage of the heights into the hollow and rivers with abundant volume and a countrywide distribution. The shrines that survive to the present day on the sites of extinct water supplies are evidence of the correctness of my hypothesis (Hamilton 1961: 49). Hamilton saw water as the greatest resource for the fertility of the soil. He also indicated the crises of water, but never tried to find out the cause. We find that colonial policies and forest policy in particular, were largely responsible for it. Rainfall depends on forests and from the early nineteenth century the clearing of forest areas had begun by the British Government; by the mid-nineteenth century the process of felling trees was much accelerated to supply timber to the railway companies. After the Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878, the process of felling trees became even more organized and in the twentieth century it gained its ultimate momentum. Hamilton never mentioned this basic cause although he was talking about rainfall problems. River courses also changed due to this rapid deforestation. Hamilton not only ignored all these factors, but provided a rationale for such oversights. He himself was promoted to the highest post in the Forest Service and became the Inspector-General of Forests for his successful ‘work planning’ in the Indian forests. Hamilton argued, ‘History does not record the cause of disaster; it could have been the result of the “scorched earth” policy of the land on its natural covering’ (Hamilton 1961: 50). Quoting Plato, Hamilton said that in Attica too there was a similar crisis of water 2,300 years ago. The problem thus might have different causes, including misuse of water resources by the local people, but according to Hamilton, it was important to be conscious of the

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water problem because ‘prosperity depends on the guarantee of a permanent supply of water’ (Hamilton 1961: 50). He ignored the basic causes of the problem and implicitly made the Indian people responsible for the misuse of water. This was a typical colonial method of interpreting ecological problems, which could not possibly be rectified unless the causes were removed.

C. E. Hewetson C. E. Hewetson was a member of the Indian Forest Service in the 1930s. His accounts are particularly important because he has dealt with the issue of the crisis between British Forest Policy and the local people in the Indian forests. Most of the forest officers consciously ignored the question of the rights of adibasis in the forests except D. Brandis who insisted on developing the idea of community forestry, although he could not implement it successfully. The British colonial government tried to possess absolute right over forest resources and the forest acts inevitably negated the traditional rights of the local people. C. E. Hewetson tried to deal with these issues in his memoirs, issues that were very sensitive to the colonial British Government. Hewetson described the human factors that were responsible for the crisis in the forest resources despite the best efforts of the British Government. I have always been interested in the ecological approach to forestry and silviculture. When listing the factors of the locality, a heading is usually given to the influence of man. This usually means the tendency of the local population to start fires, to make illicit felling, trespass or shoot without a license. One rarely takes into account the background and ideas of the Civil Administrators and Forest Officers who promulgate the Forest laws and policies. Yet these ideas have shaped the structure of the forests more powerfully than any other single factor (Hewetson 1961: 51). Hewetson’s statement appears more imperialistic than it actually is. He strongly rejects any reference to the rights of the local

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people in the forest area, and blames them for lighting forest fires. But fires, as anyone familiar with Indian forests would know, are a very natural phenomenon, particularly in the months of March and April. It is the natural process of clearing. Sometimes forest fires caused a great loss of forest resources, such as the one that occurred in the UP forests in 1907–1908; but these forest fires were not man-made. Sometimes people used to burn forest areas to open land for cultivation, as the Dangs used to do in Gujarat in the nineteenth century (Hardiman 1998: 101–31). But in the Uttar Pradesh forest area such incidents never took place after the implementation of forest acts. The word ‘trespass’ used by Hewetson also suggests a typically colonial mindset. After 1865, the inhabitants of the forests suddenly become trespassers. Hewetson’s reference to licence, however, accentuates the fact that it was not even possible for them to shoot with a licence. The licence then, was obviously given to the people who were white and had only to obtain legal sanction for the ‘crimes’ that would penalize the adibasis. This underlines the discrepancy between the ‘background and ideas’ of those who promulgate the forest laws and policies, and the actual sanction by the government to violate them with special permission. The people, moreover, did not have any firearms to hunt animals— they were dependent on their traditional weapons. Nor were they capable of defending themselves from man-eating tigers. If the local people had good rifles, or the permission to use traditional weapons on animals, then the creation of Jim Corbett’s myth as a ‘saviour’ would not have been possible. The forest people only hunted deer and wild boar for their food, but the forest acts took away their rights and a new term emerged for these people— ‘poachers’. Hewetson’s account implicitly draws attention to this helplessness of the people. At the same time that Hewetson highlighted the success that was gained by the British forest officers who promulgated the forest laws and policies, the aim of British Forest Policy and the duties of forest officers were clear to him—‘The duties of forest officers were primarily economic’ (Hewetson 1961: 52). Hewetson emphasized the economic motives of the Forest Department and ignored all the high ideals of preservation. But in the Forest Acts of 1865 and 1878 these economic motives were not mentioned

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anywhere; on the other hand, the preservation issues were highlighted. Economic motives were indeed the guiding factors for framing forest policies and Hewetson did not hesitate to point out the truth. Hewetson insisted that the chief duties of the Forest Department were the preservation and development of large timber forests. Timber was necessary for the economic growth of Britain. The main research projects of the Forest Research Institute were also carried out to identify the forest areas that could produce a large amount of timber. He argued that ‘the main concern in 1894 was to see that only such lands were kept for timber production which could produce valuable timber’. Yet in his detailed description of the 1894 Resolution of the Government in his memoirs, Hewetson highlights that the Government was prepared to discuss the issue of public interest for the first time, although it still remained somewhat theoretical. Three paragraphs from the Government Resolution are quoted by Hewetson: Paragraph 2. This regulation and restriction (of rights) are justified only when the advantage to be gained by the public is great: and the principle to be observed is that the rights and privileges of individuals must be limited, for their own benefit. Paragraph 5. Even in tracks of which the conditions are suited to the growth of large timber it should be carefully considered in each case whether it would not be better, both in the interest of the people and of the revenue to work them with the object of supplying the requirements. Paragraph 6. It should also be remembered that, subject to certain conditions to be referred to presently, the claims of cultivation are stronger than the claims of forest preservation (Hewetson 1961: 53). Hewetson discussed some selected parts of the Resolution of 1894. Although the ‘interest of the people’ was mentioned in the Resolution, it was never applied in practice. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the railway revolution was almost complete in India and public agitation against British Forest Policy was becoming stronger and stronger. This was also the period of the development of associational politics in India. The British

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Government was coming under increasing criticism by the English educated intelligentsia. Although the rights of the forest people was never primary to the Indian politicians of the time, they were becoming more and more conscious about Britain’s economic exploitation of India. Dadabhai Naoroji’s Drain of Wealth was to be published just after this decade, with its exposure of British economic imperialism. So the Government had to make some people-friendly resolutions at this time although they were never applied afterwards. Even C. E. Hewetson, who gave emphasis to these aspects of the Resolution in his memoirs, did not apply them in practice as long as he was in the forest service. It is also interesting that while Hewetson discussed some parts of the Resolution, he passed over the other parts where the government wanted to impose more restrictions on the people. In paragraph 7, for example, it was written that cultivators must not be allowed to extend or to encroach upon the minimum area of forest that was needed in order to supply the general forest needs of the country or the reasonable forest requirements, present and prospective of the neighbourhood in which it was situated.5 This part of the Resolution was intended to check the people from using forest resources, which Hewetson did not mention. The reference to ‘needs of the country’ was tantamount to preserving the economic needs of the Empire, which were served by maximizing the exploitation of forest resources, and the needs of the common people were quite insignificant compared to this. On many occasions, Hewetson criticized the private landowners who did not protect their forests. This issue of protecting private forests was very important at that time in England where there was a movement for private forests. The Royal Forest Society had more than 4,000 members from England. Hewetson, however, shared what he saw as the Forest Department’s economic idea that forests should be protected not for the need of environment, but for maximizing timber extraction. He described it thus: In this favourable climate a whole new profession of private forestry consultants and firms which specialise in carrying out forest works on contract have established themselves to help the smaller landowners who could not maintain their own labour force or afford the special equipment for extraction of timber (Hewetson 1961: 53).

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Here he was highlighting the fact that as the private owners of forests did not have any specialized training for timber extraction they looked for help from European specialists. But if we study the history of privately owned forests in India, we find that the private owners sometimes better preserved their forest areas. The forests owned by Maharajas were called ‘Royal Reserves’ and these reserves were favourite places of big hunting for Europeans as well. The Maharaja of Rewa had a huge forest area under his control, which was later turned into national parks. The forests owned by the King of Chail became the ‘Chail National Park’, and the King of Mayurbhanj contributed the forests of his district to create the ‘Simlipal National Park’ in a later period. These forests controlled by the Maharajas were in much better shape, and there was also less of timber felling in these areas.6 It was also rather unjust on the part of Hewetson to compare Indian forest landowners with British forest landowners. British forest landowners had a different set-up and they were used to a completely different type of forest area—much more sparse than the Indian forests, and almost without any wildlife.7 The most valuable forest areas in India were occupied by the British Government, which they cleared over the course of time. The earliest measures to monopolize forest resources had been taken in 1849, when Governor-General Dalhousie ordered certain wastelands to be formed into governmental estates,8 and this process continued till the end of the colonial period. Hewetson also brought up in his memoirs questions about the revenue extraction system of the Forest Department. He quoted from the report of Dr Volcker,9 ‘The Forest Department is … called upon to show a large revenue, and naturally proud of the profit it makes’. Hewetson commented: This pride in annual surplus of a few lacs of rupees seems pathetic now when surpluses are counted in crores and the main problem of the forest department is to spend the money which is pressed upon them (Hewetson 1961: 52). As a forest officer Hewetson referred to the problems of spending the money, but he was insinuating at the fact that the Forest Department was one of the greatest profit-making sections of the British Government. Theoretically, forest resources would

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include its mineral resources, water resources and even the fruits of the trees. But as Hewetson so often stated with apparent innocence, the British foresters treated only timber as a resource from the forest. Without the ideological claim that they never used forest products that were used by the original inhabitants of the forest areas (adibasis) or the so-called tribals, such a great pace in timber felling would not have been possible. It was the tribal population who were supposed to treat the woods as their main resource, and so they were held responsible for the destruction of their habitus as the green cover slowly faded away from the land of the subcontinent. Hewetson’s account gives a clear picture of the contradictions in these ideologies of imperialism. Hewetson also showed considerable interest in the connection of Indian forest officers with Europeans, to emphasize continually on the build-up of forest capital, pointing out that the forest capital in Germany and in England were better maintained than it was done in India. Timber felling in England was no longer necessary because there was a high quantity of supply from India, and British forest areas actually survived at the cost of the East Indian forests. While the Europeans protected their own forests by exploiting the forest resources of India, the Indian Forest Department, following the European method of timber extraction, made a huge profit on the wood. Hewetson tried to draw attention to the success of forestry in Europe, suggesting that the Imperial Forest Department in India played a very important role in contributing to that success. Theoretically, the regeneration of forest areas was one of the major duties of the Forest Department. Hewetson argued that the Forest Department had failed to regenerate trees properly not due to any fault in their working plans, but due to the technical problems of European methods. He justified it in the following terms: Perhaps only in the field of silviculture has the influence of European method led to some mistakes. The fault was not in the European system, but in the use of them in the tropics without realising that silvicutural systems evolved in Europe to fit the requirements of the main timber species there, were not going to suit the tropical forests. Though some magnificent young forests have been obtained by natural regeneration, on

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the whole it has not been found possible to obtain natural regeneration as and when prescribed in the working plan in most states, I think it is true to say that the uniform system is being abandoned or is retained in name, but dropped in practice. In this field the European foundation has impeded progress towards evolving a silvicultural system suited to the condition of tropical forests. But the European method failed in these tropical forests (Hewetson 1961: 53). But if we study the British Forest Policy critically we find many omissions in Hewetson’s comments. British foresters were never really interested in the regeneration of forests and there was very little research on how the regeneration of trees could be achieved in India. A closer look at the research activities of the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, reveals that a silvicultural branch was established in 1906 after thirty-five years of the foundation of the Institute. Until 1909, there was no research scientist and in 1909, R. S. Troup, who was not a silviculturist, but a forest economist, was appointed. He was the only person in charge of silvicultural research for the entire 104,000 square miles of forest.10 As the British Forest Department had never taken any interest in regenerating forests in India it was not so much the faults in European methods that checked the success of silviculture in India, but it was due to the lack of real interest of the forest department in preservation that the forests were denuded. Hewetson’s interpretations cannot be accepted at face value because he did not expose the real commercial interests of the Raj and these interests played a key role in the forming of the work plans of the Imperial Forest Department.

Conclusion These reminiscences, private letters and official notes of forest officers like F. Canning, F. W. Champion, A. P. F. Hamilton, C. E. Hewetson and others were different in the style and content of their narratives of remembering the experiences of Indian forests. But all of them served the same purpose under the colonial government, which was, as Canning pointed out so perspicuously,

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defined by their status as public servants. All these imperial foresters tried to transform the forests into a managed landscape where land use would be under colonial supervision and control. As loyal servants of the government, they tried to maximize the revenue earnings of the government. But as conservators of the forest service in India, they were also the earliest naturalists and their training either from Germany or from England only made them more conscious about preserving the flora and fauna of the forests. When they joined the service, however, they were inevitably transformed into imperial officers. Eventually they became ‘officers only’ to serve the purpose of the British Raj, and began to support its commercial exploitation of forest resources. That this was their real dilemma in the Imperial Forest Service is repeatedly revealed in the accounts of the forest officers and in the gap between their ideas and experiences, to which they themselves drew attention. The memoirs of these foresters also show that they treated the forests of India as forests of an exotic world with their enormous variety, teeming wildlife and unlimited resources. They were endowed with a moral obligation to ‘order’ these forests into a homogenous and less variegated wilderness, although they were not confident of the effectiveness of doing so. These conflicting attitudes toward Indian forests are often manifested in their use of orientalist expressions about the forests, with a great deal of poetic persuasiveness, even as they were themselves being used— regardless of their orientalism—in the process of mercenary destruction of forests. It ultimately changed the landscape of the orient, and ironically, it was the typically orientalist construct of Indian forests as a wild but plentiful, and an automatically regenerating nature that contributed as the rationale for their depletion.

Notes 1. In English newspapers, the posts were always advertised under the title ‘Woods and Forests’ to highlight the issue of preservation. 2. The statistics are available in the Forest Records, F.R.I., Dehradun, 1907. 3. Two of the most important articles of F. W. Champion were (1) ‘The Preservation of Wildlife in India, No. 4: The United Provinces’, JBNHS, 1934; (2) ‘Correspondence: The Protection of Wildlife’, Indian Forester, 1939.

226 Subhasis Biswas 4. Mahesh Rangarajan describes this contradiction in details in India’s Wildlife History, pp. 76–77. 5. Though Hewetson cited this from the Resolution of 1894 in his Reminiscences, he did not discuss it in detail. 6. For details of this Forest Policy and origin of reserves see ‘Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves in India: The Prehistory of a Strategy’ in P. C. West and S. R. Brechin (eds), Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation, pp. 40–52. 7. For a detailed study of the attitude of the British people towards their forests, see K. V. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. 8. For details see Ranjan Chakrabarti, ‘The Jungle, the Imperial Hunt and British Imperialism (1800–1947)’ in Chittabrata Palit and Amit Bhattacharya (ed.), Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment in India: Historical Perspectives, p. 207. 9. Dr. Volcker’s Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture was one of the many reports which fuelled forest policy debates at the turn of the nineteenth century and had a major impact on the direction of Indian forestry. Dr. Volcker’s conclusions were that forest policy should ‘serve agricultural interests more directly’. 10. For details see Subhasis Biswas, ‘Forest Researches before Independence’, p. 412.

References Books and Pamphlets Braudel, Fernand. 1972 [1949]. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. London: Fontana; New York: Harper and Collins. Canning, F. 1961. Reminiscences. Dehradun: Forest Research Institute (FRI). Champion, F. W. 1927. With a Camera in Tigerland. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1934. The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1961. Reminiscences. Dehradun: FRI. FRI Publication. 1961. 100 Years of Indian Forestry, 1861–1961, 2 vols. with maps. Dehradun: FRI. Hamilton, A. P. F. 1961. Reminiscences. Dehradun: FRI. Hewetson, C. E. 1961. Reminiscences. Dehradun: FRI. Rangarajan, Mahesh. 2001. India’s Wildlife History: An Introduction. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Thomas, K. V. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. Middlesex: Penguin.

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Articles Biswas, Subhasis. 1998. ‘Forest Researches Before Independence’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. Calicut. Chakravarti, Ranjan. 1998. ‘The Jungle, the Imperial Hunt and British Imperialism (1800–1947)’ in Chittabrata Palit and Amit Bhattacharya (eds), Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment in India: Historical Perspectives. Calcutta: Bibhasa. Champion, F. W. 1934. ‘The Preservation of Wildlife in India’, JBNHS (Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society), vol. 37, pp. 104–11. ———. 1939. ‘Correspondence: The Protection of Wildlife’, Indian Forester, vol. 55, pp. 501–4. Hardiman, David. 1998. ‘Farming the Forest: The Dangs 1830–1992’ in Mark Poffenberger and Betsy McGean (eds), Village Voices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–31. Tucker, Richard P. 1991. ‘Resident Peoples and Wildlife Reserves in India: The Prehistory of a Strategy’ in Patrick C. West and Stephen R. Brechin (eds), Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 40–52.

Chapter Nine

Can We Cross the Chasm? Agency and Orientalist Discourse in the Colonial Tamil Context Perundevi Srinivasan Inheriting Colonial ’Structures of Attitudes’ My essay attempts to investigate the episteme of the construction of identities, of ‘identities-as-dichotomies’ with its bearing on the question of agency of the colonized in the Tamil context. I would like to begin by recalling Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism ‘as a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’ (Said 1979[1978]: 2). Such distinction is marked by two characteristics, according to Said: (1) that this distinction is not a product or conclusion of elaborate investigation or exegesis into cultures-in-reality; rather it is a ‘starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind”, destiny, and so on’ (Said 1979[1978]: 2–3); and (2) that this distinction not only serves as an ‘accepted grid’ for ‘filtering through the Orient in Western consciousness’, but as it is internalized as something pre-given, Orientalism sets ‘limitations on thought and action’ (Said 1979[1978]: 3–6). It is thus evident that Orientalism is much more than the body of knowledge and discourse about the Orient that enables its ‘control’; it governs the very production of such knowledge and discourse through the inheritance of certain ‘structures of attitudes’ (Said 1979[1978]: 341). These structures rest on the inherent assumption of ‘distinction’ between ‘self’ and the ‘other’,

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with them having the force of certain ‘ontological truth’ behind them. The force of truth can mask the fact that ‘identity is not only not natural and stable’, but is recreated continuously, and at times ‘even invented outright’ (Said 1979[1978]: 332). As I intend to analyse the orientalist discourse in colonial Tamil Nadu in the above framework, I think it is necessary to cite two significant currents of criticism that Said’s perspective encountered. Critics like David Kopf, especially while citing India, point out that Said does not take into account concrete historical reality (Kopf 2000: 196). Kopf’s criticism that Said’s perspective of Orientalism is only an idea and a construct was also taken up by other critics such as Michael Richardson (Richardson 2000: 208–16). A careful reading of Said, especially his ‘Introduction’ in Orientalism, would disclose that he never refutes the existence of the reality of cultures and nations, which were the ‘object’ of the orientalists. Indeed, Said observes: In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality.… [The] phenomenon of Orientalism as I study here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (Said 1979[1978]: 5). A second current of criticism points out that Said does not take into account the reciprocity in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. David Kopf questions Orientalism being regarded on a par with imperialism in Orientalism and draws attention especially to Indian culture, considering the orientalist contributions employed by the modern intelligentsia such as Jawaharlal Nehru, in reconstructing the history of the Indian Self (Kopf 2000: 206). Ravindiran Vaitheespara seems to pick up from here when he criticizes that the Saidian school does not give due accord to the agency of the ‘local intellectuals’ belonging to the colonized group. Citing the instance of Dravidian nationalism in twentieth-century South India, Vaitheespara observes that ‘far from being passive victims of an orientalist discourse, local figures and communities played a decisive role in the … construction of orientalist knowledge’. According to him, the ‘missionary Orientalism’ of the

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Madras school, which functioned as a counter discourse to what he calls the ‘hegemonic’ Orientalism of the Calcutta school, was later utilized by ‘dominant non-Brahmans’ to address the local power structure in South India (Vaitheespara 2000: 79). Against the given background, my essay takes up as its point of departure Ravindiran’s proposition that certain groups of the colonized did have agency and used the missionary discourse in forging their identities against the ‘local power dynamics’.1 I argue that such identity construction, whether it is done by the colonized or not, inasmuch as it gets trapped into the simplistic dichotomy of a borrowed model, could still be orientalist, and therefore, the argument that such identity construction attests to the agency of indigenous colonized groups remains questionable. Here I employ the term ‘orientalist’ to underscore the particular ‘structure of attitude’ that assumes prima facie a rigid line of ‘distinction’ between essentialized categories. In fact, in the Tamil context we come across an array of such categories constructed along with the first forged Dravidian and Aryan dichotomy. With the Dravidian/non-Dravidian dichotomy proliferating into other ‘corresponding’ dichotomies, such as Sanskrit/Tamil, North/South, Saivism/Vaishnavism, and Brahmin/non-Brahmin, the multiplicity inherent in the local culture was flattened, exchanges and intellectual practices went unappreciated, interconnections and overlapping across the categories were neglected, and facts were glossed over.

Definition of Dravidian in Missionary Accounts Reverand Robert Caldwell, a Christian missionary, employed the term ‘Dravidian’ as an overarching ‘generic appellation for the South Indian peoples and their languages’.2 In A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, Caldwell suggests two reasons for employing this term. First, it has ‘already been used by Sanskrit philologists’ and could be found in Sanskrit texts. Caldwell cites the Sanskrit ‘law-giver’ Manu, who included the ‘Dravidas’ as one of the ‘sunk’ tribes of ‘outcasts’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 5). Second, according to Caldwell, the ‘Sanskrit name’ corresponding to Tamil is ‘Dravida’, and it indicates

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the country inhabited by the people called Dravidas as well as the language spoken by them (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 12). Though he admits that the term was used in a ‘restricted sense’ as ‘equivalent to Tamil’, Caldwell proceeds to use it, since its employment is advantageous, for ‘the word “Tamilian” has [now] been left free to signify that which is distinctively Tamil’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 7). A few characteristic features of this definitional discourse are worth bearing in mind. While it achieves the foregrounding of a generic term for the distinct South Indian family of languages, which would also stand for the distinct South Indian cultural model, it provides some space for metonymic interchangeability— Tamil standing for Dravida and vice versa. This space would be manipulated by Dravidian politicians in the century to come: Dravidian leaders could smoothly straddle the interchangeable connotations, with ‘Dravidian’ implying ‘South Indian’ some times, and connoting ‘Tamilian’ at other times.3 Again, according to this discourse, the terminology ‘Dravidian’ is presented as derived from Sanskrit. By quoting Manu, Caldwell indicates that the term ‘Dravida’ is not simply used as a name in the Other language, but such a naming is, in fact, invested with a certain secondary/lower status in the Other language. Languages and cultures do not hang in suspension: there must be concrete agents who learn them, embody them and practice them. That Caldwell thought they must be identified, designated and shown in reality, here and now, is evident from the following passage: Sanskrit, though it is improbable that it ever was the vernacular language of any district of the country, whether in the north or in the south, is in every southern district read, and to some extent understood, by the Brahmans—the descendants of those Brahmanical colonialist (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 2, italics mine). Caldwell concedes that ‘the vernacular language of the district in which they [Brahmins] reside is that which they use in their families, and with which they are most familiar.’ Nevertheless, he proceeds to proclaim that ‘they are all undoubtedly descended from one and the same stock, and Sanskrit, though now regarded only as an accomplishment or as a professional acquirement,

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is properly the literary dialect of their ancestral tongue’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 2, italics mine). Despite their having different vernacular languages and being scattered all through the different districts, which Caldwell himself has admitted, in as much as the Brahmins could be seen to be understanding and conducting ritual functions in Sanskrit, they could be bound by the thread of that language. After binding the Brahmins with the thread of this ‘dead’ ‘literary dialect’, Caldwell would sever their native ‘inner’ and ‘vernacular’ tongues silently. We could only listen to his post-severance justification thus: ‘In Tamil … few Brahmans have written anything worthy of preservation’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 51).4 While the Brahmins, with all their different cultures, subcultures, sectarian affiliations and temple–institutional loyalties could be essentialized and identified with Sanskrit, and branded as colonialists, most of the remaining people of the land were tied into a bulky whole under the term ‘Sudras’.5 After citing the Mahabharata and Manu to draw evidence that the Dravidians were ‘originally designated’ as Kshatriyas (kingly or warrior caste and the second rank in the varna ladder), Caldwell emphasizes that though they are represented in the Sanskrit texts as having fallen from the rank of Kshatriyas into the condition of Vrishalas, ‘outcastes or Sudras’ (the fourth rank in the varna ladder), this would not undermine their original condition (Caldwell 1981 [1856]: 111). As with ‘Dravidas’, the term ‘Sudras’ or ‘outcastes’ is presented as drawn from the vocabulary of the constructed Brahmin– Sanskrit Other in Caldwell. On the one hand, such a construction in which being ‘Sudras’ is rendered equivalent to being ‘befallen’ would in itself bring out the necessity to wage a collective fight of the consolidated ‘Selves’ against this state of affairs. On the other, the interstice embedded in Caldwell’s statement between ‘representation’ (by the Other) and ‘original condition’ (or reality of the Selves) would define the contours of the Dravidian discourse, which would later be picked up by indigenous elites. To the extent that the negative representation is effected by the Other, it makes easy the argument that the burden of such representation need not be borne at all (that is, ‘We are a distinct race, we are Dravidians and do not come under the Varna system’).

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And, insofar as the original condition of the Dravidians is Kshatriya, upward mobility toward that rank (from the fourth Sudra rank) could also be negotiated within the Varna system. Within the above framework, let me deliberate further upon the construction of identities in Tamil Nadu. Vaitheespara points out two key moments in the Tamil orientalist context. The first key moment is the separation of Brahmins and non-Brahmins, achieved by Caldwell. The second key moment is the linking of Saiva Siddhanta with the Dravidian ideology, and thereby indigenizing the Dravidian ideology that was achieved by local intellectuals like Maraimalai Adigal along with European orientalists like G. U. Pope (Vaitheespara 2000: 54–58). Subscribing to Pope, who held Saiva Siddhanta to be the overarching guardian of the claims upheld through the fights against Brahmanic Hinduism, Ravindiran juxtaposes the modern Saivite revival of nonBrahman Saivite Vellala elites in South India with the ascendancy of neo-Vedantism and Vaishnavism (Vaitheespara 2000: 67). In his discussion of G. U. Pope’s identification of the Saivite tradition as the ‘guardian and repository of the Tamil language’, Vaitheespara cites Pope’s comments on a Tamil text Naladi Nanuru or Four Hundred Quatrains: These verses, mainly but not, I think, exclusively of Jain origin, were doubtless expurgated by the Caivas [Saivas], under whose chief guardianship Tamil literature has since remained.… Perhaps the Jains fostered the vernaculars partly out of opposition to the Brahmins. Reformers and missionaries, who generally address themselves to the intelligent middle classes, have often been the most assiduous students and promoters of the vulgar tongues. Quatrain 243 of the Naladi shows the feeling of hostility that existed between the North and the South: between Hindus and Jains. The great antiquity of Tamil which is the one worthy rival of Sanskrit, is abundantly plain (G. U. Pope cited in Vaitheespara 2000: 65). I had to reproduce this extensive quotation in order to underscore some claims of Pope to which Vaitheespara also subscribes:6 (1) Saivites have been the guardians of Tamil literature for a long time; (2) the fostering of vernaculars was earlier achieved by Jain

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scholars and now by missionaries; (3) the feeling of hostility that existed between the Northern Hindus and the Southern Jains proves ‘the great antiquity of Tamil’ as the ‘rival’ of Sanskrit. The privileged roles attributed to Jainism and Saivism in connection with the ‘vernacular’ literature by Pope are nothing new. In Comparative Grammar, Caldwell regards the literary period that witnessed the Jains’ composition of the Tamil didactic text Kural and the epic Cintaamani as the ‘summit of [Tamil literature’s] perfection’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 128). Arranging chronologically the literary period that began with the Jains, Caldwell advances the thesis that the ‘oldest Tamil works of any extent now extant are those which were written, or claim to have been written, by the Jainas [Jains]’. Having said that, Caldwell proceeds to emphasize: ‘The Jainas of the old Pandya country were animated by a national and anti-Brahmanical feeling of peculiar strength; and it is chiefly to them that Tamil is indebted for its high culture and its comparative independence to Sanskrit’. After crediting the Jains for the nationalist sentiments embedded in Tamil language and culture, Caldwell credits ‘especially the Saivas’ for their ‘enthusiasm for Tamilic purity and literary independence’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 129). Pope’s account traces the path of Caldwell. Only in analysing Pope’s passage, one can more clearly observe how a grid of monolithic dichotomies are constructed and sustained in eternity, as it were, by an anterior frame, which could be temporally created, emptied and filled up in the discourse. The binaries are set in eternity between Tamil and Sanskrit, South and North. The fighters, though, have changed. Before it was the Jains who fought; now it is the missionaries.

Lost between Dichotomous Representations In such production of history, as the ‘discourse of differentiation’ between two sets of opposing categories, some overlapping interconnections were glossed over. If the North can be traced as the source of Brahmanical Hinduism, it can also be traced as the source of heterodox Jainism. Moreover, the Jains, in addition to fostering the Tamil ‘vernacular’ had also contributed to ‘classical Sanskrit’. The Jains were also the ones who brought Sanskrit

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words before anyone else into Tamil Nadu. The Tamil revivalist Surya Narayana Sastri, who is called ‘Dravidian Sastri’, charges the Jains with bringing the language style of Manippiravalam (intermixing Sanskrit and Tamil), and he calls such a style adapted in the Jain text Sripuranam ‘obscene’ (Sastri 1903: 19). In the Tamil context, the relationship between Jainism and Saivism was not a friendly one: the mutual antagonism between the two in Tamil Nadu was often marked by impalement on stakes and various methods of torture.7 There were other tests and trials between these two groups, for instance, one group throwing into fire the Tamil hymns written by the other group. Nevertheless, the complex relationship between Saivism and Jainism was portrayed as a simplistic sequential alliance in these orientalists’ accounts.8 Furthermore, the agenda of dichotomous framing, in valorizing one set of identifications over the other, only overlooks the connection between the categories thus placed in opposition. Otherwise, how can we comprehend the utter disregard such accounts display towards Vaishnavism’s role in fostering Tamil? How can we comprehend that while intellectuals of yore as well as contemporary writers blame Vaishnavaite commentators for corrupting Tamil or for adapting the style of Manippiravalam (the intermixture of Sanskrit and Tamil words) in texts, they are silent about the composition of the 4,000 hymns of Vaishnavaite poet–saints that are well within Tamil literary conventions, and enriching them? What about the prime role that these Tamil hymns play in Vaishnavaite temple spaces in Tamil Nadu even today; or about the symbolic conception of the poet–saint Nammalvar, a Vellala, as the ‘body’ of Vaishnavaite tenets?9 For that matter, it is also forgotten that the patrons, composers and saints of both Vaishnavism and Saivism hail from a variety of castes.10 Apart from the reluctance to discuss such interconnections, some categories-in-themselves, established by dichotomous accounts of Tamil identity, break down under the weight of the imposed homogeneity in these accounts. When the ‘indigenous’ scholar Maraimalai Adigal deploys the dichotomous categories Dravidian/Aryan, he constructs the Dravidian sign in terms of the practice of non-violence—specifically in the observance of vegetarian food habits—and the worship of Siva.11 The Vellalas being ‘agriculturalists’ (as against the ‘Aryan-hunters’) as well as Saivites

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are the perfect bearers of this sign, and they therefore, become the ideal inhabitants of his Dravidian land (Adigal 1998: 22). Standing against his Dravidian essence are the northern Aryans, the supporters of bloody sacrifices and meat-eating.12 The representatives of the southern Dravidians in Adigal’s account are not confined to the Vellalas of the present—the Vellalas being one of several castes in Tamil Nadu. In his account, the Vellalas were the only and original tribes of Southern India, who had ‘created’ out of their agricultural efforts ‘the begging Brahmin neighborhood’, the ruling kings, and even the traders (Adigal 1998: 26). The indignation of Adigal about the ‘Sudra classification’ of the Vellalas arises precisely within this framework (Adigal 1998: 31).13 The master sign of southern Dravidians– South Indians–Vellalas, in Maraimalai Adigal’s writing, does not include such communities as the Vannar, Maruttuvar, etc.— basically the Dalit communities, which, according to him, ‘have never abstained from killing and meat-eating and who stand low in practicing of aram (virtue)’ (Adigal 1998: 29). Notwithstanding this, Adigal urges the consolidation of Dravidian forces by ‘eschewing the company of the Aryan intruder’. Adigal’s rhetoric is nothing new in the history of binary-building along the lines of Dravidian/Aryan, Tamils/Brahmins, Tamil/Sanskrit, South/North and Saivism/Vaishnavism. In Adigal’s polemical writings, the streams of indignation against being named as Sudras by the ‘intruder’ Other, along with the attempt to consolidate those who are thus named by invoking and channelizing this indignation, constitute an important move. In his account, the Dravidian Self not only has an anterior existence (‘Dravidians/Vellalas have been the inhabitants of India from the beginning’), but it also has a ‘pure’ (unlike the Self of ‘mixed Dravidian–Aryan intruders’) and ‘civilised’ identity (the markers of civilization being such practices as non-violence maintained in vegetarian food habits and the philosophy of Saiva Siddhanta). Adigal, no doubt, tried to emphasize the homogeneity of people through his propositions, especially if we consider how effective the articulation of a homogeneous ‘horizontal comradeship’ is in constituting national consciousness (Anderson 1983: 7).14 Nevertheless, the homogeneity of the people (Vellalas as Dravidians– South Indians–Tamils) that he proposes, splits into an overarching ideal Vellala community of ‘time immemorial past’ on the one

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hand, and into the contemporary Vellala caste on the other. The master sign plunges into a crisis of national representation. Further, in as much as Adigal traces the path of missionaries in presenting a homogenous Dravidian identity by privileging Saivite identity as the Tamil identity, one can conclude that local intellectuals in the colonial context had begun to own the missionaryconstructed Dravidian ideology rather than ‘indigenizing’ it. The notion of the master sign of the Dravidian Self would be appropriated by the non-Brahmin associations in the 1910s, particularly by the Dravidian Association (1912), the South Indian Liberal Association or the Justice Party (1917), and later by the social reformer Periyar (E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker).15 I should mention here that Periyar did not involve himself in any elaborate exegesis while employing the term ‘Dravidian’ as Maraimalai Adigal did. In Periyar’s writings, one can see the ‘Dravidian’ label springing up as if it were the ‘indigenous’ label for the Self represented.16 Periyar’s is an effortless narration that poses the constructed self as the indigenous self. By Dravidian, Periyar meant a ‘coalition of megacastes—the non-Brahmin Hindu castes of Tamil Nadu’, including in it people other than Brahmins, members of minority religious groups and Dalits (Subramanian 1999: 103–4). At times, Periyar used the term Dravidian to refer to all South Indians other than Brahmins (Subramanian: 105).17 The Dravidian identity for Periyar was, thus, clearly defined by what it excluded, rather than what could be included in it. The excluded Other was expectedly the Brahmin and the northern Aryan.

Comparative Textual Traditions and the Role of Brahmins in Retrieving Non-Brahmanical Texts While I acknowledge the political necessity in challenging the Brahmanic domination in the social order and recognize the currency of identity in representational politics, especially considering the monopoly that the Brahmins had over the British administration and some regressive initiatives (like the Varnashrama Dharma movement) by Brahmins in the colonial era, I would also like to point out what came to be at stake in these

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identity discourses. What was lost foremost was the broader comparative cultural framework that recognized and accommodated the heterogeneity of the Other as well as heterogeneous Others. In earlier Tamil textual tradition, that attests to several epistemological and philosophical debates, we rarely witness dichotomous framing. For instance, while the Tamil epic Cilappatikaram contains Jain epistemological thoughts, it also interweaves mythologies and exemplifies basic tenets of other religions worshipping Mayon, Murugan, Korravai and Indra. The Buddhist Tamil epic Manimekalai would throw more light on the methodology that the Tamil texts generally employ for advocating a specific epistemological and philosophical position. Consider the twentyseventh Canto of Manimekalai titled ‘Camayakkanakkar tam tiram ketta katai’ (‘Canto Wherein the Merits of Religious Accounts are Heard’). As S. N. Kandaswamy aptly remarks, it seems to be the earliest available compendium of Indian philosophy that discusses the doctrines of as many as ten schools of thought, including the Nyaya-Vaisesika, Samkhya and Mimamsa, Lokayata, Ajivaka and Jainism, which were prominent during A.D. 500 (Kandaswamy 2000: 5). Kandaswamy praises the ‘excellent methodological manner’ achieved through the specific arrangement of cantos in Manimekalai for developing a ‘comparative outlook’ among various systems of thought, in the process of mastering the Buddhist philosophy (Kandaswamy 2000: 5). In a similar vein, the Jaina Tamil epic Nilakesi (of A.D. 900) deals with different schools of Buddhism, Ajivaka, Samkhya and Vaidika systems, though ultimately the percepts of Jainism are upheld (Kandaswamy 2000: 7). The same methodological framework continued even after the epic period, as we witness from a key text on Saiva Siddhanta, titled Sivajnana Siddhiyar, by Arulnandisivam in A.D. 1200. As Kandaswamy points out, the first part of the book, Parappakkam, elaborately discusses fourteen schools of Indian philosophy.18 These texts do not merely engage with a variety of cultural thought systems that are different from the one from which they spring forth; they basically recognize the heterogeneous presence of systems of thought other than their own. In other words, these texts have desisted from ‘assimilating’ cultural markers, and presenting a group of ‘these’ as one set belonging to them while condemning a group of ‘those’ as belonging to an Other.

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And second, the construction of identity along the lines of missionary orientalist discourse implies essentialism, with the assumption that the chasm lying between the constructed categories is natural and forever unchanging. As Said observes, by ‘setting the real boundaries’, such a chasm would pave the way for the rhetoric that ‘there was no escape from origins and the types these origins enabled’ (Said 1979[1978]: 233). Such an attitude alone can make, for instance, scholars like N. Subrahmanian proclaim that the ‘“Brahmin” … essentially has not changed’ (Subrahmanian 1989: 89), or that ‘most brahmins had a sneaking contempt for their mother tongue’ (Subrahmanian: 93), or that Brahmins ‘remained totally ignorant of Tamil literary and cultural traditions’ (Subrahmanian: 94).19 If Subrahmanian writes these things, despite the sustained literary and intellectual practices by Brahmins, such as U. V. Saminata Iyer who retrieved Tamil epics from oblivion;20 C. Subramaniya Bharati, whose poetry played a key role in shaping Tamil national sentiments and the Tamil music movement;21 Rajam Iyer, one of the first novelists in Tamil; and Visakapperumal Iyer, who in fact taught Tamil to the orientalist G. U. Pope, etc., notwithstanding the extensive treatment which Subrahmanian himself has given to such practices in his book, it becomes obvious that his perspective has been shaped by the internalized dichotomous framework that rests on the chasm, assumed as natural, between the sets of categories. From this and instances of overlapping and criss-crossing interconnections that cut across and challenge the dichotomous framework, I think what Ronald Inden has observed of Indology fits the ‘missionary orientalist’ context as well. According to Inden, ‘two of the assumptions built into the “episteme” of Indology are that the real world (whether that is material and determinate or ideal and ineffable) consists of essences and that that world is unitary’, with the underlying further assumption that human nature itself consists of a unitary essence, as each culture or civilization does (Inden 2000: 278). Inden argues that owing to the conception of the essence as God, Reason, Man, and so on in Western thought, the Indological discourse, when it encountered the ‘irrational’ institution of caste in India, tended to perceive human agency in India in terms of substantialized caste in order to evolve a rational institution out of it, while at the same time overlooking political institutions and other connections (Inden 2000: 279).

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In as much as the identity constructions are presented by missionaries as homogeneous essence and in as much as their dichotomous model founded on an unbridgeable chasm is not attested by Tamil textual traditions, I conclude that the agency, if any at all, of the ‘local intellectuals’ who followed the footsteps of the missionaries, is but ‘derived’, and their discourses solely served to duplicate the ‘orientalist’ paradigm of dichotomy. In conclusion, I think it is pertinent to remark that only when the discursive terrain of a representational discourse allows us to question the genealogy of ‘distinctions’ between dichotomous categories, or at least, as the first step, acknowledge the dynamism of these categories, could the necessary ‘task of dialogical learning on the level of basic frameworks, beyond the limits of assimilation and exclusion’, as effectively put forth by Fred Dallmayr, be accomplished (Dallmayr 2000: 368). This essay, I hope, takes a right step in that direction.

Notes 1. Ravindiran Vaitheespara asserts that ‘there was often a symbiotic relationship between European orientalists and local intellectuals rather than one in which local intellectuals and cultural brokers had little agency as suggested by the “Saidian school’”. See Vaitheespara (1999: 546–47). 2. With Caldwell’s definitional discourse began the chapter of Dravidian nationalism. He transformed what he thought of as distinct races of peoples into distinct nations. See also Vaitheespara (2000: 53) and Tamilavan (2000: 369). Tamilavan points out that Comparative Grammar was the first book which posited the relationship between Sanskrit and Tamil as a binary one. 3. C. N. Annadurai, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state, details the discussion of the term as late as in the 1960s. In defending his party’s (DMK’s) changed demand for an independent, smaller ‘Tamil Nadu’ instead of its earlier demand for a bigger ‘Dravida Nadu’, which would comprise four states in South India, he clarifies how ‘Tamil Nadu’ and ‘Dravida Nadu’ differ in terms of quantitative measure, but not in their inherent qualities or traits (Annadurai 1989). 4. I choose not to go into the ‘veracity’ of this narrative, except that these pronouncements hold their place very much in the missionary tradition. For instance, the missionary Abbe Dubois, at the turn of the nineteenth century, not only mentions that Brahmins have never been authors of texts of a ‘philosophical vein’, but also charges that the Brahmins speak of the work of other caste authors with contempt and prevent people from reading them. The editor of Dubois’ work, Henry K. Beauchamp, however, contests Dubois’s statement, maintaining that these authors are held in great respect and are

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

read by ‘educated’ Brahmins (Dubois 1947[1906]: 274–75). Also, I resist my temptation to delve into the missionary politics that went hand in hand with European colonialism—the politics which, despite Caldwell’s love for the Tamil language, alone would have made him proclaim that ‘the language of the governing race ought to be employed as the language of public business in every part of British India’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 3). According to Caldwell, ‘The mass of the Dravidians are now commonly designated as Sudras, especially by Brahmans and those Europeans who take their caste nomenclature from Brahmans’ (Caldwell 1981[1856]: 111). For instance, Vaitheespara writes: ‘The men who came forward to embrace and “indigenize” Dravidian ideology were drawn predominantly from an English-educated, higher non-Brahman, caste of Tamil/Saivites of southern India’ (Vaitheespara 2000: 67). The deployment of the term ‘Tamil/Saivites’ informs us how the equivalence between signs is assumed as something natural and given. For the antagonism between the Jain saints and the Saivite saints, see Indira Viswanathan Peterson (1991: 10, 217 and 273). Moreover, as it was between Vedic and heterodox religions, a discourse of enmity was also prevalent between Jainism and Buddhism. The ‘street scene’ in the Buddhist epic Manimekalai (Canto 3) attests to this fact. See also N. Balusamy (1965: 73–74). Orientalist narrations, however, do not take account of this conflict. For instance, the hymns of Andal, Kulasekaralvar and Nammalvar are rich in a variety of poetic meters (pa), sub-genres in Tamil Akam poetic conventions (Akapporul turai) and rhetorical devices (ani ilakkanam). The poet– saint Periyalwar was the forerunner of the Tamil literary genre Pillaittamil (literature dealing with childhood as a special theme). See M. Narayanaveluppillai for an elaborate discussion on this subject (1994: 171–72). For Maraimalai Adigal’s attack on Vaishnavite commentators’ use of Manippiravalam, see the chapter discussing Siva’s primacy in northern (Sanskrit) texts in his book on Manikkavacagar’s history and time (Adigal 1957). Adigal not only argues that Vaishnavite writers have spoiled Tamil, but he also asserts that Saivism alone is the great privilege (perurimai) of Tamil language and the Tamils. The collection of Saivite Bhakti hymns was, indeed, accomplished by Nambi Andar Nambi, a Brahmin. In his Velalar Nakarikam (‘The Civilisation of Vellalas’), Adigal implies this, as he ‘glorifies’ the food habits of the Vellalas (1998: 32). Adigal asserts that the Vellalas would not mingle with, or eat at the place of anybody who eats meat or who would not worship Siva. It should also be mentioned here that in his book Tamilar Matam (‘The Religion of the Tamils’), Maraimalai Adigal elaborately emphasizes that these northern Aryans are not the ‘pure Aryans’; they themselves are ‘Dravidian– Aryans’, an intermingled race formed due to the mixing of invading Aryans and the ancient Dravidian inhabitants of the land (1999: 33). According to him, these Dravidian–Aryans later occupied the South. Adigal’s use of the term ‘Aryans’ should be seen in the light of this background.

242 Perundevi Srinivasan 13. The Vellalas’ indignation against the term ‘Sudra’ dates back to the late nineteenth century. See Irschick (1969: 295). 14. Tamilavan (Carlos) also mentions homogenization, classification and rationalism as the prime tendencies in the thought of Maraimalai Adigal (Tamilavan 2000: 378), although he does not elaborate on these. Tamilavan observes that Maraimalai Adigal wished to structure Saiva Siddhanta thought after an English model. In support of this argument, he draws our attention to Maraimalai Adigal’s work The Saiva Siddhanta as a Philosophy of Practical Knowledge, wherein Adigal (with all his zealous regard for Saiva Siddhanta) seems to despise the worship of ‘little deities’ by ‘lower castes/classes’ (Tamilavan 2000: 377–78). 15. The history of the term ‘non-Brahmin’ might be interesting to ponder over. Narendra Subramanian throws light on two facts: one, that ‘non-Brahmanism, a term coined to signify the politicization of non-Brahman identity, emerged only in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra’; and two, ‘as non-Brahmanism was popularized, the term non-Brahmin, initially coined in English, was translated into the inelegant Tamil term paarppanarallaaathaar [those other than Brahmins]’ (Subramanian 1999: 82). 16. See Periyar’s narrative, for instance: Once upon a time we the Dravidians were called as Tamils. Today the word Tamil is used to denote the Tamil language. Naturally even those who have Aryan culture and civilization call themselves as Tamils, just because they speak Tamil. Not only that, they further want to impose their civilization on us. I say that we are today called as Sudras because of our association with them (Ramaswamy Naicker 1981: 22–23). 17. In explaining this inconsistency, Subramanian underscores Periyar’s layered conception of the Dravidian identity with the Tamil-speaking Sudras as its core (Subramanian 1999: 105). Around this core, in ‘concentric circles’ of groups such as South Indian non-Tamil-speaking Sudras, Tamil religious minority communities and Dalits could also find space. 18. On this subject, also see A. Veluppillai (1980: 73–74). 19. Though Subrahmanian admits that ‘the “Brahmin” did not have the same definition all along’, from the ‘Vedic times to the days of Rajagopalachari’ (Subrahmanian 1989: 89), he still desires to fix an essential component in the term ‘Brahmin’. M. S. S. Pandian in his paper on the ‘transformation of “Dravidian” ideology’ refers to Subrahmanian. Citing some specific instances, Pandian too constructs a historical milieu; nevertheless, his narrative traces a similar track: ‘Evidence on the Brahmin’s contempt for Tamil is voluminous’ (Pandian 1994: 3). I consider that such a normative claim bears in itself the possibility of eliciting a mimicking counter-narrative, supported by a similar set of instances that might prove otherwise. The resulting debates could, at best, circulate an uncritical assumption of, as well as an allegiance to, essentialized and monolithic categories. 20. The early twentieth century, which witnessed the growth of the Dravidian movement, also witnessed the retrieval of Tamil literature from oblivion. The work of the veteran Brahmin, U. V. Saminata Iyer (1855–1942), is incomparable. With his deep love for Tamil, Saminata Iyer brought to light the set

The Colonial Tamil Context 243 of ten poems of the Sangam Age called Pattuppattu. Of the five Tamil epics, the three epics Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai and Civakacintamani that are now in circulation were resurrected by him. In addition to the above, Saminata Iyer edited and published a few Tamil Puranas and long poems, forty-two minor classics, four grammar books and prose works. K. Panchangam cites N. Sanjeevi, who in turn, has observed that Iyer’s edition of Cilappatikaram laid the silent foundations for the Tamilisai (Tamil music) movement and movements that imagined Tamil Nadu as a distinct nation. See Panchangam (1993: 13). It is noteworthy that Cilappatikaram was employed by Tamil nationalist leaders like M. P. Sivagnanam during the reorganization of Indian states. 21. The Tamil poet C. Subramaniya Bharati (1882–1921), another Brahmin, sang the glory of the Tamil nation and Tamil language alike. Celebrating the authors of Tirukkural, Cilappatikaram and Kambaramayanam, Bharati proclaimed that Tamil was the sweetest of all languages he knew. As Irschick observes, Bharati has been credited with ‘transmuting vague feelings of Tamil patriotism into lyrical expression’ (Irschick 1969: 287).

References Books English Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Balusamy, N. 1965. Studies in Manimekalai. Madurai: Athirai. Caldwell, Robert, Rev. 1981[1856]. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages. Delhi: Gian Publications. Dubois, Abbe J. A. 1947[1906]. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, reprint [3rd edition]. tr. and ed., Henry K. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Irschick, Eugene F. 1969. Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The NonBrahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kandaswamy, S. N. 2000. Indian Epistemology: As Expounded in the Tamil Classics. Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies. Peterson, Indira Viswanathan. 1991. Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Ramaswamy Naicker, E.V. 1981. Golden Sayings of Periyar. Tr. A. S. Venu. Chennai: Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution. Said, Edward W. 1979[1978]. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Subrahmanian, N. 1989. The Brahmin in the Tamil Country. Madurai: Ennes Publications. Subramanian, Narendra. 1999. Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tamil Adigal, Maraimalai. 1957. Manikka Vacagar: Varalarum Kalamum. Chennai: Kalagam. ———. 1998. Velalar Nakarikam. Chennai: Manivacakar Patippakam. ———. 1999. Tamilar Matam. Chennai: Manivacakar Patippakam. Annadurai, C. N. 1989. Inbattiravidam. Chennai: Pumpukar Patippakam. Cittalaiccattanar. 1981. Manimekalai. U.V. Saminata Iyer (ed. with com.). Madras: Nulnilayam. Ilango. 1968. Cilappatikaram. Ed. U.V. Saminata Iyer, Adiyarkku Nallar (com.). Chennai: Kapir Accukkudam. Narayanaveluppillai, M. 1994. Alvarkalin Tamilttontu. Velleri: Buvana Publishers. Panchangam, K. 1993. Cilappatikarattiranayvukal—Oru Parvai. Sivagangai: Annam. Suryanarayana Sastri, V. G. 1903. Tamil Moliyin Varalaru. Chennai: G. A. Natesan & Company. Tamilavan, (Carlos). 2000. Irupatil Navina Tamil Vimaricanangal: Tamilavan Katturaikal. Bangalore: Kavya. Veluppillai, A. 1980. Tamilar Camaya Varalaru. Chennai: Pari.

Articles Dallmayr, Fred. 2000. ‘Exit from Orientalism’ in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, pp. 365–68. [Previously published in Fred Dallmayr, 1996. Beyond Orientalism: Essays in Cross-Cultural Encounter. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 115–17 & 134]. Inden, Ronald. 2000. ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’ in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 277–84. [Previously published in Modern Asian Studies 1986, 20 (3), pp. 401–3 & 416–21]. Kopf, David. 2000. ‘Hermeneutics versus History’ in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 194–207. [Previously published in Journal of Asian Studies 1980, 39 (3), pp. 495–506]. Richardson, Michael. 2000. ‘Enough Said’ in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A Reader, pp. 208–16. [Previously published in Anthropology Today 1990, 6 (4), pp. 16–19]. Vaitheespara, Ravindiran. 2000. ‘Discourses of Empowerment: Missionary Orientalism in the Development of Dravidian Nationalism’ in Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (eds), Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 51–82.

Manuscripts and Unpublished Dissertations Pandian, M. S. S. 1994. ‘Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideology: Tamilnadu C. 1900–1940.’ Working Paper No. 120. Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. Vaitheespara, Ravindiran. 1999. ‘Caste, Hybridity and the Construction of Cultural Identity in Colonial India: Maraimalai Adigal and the Intellectual Genealogy of Dravidian Nationalism, 1800–1950’. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Toronto.

Chapter Ten

The ’Octopodal Idea’: Vincent Smith, Oxford University Press and the Histories of India Rimi B. Chatterjee Anyone who has passed through the Indian school system will have heard of Vincent Smith, to whom many textbooks still genuflect as the putative first historian of India. This is surprising, because Smith was neither a professional historian nor a fieldworker, but an eminently successful popularizer. Although he had a reputation for factual meticulousness, he also did not shrink from giving his own ideological colouring to his writing, but his selfpublicizing was so successful that he managed nevertheless to overshadow the work of other writers, both European and Western, including William Wilson Hunter, his predecessor at Oxford University Press (OUP) and author of A Brief History of the Indian Peoples. Today historians and historiographers find little to preserve in Smith’s oeuvre, but he continues to enjoy a cozy afterlife in educational folklore.

Competing Histories of India from Hunter to Smith Smith and Hunter were a study in contrasts: though both had served in the Indian Civil Service, Hunter in Bengal and Smith in the North West Provinces, their attitudes and projects showed significant differences. Smith had been a very correct functionary, while Hunter had dabbled in a wide variety of issues and was consequently dogged by controversy throughout his career in India. He had contributed to the fields of education, meteorology, census-taking, famine relief and the Gazetteers of India, of which

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his was the founding hand. He wrote from a position of qualified sympathy for Indian practices and culture, and strove for both a comprehensiveness of research and a neutrality of tone. Smith, on the other hand, had very definite ideas about what India was all about, and unlike Hunter, whose fame had been at its peak while he was in India, Smith’s reputation grew after he returned to England in 1900, the year of Hunter’s death. He took early retirement at the age of fifty-two with the express purpose of dedicating himself to history. He felt more than a scholar’s zeal in this, and the hardliners in the British government appreciated Smith’s tough stand against both nationalist and Hindu revisionist historiography. To them, Hunter’s long and intimate engagement with empirical research in India was precisely the reason why his works were less congenial: Smith, on the other hand, was very definitely untouched by any infection caught from ‘native’ thinkers, and had a strong sense of mission in holding his end up for the Empire. This tendency of the British Indian rulers to trust the armchair commentator over the man in the field dates back to James Mill, who famously wrote his 1818 History of India entirely from sources, such as Alexander Dow’s History of Hindostan (1768–72) without ever having set foot in the country. Mill was rewarded for this with high office in the Indian administration. Not surprisingly, his history was found unsuitable as an educational tool in the newly established Indo-European colleges, and it was quickly superceded by John Marshman’s 1819 History of India and then Mountstuart Elphinstone’s History of India of 1841. Nilmoni Basak’s Bengali text of 1858, Bharatbarsher Itihas (History of India), was published in the inaugural year of the University of Calcutta, but it was another Bharatbarsher Itihas, by Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, which became the textbook of choice till the 1890s (Chatterjee 1994). History writing in the colonial context could never be entirely innocent of the Empire, however much individual writers might struggle (or not) against imperialism’s ground conditions. Ranajit Guha observes, ‘The British … had to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it…. The material which had to be historicized was of course the sum of all existing narratives— annals, chronicles, anecdotes, folklore, etc.—but the narratology

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brought to bear on such material was that of contemporary European, specifically Whig historiography’(Guha 1988: 12, 6–8). There was thus an imperative to describe and analyse the systems of administration existing in India, dispossess the Persian-speaking officials and administrators of the old Mughal empire of them, and place them in the hands of the new rulers. Furthermore, the rulers also had to back up their claim of acting in the best interests of the ruled, and for this they needed history to prove that they were the best of all contenders for hegemony, and/or that their rule was the inevitable result of historical processes. Thomas Richards comments: The British may not have created the longest-lived empire in history, but it certainly was one of the most data-intensive .... In a very real sense theirs was a paper empire; an empire built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts (Richards 1993: 4). Scholarship is in implicit, and sometimes explicit, conflict with this pretexting of Empire, and each British scholar of India had to decide where to draw their personal line between impartial commentary and apologia. There were vast differences in the boundaries so drawn. Some writers were willing apologists for the Empire and saw no contradiction between their frequent combination of ruling with writing. Others suffered emotional conflicts over their dual role, even as they carried out their researches in the intervals of administration, and perhaps worried that their scientific objectivity might be coloured by their responsibility to, and power from, the state. On top of this conflict within the writer, there could be conflicts without, as we shall see in the case of Vincent Smith: there could be serious disagreements between the various people involved in producing these ‘imperial’ histories. In Smith’s case, the failure to resolve the conflict resulted in the publishers’ undercutting and subverting Smith’s pet ideologies after his death. This was done in the interests of sales in the new nationalist India of the twentieth century as well as from a personal distaste on their part for Smith’s jingoism. The nationalism that was to transform Britain’s relations with India had been around during Smith’s Indian career, but it was

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yet to take its full-blown form and Smith was accustomed to dismissing it as the preoccupation of westernized babus. Nevertheless, from the 1880s, a nascent nationalist feeling began to increasingly affect Indian education, and it began by raising questions over what should be taught and how. History and historiography were particularly contentious areas in this debate. A number of Indian scholars had been working quietly and diligently to rediscover India’s material past. Responding to Bankim Chandra’s appeal of ‘History for the Indians/Bengalis’, they debated the issues of Indian history from the point of view of people embedded within it, not of scholars observing it from the outside and attempting to penetrate its mysteries. For them ownership of the past held deep significance for the present. Back in 1819, John Marshman’s History of India had contained only fifteen pages on ‘pre-Islamic’ Indian history; in the next century almost the whole of that history was rediscovered by an extraordinary effort combining philology, archaeology, paleography and other disciplines. And as this body of work grew, there was also a feeling, rarely articulated but always there, of grievance at the apparent neglect of Indian achievement and enterprise. It is ironic that the rapid Indianization of education from the 1880s onwards was put in train partly by William Hunter’s Education Commission of 1882–84. This had aimed to sweep away the last vestiges of Macaulay’s influence on Indian education, to privilege mass primary education in the vernaculars and relegate English to a second language. Hunter retired to Oxford in 1887, and from there tried and failed repeatedly in the 1890s to keep his Brief History of the Indian Peoples on the Calcutta University lists. He was dropped in favour of R. C. Dutt, then Hara Prasad Shastri, both illustrious names in Indian history writing; to Shastri goes the credit of discovering in Tibet the earliest known manuscripts in the Bengali language. Hunter’s negotiations with the Press over this fiasco left both sides feeling bruised, largely because Hunter failed to appreciate that, having left Indian shores, he was rapidly fading from the public mind; he was no longer the celebrity that he had once been, and without a name he could not keep up with the ever increasing competition in the field. By 1895, his works were thoroughly dead.

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Editions of Smith’s History and an Account of Their Sales With Hunter out of commission, the Press needed a new flagship history text. Smith’s retirement to England was opportune, and his Early History of India was published by the Clarendon Press (the scholarly arm of Oxford University Press) in 1904. Sales showed promise from the start and the Press, delighted with its new star author, quickly drew up plans for a family of histories based on the original for different levels of the Indian education system. The Early History was duly followed by the Student’s History of India co-published with B. Banerjee & Co. of Calcutta in 1908. This is a remarkable instance of collaboration between Indian and British publishers on a major book. Banerjee had approached Smith directly in 1907 to ask for a school history, and Humphrey Milford, publisher to the University,1 had responded on Smith’s behalf to say that Smith was contracted to the Press, but Banerjee could be the Press’s partner in selling the planned school history of India. The Press had already had extensive dealings with Banerjee; who had had a standing account with the London office from the early 1880s, was trusted to pay for orders promptly and had been given permission to excerpt and extract from the Press’s publications in the past (MLB 1908, V 12: f 198). Milford asked for an estimate for printing 5,000 in the style of Hunter’s Indian Peoples and set about looking for suitable maps which were to be up-to-date, well coloured, and as numerous as the low published price would allow. The book was to be about 256 pages long, and would carry a royalty of 4d per copy, half of which Banerjee would pay directly to Smith, the other half coming from the Press (MLB 1908, V 13: f 180). Banerjee balked a bit at the length, saying that heads of institutions were disposed to ‘take a fancy’ to small books. Banerjee continued his efforts to get the book listed, asking Milford to send copies a month in advance of the deadline, which threw the printing schedule out of joint. Banerjee seemed to have assumed that the Press would know that advance copies were necessary to submit to the Board of Studies for consideration;

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the Press did not know and Banerjee had to educate Milford in the intricacies of book prescription in India (MLB 1908, V 15: f 242, 265). By a valiant effort they managed to make up the required volumes by the end of September, and on 2 October Milford sent the Registrar of Calcutta University twelve proof copies with a covering letter, in which he was at pains to point out that the books were jointly published with B. Banerjee, and to excuse the provisional nature of the samples. He also sent copies to Ashutosh Mukherjee, Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, and H. M. Percival, one of the professors. Milford’s letter of the same day to Banerjee shows that his actions were closely guided by Banerjee’s advice (MLB 1908, V 15: f 443, 445). The following year Milford reported to Charles Cannan in Oxford that total sales to date were 3,996, with January to March of 1910 accounting for 950 (MLB 1909, V 26: f 158, 318; 1910, V 35: f 200). The next year saw sales of 6,789 copies (MLB 1911, V 37: f 161). The Bombay Branch, which was set up in 1912 by E. V. Rieu, cabled for 2,500 copies of the Students’ History of India in early 1913. There was an attempt to produce a Bengali translation, but Ashutosh Mukherjee advised the Press against it, as he felt the only readers would be those who knew no English but might conceivably take an interest in the book, such as alumni of the traditional education system or perhaps a few women; the majority would read the original (MLB 1918, V 82: f 297). The sales of the Student’s History were so bankable that during the first World War Milford even paid extra insurance against loss at sea on their copies on the way to India. The usual cribbooks and notebooks abounded, and Rieu sent ‘disgusting’ examples of these to London, some of which he was able to suppress by threats, some not. One, called the ‘catechism’, was especially successful and continued to sell under Rieu’s nose; Oxford asked if anything could be done, and Milford replied that London was helpless. All they could do was ‘encourage Rieu to blow up and to threaten the rogues with the pains and penalties of the law’. Rieu could tell the pirates he had reported the catechism to the British authorities who were taking ‘a very serious view of the case’, but this was hardly intimidating enough to stop such a lucrative racket.

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The Failed Project of Revision Rieu was constantly on the lookout for ways to improve Smith’s books, and warned that some schoolteachers had dropped the Student’s History because Smith’s English was too tough in parts; he cited passages that were too difficult for Indian readers (MLB 1911, V 37: f 161, 174, 190). ‘Vincent Smith is not particularly popular nowadays’, he observed, sending reviews of Akbar by the Pioneer and the Indian Review. The Pioneer attacked Smith’s style, which as the Press knew ‘was not all it should be’ (MLB 1918, V 82: f 292). Rieu’s own perusal of the book had led him to believe that certain of Smith’s opinions were objectionable to Indians, and he therefore made inquiries in 1917 of eminent Indian and European educationists as to what changes and additions they thought necessary. The results were mixed, but it was clear that the histories had to be extensively revised. By early 1918, Smith had finished drafting his enlarged and updated Early History, now to be given official blessing as the Oxford History of India. Proofs were sent for checking to Rangaswamy Aiyar, the Press’s manager in Madras. Aiyar took a long time to return the proofs, and when he did, they were accompanied by his strong condemnation of many of Smith’s arguments. Rieu seconded many of these complaints and added that Smith had ‘clung with peculiar pertinacity to the sting of most of the “offensive” passages’. Rieu went on in his covering letter, As for the Epilogue, I think it is the limit. Page 1 begins in patronage and ends (‘the octopus of Hinduism’) in insult. After all, VAS would never refer to Christianity as an octopus, or any other undesirable aquatic beast, but if he wished to convey the octopodal idea, would choose a more engaging metaphor (MLB 1918, V 83: f 183). Rangaswamy Aiyar annotated the octopus passage with a note from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Octopus: an organized and usually harmful ramified power or influence’ and observed that even a missionary would speak less violently. He also noted tersely

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about a passage on page 204, ‘Drop the dancing girls’ (MLB 1917, V 77: f 433, 434). Aiyar continued: Mr Smith does not give the Brahmin his due …. [He] says, ‘The sanctity of the cow is now the most conspicuous and outward mark of Hinduism.’ No Hindu, literate or illiterate, will endorse this palpably false proposition. It is an absolutely wrong statement …. Sivaji was never thought to be an incarnation of God. Could Mr Smith revise his estimate of Sivaji and use less abusive language? (MLB 1918, V 83: f 443). More comments arrived in instalments over the next few days. Milford was perhaps guilty of tactlessness in passing the whole bundle on to Smith, and he was rewarded with an explosion so severe that Milford felt moved to record it in his letterbook. The following are from the transcript of Smith’s personal letter to Milford: I desire to add, to my indignant repudiation of the very improper remarks on my proofs forwarded by Rieu, some observations of a more private nature. Possibly Rieu does not know ‘natives’ as well as I do. If he did he would not have accepted on two occasions ‘criticisms’ deliberately intended to be insulting. The Hindus now have swelled heads and when a Hindu gets that malady he invariably becomes insolent. Rieu degraded himself in the eyes of the man by accepting a note which accused me of making a palpably false proposition, and … of a misstatement of fact. Rieu should have refused to accept the note both in this case and on the beef question and have firmly told the man that his notes could not be received unless they were expressed in courteous language. The man would then have recognized that he was dealing with a Sahib. Rieu is evidently afraid of him and of the Hindus—a most fatal error. As to Shivaji—Rawlinson, being stationed in the Deccan, demeaned himself by trying to curry favour with the Marathas … Rawlinson thus earned the encomium of Jadmouth Gurkas [Jadunath Sircar] whose third volume on Aurangzib is disfigured with Hindu bigotry.2

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Englishmen should be extremely careful in these times to keep their end up and the responsibility rests on a businessman like Rieu as well as on others. The suggestion that I should modify my account of Shivaji in order to humour Hindu sentiment is scandalous, cowardly and immoral. I weighed every word and gave prominence to everything good that can be said about the man. The fact remains that he was primarily a brigand and followed the brigand tradition which still survives in full force. Much harm has been done by the fulsome flattery poured upon Hindus by Havill3 and other writers …. It will be an evil day when a British writer does not relate the facts of history faithfully because they may be unpleasant reading to Hindu, Muslim or Englishman as the case may be … I have no objection to Rieu seeing [this]. He needs straight talking to, and would be well advised to sack his insolent Hindu reader (MLB 1918, V 83: f 40). The ‘Shivaji’ title referred to is H. G. Rawlinson’s Shivaji the Maratha, 1627–1680, initially offered for the Rulers of India series which had been officially closed by then, and was subsequently published as a stand-alone title by the Press in 1913. It was clear that meaningful revision by Smith was not likely, and the Oxford History of India was perforce published with only minor changes to the text. In spite of its blemishes, in 1919 it was prescribed for the B.A. pass course in Calcutta, bringing an additional sale of 1,500 copies a year. Cannan in Oxford and Milford in London were particularly grateful for this break as it brought the prospect of exhaustion of the first edition closer, and the Press plotted to get more revisions past Smith in the second (MLB 1919, V 92: f 472). But Smith had other agendas in mind. In 1918, when the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms intended to give local Indian governments more power were under discussion, Smith’s eversmouldering imperial volcano erupted again. He proposed to Milford that he write a book condemning the reforms, which he rightly saw as the first concrete step to total devolution of power at the local level, and with great dispatch had a sample chapter ready by October, with just days before peace was declared in Europe. Somewhat nervously, Milford wrote to Cannan to say he

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would rather not touch the project as the subject was too controversial, but before refusing, ‘Vincent being what he is’, he wanted Cannan’s advice. The Press, however, was willing to risk the venture to keep their star author in good humour, and accordingly, Milford undertook to read the sample. His worst fears were soon confirmed. He quickly wrote to Smith in an attempt to control the damage: When I read your first letter, and before I had read any of the manuscript, I said to myself, ‘No, too controversial’. A perusal of the introduction and two chapters has nearly converted me, but not quite. You are the ideal person to write this book, and speaking as an ignorant but open-minded democrat—and not, for the moment, as a publisher—I want to read and consider carefully what the most eminent living historian of India says against the scheme. But I find myself pulled up, here and there, by phrases which seem to me too violent or bitter for a sober historian to use (e.g., ‘rocks of inconvenient fact cannot be blasted away by blasts of doctrinaire gas’ and ‘absurdities … excogitated’[sic]). And they tend to make me, or would make me if I knew you only as a historian, unwilling to give their due weight to the arguments of an author who seems sometimes to condescend to exchange lofty reason for loidoria.4 Milford further explained in his letter that Smith was ‘preaching to the unconverted’, not to those who agreed with him, and as a representative reader he was sure he was not alone in wanting his arguments neat. He added somewhat ominously, ‘It will be interesting to see whether the publication of this booklet has any effect on the sale of your other books’ (MLB 1918, V 84: f 363, 403). Smith’s Indian Constitutional Reform Viewed in the Light of History came out in early 1919 and represented the culmination of Smith’s vision of England’s imperial mission. In this work, Smith brought to bear the full weight of his historical authority to claim that India was irreparably divided by caste and creed, that ancient feuds would forever sunder its nascent polity, and that for Britain to abate one jot of the sternness of its rule would invite disaster. His fury was no doubt partly motivated by a sense of deep betrayal. He had taken up the task of writing India’s history in the backwash of Curzon’s Viceroyalty, which seemed

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at the time to many to be the high point of the eternal British Raj, and a necessary corrective to the ‘mischievous Independence of mind’ that the Indians were showing. In 1904 it was possible to believe that the sun would never set on the British Empire, and viewed from this confident meridian, Smith had never thought to see Britain’s good work in India so cravenly revised. But his fulminations were all in vain. As a historian, had he calmed down enough to look dispassionately at the situation, he would have realized that he was swimming against the current of history. The War had weakened England to the point where there simply weren’t any resources and manpower left to continue the iron hand on the reins of government that Curzon had envisaged. In any case, many administrators felt that it was unnecessary to meddle in every aspect of Indian government; the Indians themselves could best deal with local affairs, while macro issues would continue to be in the hands of the Raj’s administrative apparatus. The very fractures in India’s polity that Smith ‘excogitated’ could only be mended from within by untrammelled Indian hands, yet this was precisely what Smith was trying to prevent. In December 1919, the Government of India Act was passed without opposition, vastly enhancing the Indian electorate and putting more powers into the hands of its native legislature (Metcalf 1995). Smith’s last hurrah sunk like a stone. The author himself barely survived this debacle, and in February 1920 Milford recorded for the estate of Vincent Smith that the title was of no value (MLB 1920, V 94: f 411).

Posthumous Revisions Survive the Original Book Meanwhile orders for the Student’s History were pouring in, and Milford sent 4,000 copies to Madras and 7,000 to Calcutta. Just a week before Smith’s death, Milford had proposed that he give the Press authorization to have his books updated and revised by some competent authority, but the prompting was too late (MLB 1920, V 94: f 132, 45). By a strange twist of fate, the Press assigned the work of revision to the same H. G. Rawlinson whom Smith had lambasted for exalting Shivaji. Rawlinson set to work almost at once in revising the Student’s History, with an unwritten mandate to remove the blemishes of dogmatism and prejudice

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that Smith had been so stubborn about in his time. Geoffrey Cumberlege, who had just relieved Rieu in Bombay, estimated that he could dispose off the old book at 10,000 copies a year, and with the Rawlinson version he hoped to do even better. He advised an edition size of 20,000 for the new version, and also asked Milford to raise the price to 4s (and the Oxford History to 10s) (MLB 1920, V 99: f 386; V 100: f 162). Rawlinson was not the first such reviser, with others such as S. M. Edwardes also working on the book, and most of the extant versions of the book are revisions to varying degrees of Smith’s original. What are we to make of this? Although sales of the first edition were substantial, Milford was certain that its blemishes held it back, and he continually tried to get it cleaned up. His uneasiness about the book was shared by most of the Press’s men who dealt with it. Noel Carrington, brother of the artist Dora Carrington and manager of the Calcutta Branch from 1920 to 1924, was in India just after Smith’s death, when his books were at the height of their popularity. Carrington’s own opinion of the Oxford History was that it was ‘the typical “standard” history beloved of publishers, that is to say the author had managed to cram in all the facts which were likely to be needed in the examinations to come … naturally slanted towards the justification of British Rule’. He added that he knew Indian professors of history were impatient with the book’s continued use, but when he suggested to one of his Indian staff that the Press ought to be selling a less bigoted history, the man smiled at his naïveté and said that very good histories had been written by ‘distinguished Hindu and distinguished Moslem gentlemen’, but no board of studies in History would accept a text written by one or the other. Only an Englishman was ‘trusted’ as a writer of textbooks (Carrington n.d.). Carrington was obliged to go along with this opinion. It would perhaps be assuming too much to say that the Press actively opposed Smith’s ideology. The Press sought above all to avoid controversy, unless the issue at hand was one where the prevalent view was demonstrably at fault and the author in question was refuting it with sound scholarly groundwork to stand on. The Press was not convinced that Smith’s take on India and British Rule was justified, and moreover, they were sensitive to

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the opinions of Indian scholars who had spent their careers to produce the data that Smith marshalled in his conspectus. The Press feared that primary researchers, European but most especially Indian, would feel that Smith’s interpretation of their findings was unfair, and that Smith was doing the Press no favours by dragging it into this potential minefield. They approved of Smith’s fact-gathering and his organizing sense of historical progression, although modern historians have questioned Smith’s mania for ‘epochs’. Milford, ever tactful, did his best to persuade Smith that nineteenth century attitudes were out of synch with the world of 1918, but with little success. Smith’s death, though much lamented, came just in time to salvage his book, and Milford was left to whitewash Smith’s sepulchre and engage the hated Rawlinson to apply a more market-friendly historical vision to Smith’s imposing collation of data. And since the original edition quickly disappeared from the market, as educational books will, it was perhaps Rawlinson’s hand, and the hands of the many revisers and updaters who came after him, that raised Smith to his appointed height in the Indian education firmament.

Notes 1. The Press’s organization was rather complicated, but in short I should say that by 1881, a subsidiary office in London had been set up and was managed by the publisher to the University. Books issued from London were meant to be market-friendly educational and reference books, and carried the imprint ‘Oxford University Press’, while scholarly books issued directly by Oxford went under the imprint ‘Clarendon Press’. The Clarendon Press was administered directly by the delegates of the Press, all dons of the University nominated to their posts, and headed by a secretary. The publisher was responsible collectively to the delegates, and individually (in day-to-day matters) to the secretary. At the time of this account, i.e., 1906–19, the secretary was Charles Cannan while the publisher was Humphrey S. Milford. In 1912, the Bombay branch was set up under E. V. Rieu, who reported directly to Milford. 2. To be fair, some present day historians concur with this opinion of Aurangzeb. In spite of this outburst, Smith was otherwise on good terms with Sircar and even recommended one of his books to the Press. 3. Probably E. B. Havell, whose opinions on Indian art Smith abominated. 4. I am at a loss to explain ‘loidoria’, except as an example of the donnish habit of clothing embarrassment in obscurity.

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References Books Chatterjee, Partha. 1994. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth Century Agenda and its Implications. S. G. Deuskar lectures. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. Metcalf, Thomas R. 1995. Ideologies of the Raj. The New Cambridge History of India, III(4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Indian edition). Richards, Thomas. 1993. The Imperial Archive. London & New York: Verso.

Manuscripts and Unpublished Documents Carrington, Noel. n.d. ‘Ebb Tide of the Raj’. Unpublished memoir in the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. Milford, Humphrey. Humphrey Milford’s Letterbooks (hereafter MLB), Oxford University Press Archive, Oxford. Letters cited are the following: Humphrey Milford to Secretary to the Delegates of the Press, MLB Vol. 12, fol. 198, 11 May 1908. Milford to Banerjee, MLB Vol. 13, fol. 180, 10 June 1908. Milford to Secretary, Delegates of the Press [Cannan], MLB Vol. 15, fol. 242, 18 September; fol. 265, 21 September 1908. Milford to Registrar of Calcutta University, MLB Vol. 15, fol. 443; to Banerjee, fol. 445, 2 October 1908. Milford to Secretary, MLB Vol. 26, fol. 158, 2 December; fol. 318, 16 December 1909; Vol. 35, fol. 200, 12 December 1910. Milford to Smith, MLB Vol. 37, fol. 161, 28 April 1911. Milford to Smith, MLB Vol. 37, fol. 161, 28 April; to Secy, fol. 174, 1 May; to Smith, fol. 190, 2 May 1911. Rieu to Milford, MLB Vol. 77, fol. 433, 434, 17 August 1917. Milford to Secretary quoting Rieu, MLB Vol. 82, fol. 297, 24 May 1918. Milford to Secretary quoting Rieu, MLB Vol. 82, fol. 292, 24 May 1918. Milford to Secretary quoting Rieu, MLB Vol. 83, fol. 183, 9 July 1918. Milford to Secretary quoting Aiyar, MLB Vol. 83, fol. 443, 9 August 1918. Milford to Secretary quoting Smith, MLB Vol. 83, fol. 40, 21 August 1918. Milford to Secretary, Vol. 84, fol. 363, 24 October 1918; to Smith, fol. 403, 30 October 1918. Milford to Secretary, MLB Vol. 92, fol. 472, 4 November 1919. Milford to Secretary, MLB Vol. 94, fol. 411, 28 February 1920. Milford to Secretary, MLB Vol. 94, fol. 132, 10 February; fol. 45, 3 February 1920. Cumberlege to Milford, MLB Vol. 99, fol. 386, 9 November; Vol. 100, fol. 162, 8 December 1920.

Chapter Eleven

Undreamt by Tyrants and Orthodoxies: Edward Said, Orientalism and the Politics of Cyberspace David Ewick We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt of by earlier generations of either tyrants or of orthodoxies. Edward Said, ‘Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism Versus the Empire Builders’, CounterPunch, 5 August 2003

The Libertarian Function of Online Print The epigraph with which I begin is from the final paragraph of Edward Said’s final published discussion of Orientalism. ‘Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism Versus the Empire Builders’ first appeared on 5 August 2003 at the online edition of the California-based political newsletter CounterPunch. The following day, on 6 August Said’s essay appeared also at the bilingual website of the Amman-based Arabic Media Internet Network, AMIN. On 7 August, the essay appeared again at the Cairobased al-Ahram Weekly Online, and on 8 August at the online edition of the Delhi-based Outlook India. In following days, Said’s last re-reading of Orientalism appeared also at the websites of the San Francisco, Portland, Houston, and New York Independent Media Centers, the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace in

I am grateful to Modjtaba Sadria for conversations that have contributed to my understanding of Edward Said’s late work.

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Denver, the Islamic Philosophy Forum and the art collective 16 Beaver in New York City, the Asian–American activist organization Model-Minority in Chapel Hill, the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the alumni association of Princeton University, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Democracy in Jerusalem, the Egyptian State Information Service in Cairo and at its mirror sites in London and New York, and in Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese translation, at AMIN in Amman, Le Monde diplomatique in Paris, Rebelión in Madrid, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Milan, and the Impartial Spectator in Tokyo. Other online sites, forum boards and mailing lists that referenced Said’s essay with a link to the full text at one of these publications numbered in the hundreds by 28 August 2003, when the Penguin Modern Classics twentyfifth anniversary edition of Orientalism appeared in bookstores in the United Kingdom, with Said’s earlier published and already widely-read essay as its ‘New Preface’ (‘Orientalism 25 Years’ CounterPunch 2003; Said 2003[1978]a; Said 2003[1978]b).1 ‘Our ideas today of archive and discourse must be radically modified’, Said wrote in ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’, the closing chapter of the posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism. He notes there that we live in an age of the ‘multiplying reproduction’ of what is written, and that this has ‘limited the powers that regimes have to censor or ban writing … considered dangerous’. With the development of ‘the libertarian function of online print’, Said writes, ‘an article I … write in New York for a British paper has a good chance of reappearing on individual Web sites or via e-mail on screens in the United States, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Africa, as well as Australia’. In an earlier version of ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’, published online three years before Humanism and Democratic Criticism appeared, Said added a sentence that is omitted in the book: ‘I am constantly surprised (and don’t know whether to be angry or flattered) when something I wrote or said in one place turns up with scarcely a delay half way across the world’ (Said 2004b: 130; ‘Public Role’ ABC Online 2001: para 24–25). Surprised, angry, or flattered, however, Said embraced ‘the libertarian function of online print’, warily in the beginning, but in the end as importantly as any cultural theorist. First consider the

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wariness, by way of contrast to what comes later. In ‘Bridge Across the Abyss’ in September 1998 Said associated ‘the age of massive electronic communication’ with ‘global capitalism’, and suggested that both were ‘designed to win consent, if not actually to create it’. He told Nigel Parry five months later that he was comfortable with e-mail as ‘an information tool’, but that his ‘knowledge of the Web was minimal’. And in ‘Heroism and Humanism’ in January 2000, Said set forth a spirited defence of paper and ink that anticipates central arguments in Humanism and Democratic Criticism and laments the ‘rapid modes of communication common to nearly everyone today—that is, the electronic order which has made writing so much easier … as well as disposable’. Said insisted in this work that he did ‘not want to be understood as urging a Luddite rejection of the electronic means we now have at our disposal’, but ‘confess[ed]’ that he was ‘still a pen man’ who ‘still write[s] everything by hand’ (‘Bridge’ AW 1998: para 15; quoted in Parry 2003: para 21; ‘Heroism’ AW 2000: para 4, 9). These comments are from online essays that do not appear in a book, and they are the last in the published record in which Said distances himself in any way from ‘the electronic means we now have at our disposal’. By the time Said published ‘Bridge Across the Abyss’ in September 1998, he already had passed over the bridge across the electronic divide, or had been carried across by al-Ahram Weekly. He had written regularly for that publication, the most widely read English language newspaper in the Arab world since September 1993. The Weekly published its first online issue on 30 April 1998, and in the second, the following week, Said’s ‘Fifty Years of Dispossession’ appeared. Other essays followed roughly every fortnight, rarely a deadline missed through the worst of Said’s illness (‘Fifty Years’ AW 1998; ‘Hazards’ AW 1999; ‘Punishment’ AW 2002),2 for more than five years. The last of these, ‘Dreams and Delusions’, the last essay Said wrote, was his 112th to appear online at al-Ahram, 21 August 2003, thirty-four days before his death (‘Dreams’ AW 2003).3 The al-Ahram materials constitute the largest archive of Said’s work that has been, and remains available online, but the multiplying reproduction of which he took note in 2001 was not limited to the last preface to Orientalism, nor did he limit his writing for online publication to al-Ahram. Other significant archives include

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those at CounterPunch, AMIN, ZNet, and Outlook India, the online editions of London Review of Books, the Guardian, and the Nation, in Arabic at AMIN, in French at Le Monde diplomatique, in Spanish at Rebelión, in Italian at Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore and Reds, and in Japanese at RUR-55. In addition to these may be noted the Edward Said Archive, the largest collection of links to work by, and about Said online (Said online archives list).4 In total, and not counting translations or other variations of the same work at different sites, Said’s online essays number more than 140, all but a small number written in the last five years of his life, many yet to appear in a book. This body of writing has been overlooked in offline accounts of Said’s work, however. For many years, French intellectuals, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Luc Nancy, among them, have published widely read essays in the opinion pages of Le Monde. In Italy, those engaged with the theoretical work of Umberto Eco know that often it will be found in the pages of Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Giorno, La Stampa, and other dailies, and in weeklies such as L’ Espresso, for which Eco writes a regular column. In Japan, scholarly debate about national security and constitutional law is more spirited in the opinion pages of the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers than in academic journals. But in the Anglophone world, particularly in the United States, an untheorized distinction is maintained between academic and journalistic writing. Despite Said’s insistence throughout his career that responsible critical practice is ‘situated’, ‘secular’, and ‘worldly’, and that it is the ‘obligation’ of the ‘public intellectual’ to engage the ‘potential space inside civil society’, academics who have addressed the nature of Said’s work discuss it only after it has been removed from the very situatedness in which it was set forth, and re-contextualized in the ‘relatively untroubled and secluded world’ of book publication (Said 1983: 25–26, 29–30).5 The most widely influential of Said’s work in the last years of his life appeared within the context of ‘the rough and tumble of cyberspace’ (‘Other America’ AW 2003: para 24), as he called it in 2003, but this is simply an absence to his academic critics. His writing for online publication is not mentioned in the eight book-length studies of his work that have appeared since 1999, or the dozens

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of articles that have been published in the standard peer-reviewed journals in the same period. One writer who has suggested that Said’s work for the ‘media channels’ is, in important ways, as significant as his books is Rashid Khalidi, inaugural holder of the Edward Said Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, himself in recent years no stranger to the rough and tumble of cyberspace.6 Khalidi’s ‘Edward W. Said and the American Public Sphere’ first appeared in a special Said issue of boundary 2 in the summer of 1998, soon after Said’s work began to appear online at al-Ahram; and so Khalidi cannot be faulted for failing to include discussion of the internet in his analysis of Said’s engagement with ‘the communication industry’. If Khalidi’s essay reads as if it comes from another world, scarcely six years after its publication, however, this is because it does so. The argument is lucid and forceful, but by 2004 it required supplementation: [I]t is immediately apparent that Said’s voice [on the internet,] on television, on radio, and in articles in a range of magazines and periodicals has provided the main … antidote to the consensus of idiocy that generally prevails whenever Palestine is discussed in the mainstream [US] media … Surely, some may argue, it is [Said’s] major books … that we should be looking at, not [the online publications,] the Nightline appearances … or the opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Nation, or al-Hayat. In fact, Said has probably influenced greater numbers and a far wider range of people by means of the [online,] print and broadcast media than by his books. Later in the essay, Khalidi writes that in some instances in the United States ‘virtually the only … easily accessible source … for information on international affairs is the depthless drivel of CNN and its clones’ (Khalidi in Bové 2000: 152–53). This too requires supplement in an age in which the Guardian, Le Monde, and al-Jazeera, never mind Electronic Intifada, are as easily clickable in the United States as the off button of the remote control. I do not intend to do violence to Khalidi’s essay, but rather to point out that with supplements of the sort I have taken the liberty to add, the argument is more powerful today than the day it was

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written. Khalidi is right that in the American public sphere Said’s appearance on Nightline, for example, was important as a counterbalance to the slender spectrum of opinion ordinarily given prominence on such a programme; the four most frequent guests to appear in a forty-month period preceding Said’s appearance were Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams and Jerry Falwell, whose appearances taken together numbered fifty-two (FAIR 1989). But since Khalidi’s essay was written, a body of scholarship has emerged that draws upon the work of the Frankfurt School and Jürgen Habermas to suggest the possibility via the new media of a re-emergent public sphere capable of making possible a creation of shared meaning across borders, to a degree unimaginable before, in ways previously ‘undreamt by tyrants and orthodoxies’ as the sentence with which I began articulates the point (Atton 2002; Couldry and Curran 2003; Downey and Fenton 2003: 185–202; Habermas 1998: 120–21). This body of work remains ‘under-researched and under-theorized’ even by the admission of some engaged in the study, and empirical data about who is reading what online are notoriously difficult to gather and to interpret (Downey and Fenton 2003: 185; Rainie and Bell 2004: 44–46). But until we have better methods that allow more exact analysis, some precisely measurable data make up in suggestiveness anything they might lack in scientific rigour. According to results from the most widely-used search technology available in early summer 2004, the number of World Wide Web pages that reference Edward Said exceeds 200,000. According to the same technology, this is 12.5 per cent more pages than those that refer to Henry Kissinger, more than double those that refer to Jerry Falwell, and by factors of 9 and 11 more than those that refer to Alexander Haig and Elliott Abrams.7 Khalidi was right in ways neither he nor anyone else could have imagined in 1998. But something else follows from these and related figures. There can be no question that with its nearly instantaneous translation and hundreds of incoming links to dozens of electronic replications, Said’s last preface to Orientalism has been read more widely online than in the new anniversary editions from Penguin and Vintage.8 But beyond this 200,000 World Wide Web pages have a social economy of their own. More cite Said’s work at CounterPunch (7,720), al-Ahram (7,430), and AMIN (6,430) than

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refer to any of his books except Orientalism (20,700). A single essay of June 2003, ‘Of Dignity and Solidarity’, first published at CounterPunch and reproduced at al-Ahram, AMIN, ZNet, Outlook India, and elsewhere, is cited more frequently, and almost certainly has been read more widely, than After the Last Sky, Reflections on Exile, and Representations of the Intellectual. I do not intend to be understood as saying that the book is dead, or with some of the more excitable acolytes of the new media that ‘there is no alternative to electronic discourse’—the automobile, as Umberto Eco reminds us, has not replaced the bicycle (‘Of Dignity’ CounterPunch 2003; Taylor and Saarinen 1994: 10; Eco 1996)—but I do want to offer a proposition that challenges orthodoxy of a different kind than Said addressed on Nightline and The Charlie Rose Show: it is arguable, and even likely that Said has been read more widely online than in books.

The Politics of Inclusion As early as 1986 Said was writing regularly for an Arab audience, first in Arabic for al-Majalla, and beginning in 1993 in Arabic for al-Hayat and in English for al-Ahram Weekly. Collections of this work appeared in Arabic in 1994 and 1995, and as Peace and its Discontents—Said’s first book in English ‘written from start to finish with an Arab audience in mind’ (Said 1996: xxiii)— in 1996, and The End of the Peace Process in 2000, the latter updated to include new material in 2001 and 2003.9 As a practical matter, then, much of Said’s online writing is an outgrowth of his work for an Arab audience. The al-Hayat and al-Ahram essays continued, the latter online after 1998, and in time the ‘multiplying reproduction’ set in. With few exceptions, Said’s work at CounterPunch, AMIN, ZNet, Outlook India, and the materials translated at the Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese archives, appeared also, usually first at al-Ahram. These essays, like those that came before at al-Hayat and alAhram, most commonly address the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and the matrices of power, in Israel, the United States, and the Arab world including Palestine itself, that continue to ‘validate Israeli actions’, as Said put it in 2002, while simultaneously ‘devalu[ing] and effac[ing] Palestinian actions’. As in the earlier

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work, Said is scathing in his condemnations of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli occupation, and the Palestinian Authority under Yasir Arafat, and uncompromising in his insistence that peace can come only with a Palestinian and Israeli coexistence of equality. A critical vocabulary for addressing such work already has been established. ‘The ensuing essays of Edward Said constitute, quite apart from their force and tenor as a polemic against [Oslo], one of the great arguments against the “moderate” cast of mind’, Christopher Hitchens wrote in the ‘preface’ to Peace and its Discontents. ‘A lone individual, who might have done very well for himself either by keeping silent or by playing along ... chose instead to place emphasis on unwelcome truth, on “what people do not want to hear.”’ With an exception that I shall address presently, Hitchens’s words apply equally well to Said’s online writing, as do other discussions of his ‘writings on Palestine’, by Tariq Ali, As‘ad AbuKhalil, Tony Judt, and others (‘Thinking’ AW 2002: para 6; Hitchens 1996: xvi; Ali 2003: 59–65; AbuKhalil 1996: 100–102; Judt 2004: 29–34). But there is more than this. To see Said’s online work only as a continuation of his writing for al-Hayat and al-Ahram, an addendum waiting to be naturalized in another new book, is to misunderstand. As I have tried to show above, this is true in part because of the nature of the medium itself. The combined circulation of alHayat and the print edition of al-Ahram Weekly is 242,000, the first printing of End of the Peace Process 15,000, the number of online readers of CounterPunch 20 million (Corporate Author: Allied Media Corporation; Corporate Author: Al-Ahram Organisation).10 Ariel Sharon and a thousand Israeli soldiers entered Haram al-Sharif on 28 September 2000 and by 12 October Said’s response was online at al-Ahram, Frankfurter Allgemaine, the Guardian, and ZNet, with translations in the making and incoming links from every continent (‘End of Oslo’ AW 2000). But there is more than this, also. Said’s online writing represents both technically and conceptually a break from what had come before, and not only from the writing in which his beginning intention was to address an Arab audience. His awareness of the power of the medium is not evident in the earliest of the online materials. In ‘The Challenge of Israel, Fifty Years On’, ‘Jerusalem Revisited’, and ‘Scenes from Palestine’ of early 1998, for example, references to ‘we’ and ‘us’ are inclusive of Arabs and Palestinians only, and allusions to terms, people

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and events not clear to a large audience outside an Arab context are unexplained (‘Challenge’ AW 1998; ‘Jerusalem’ AW 1998; ‘Scenes’ AW 1998). The first indication of Said’s awareness that the work may be read by many outside this context comes in May 1998 in ‘Fifty Years of Dispossession’, the first of the al-Ahram essays to go online immediately after it was written. In that work, the Palestinian nakba, which in ‘West Bank Diary’ by December Said glosses as ‘catastrophe’, is left unexplained, but adalah is glossed, for those who do not already know, as ‘the Arabic word for justice’ (‘West Bank Diary’ AW 1998). By early 1999 Said is still writing ‘as a Palestinian’, and at least ostensibly for an Arab audience, but with full contextualization for others who might be listening in, as in ‘Truth and Reconciliation’, the essay in which he argued for the first time for a binational Palestinian–Israeli state. In an interview with David Barsamian in early 1999, Said spoke of his marginalization in ‘the mainstream [US] media’, but noted that his recent work ‘is published in the Arab countries, and then … appears on the Internet’, where ‘it’s picked up and people read it’. His article on the idea of a binational state, he told Barsamian, had appeared in the New York Times Magazine (four days before it went online at al-Ahram) because it had been requested by an editor who had read him online (Said 1999; ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ AW 1999). Two events of 1999 added to Said’s awareness of the possibilities of his online work. The first, in February, was his meeting with Nigel Parry at a University of Chicago conference on Palestine. From 1994 to 1998, Parry had been designer of the website at Birzeit University on the Palestinian West Bank. In 1996, in response to international media reports that downplayed Israeli culpability in violence in Ramallah that left 104 dead, Parry and colleagues, with Said’s 1984 essay ‘Permission to Narrate’ as their stated justification, published on the Birzeit website ‘On the Ground in Ramallah: Reports from a Town Become Battlefield’. The self-described ‘first … alternative news website published by the residents of a war zone’ received international attention, and Parry followed this with other projects that make use of the internet to provide an outlet for Palestinian voices, including, with Ali Abunimah and others, The Electronic Intifada.11 Said was interested in Parry’s work at Birzeit and pleased that his own work had contributed to its conception and undertaking,

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and after February 1999 he spoke and wrote more often and directly of the possibilities of the electronic media. In ‘Refusal to Surrender Quietly’ in August, he wrote of ‘encouraging signs’ of the re-emergence of a Palestinian ‘collective identity’ despite ‘the constricting limitations of the peace process’, and took particular note of the Across the Borders Project initiated at Birzeit University and the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem on the West Bank. A computer centre had been set up inside the camp, ‘for the young people there’, all refugees, who after a period of training would ‘be able to communicate directly with the outside world’. In time the project would extend to other camps, ‘making it possible for refugees separated by borders and geographical distance to communicate with each other’ and ‘just as significantly’, Said wrote, ‘with young people all over the world’. Their ‘voice’ in this way, would ‘restore confidence and visibility’ to a ‘common identity’ (‘Refusal’ AW 1999: para 9–10). Said returned to this ‘tremendously important and audacious step’ in ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’, after the Across the Borders Project had been extended to other camps. ‘For the first time since their parents were dispersed in 1948’, he wrote, ‘second generation Palestinian refugees in Beirut or Amman could communicate with their counterparts inside Palestine.’ Some residents of Deheishe had visited villages in Palestine and ‘described … what they saw for the benefit of other refugees who had heard of but could not have access to these places’. From this ‘a remarkable solidarity emerged’ at a time when ‘the so-called final status negotiations between the PLO and Israel were beginning to take up the question of refugees and return’. For some older refugees, as a result, ‘their presence and political will was actualized for the first time, giving them a new status qualitatively different from the passive objecthood that had been their fate for half a century’ (Said 2004b: 133–34). Said’s words about Across the Borders Project begin to represent something new in his writing as it emerged online, but this is best addressed after turning to the second event of 1999 that altered his understanding of what is at stake in online publication. In late August 1999, an article in the journal Commentary purported to show that Said was not in a meaningful sense Palestinian at all, and that he had lied about such details of his childhood as living in the family house in Mandate Palestine and attending

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St. George’s School in East Jerusalem. Like earlier attacks on Said in the same journal, the article is notable chiefly for its rancorous misrepresentation of what Said and others had said and written, (Weiner 1999: 23–31; ‘Commentary “Scholar”’ CounterPunch 1999), and it would have had a small and passing reception but for one thing: it was excerpted at length in the print and online editions of the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Telegraph, and repeated and embellished dozens of times over online, in electronic newspapers, journals, right-wing political sites, message boards and mailing lists. Rebuttals from Said’s family, former teachers and childhood friends demonstrated that the charges were spurious, but they stuck nonetheless in a fringe of the public discourse, particularly in the United States, and were recirculated widely even four years later in obituaries for Said at publications such as the National Review and the New York Post. Defences of Said’s credibility appeared quickly online and off, from Alexander Cockburn, Amos Elon, Christopher Hitchens, Irfan Husein, Maya Jaggi, Ghada Karmi, Salman Rushdie, and many others, at publications such as salon.com, Atlantic Unbound, and the electronic editions of the Guardian and Dawn (Cockburn 1999; Elon 1999; Hitchens 1999; Husein 1999; Jaggi 1999; Karmi 1999; Rushdie 2002: 282–84). Said was called upon to reply himself, but no major US newspaper would publish his response (Jaggi 1999: para 42; Rushdie 2002: 283). Noting that ‘it is part of the Palestinian fate … to be required to prove one’s … history’ he turned instead to al-Ahram and, for the first time, to CounterPunch, where ‘Defamation, Revisionist Style’ appeared online on 26 August and was widely linked and reproduced (‘Defamation’ CounterPunch 1999). That essay marks not only Said’s first appearance at CounterPunch but also his first submission to a predominantly online publication outside the Arab world. By this time, he was in no doubt that the online medium held possibilities both good and ill that hardly had been imagined before, and soon what I have called above a conceptual break from what had come before was fully in evidence. The turn had been anticipated in Arabic in two al-Hayat essays, both in discussion of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress,12 but what follows from the summer of 1999 represents a qualitative difference. Said’s central metaphor for critical practice long had been the exile, the voice from the margins on a

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‘voyage in’ to the centre to ‘speak truth to power’, at once inside and outside, always oppositional. His early books were positioned within the frame of the Western, and most specifically the American academy, in opposition to its priestliness, other-worldliness and cant. His early work on Palestine was, by his own account, intended to bring a Palestinian voice to a Western and most specifically to an American landscape, a ‘writing back’, outside in. His turn to an Arab audience shifted the ground and even the style, but not significantly the stance. Perhaps it was in part the long illness and increasingly clear intimations of mortality, perhaps in part the completion of Out of Place, perhaps in large part the clarity that as the essays continued to appear online, they increasingly were found meaningful in contexts beyond what he imagined as they were set forth—but whatever the combination of reasons, Said’s politics of cyberspace became in time a politics of inclusion as much or more than of opposition. In ‘A Place to Travel In’ in July 1999, Said wrote of the academy and academic freedom, and relied upon a metaphor more fitting to his late work than that of the exile. ‘Our model … should be the migrant or traveller’, he wrote. ‘We should be able to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure’, and ‘in this joint discovery of self and other … to transform what might be conflict, or contest, or assertion into reconciliation, mutuality, recognition, [and] creative interaction.’ Said’s interest in Mandela and the ANC had been largely in the degree to which their campaign both locally and internationally had ‘delegitimized apartheid’ by the affirmation of a ‘common humanity’ inclusive of all (Said 2003: 63; ‘Only Alternative’ AW 2001: para 3). He had addressed this need in the two earlier essays, pointedly noting the degree to which the Palestinian leadership had failed to understand it, but in practical terms the awareness is actualized and becomes a central theme in the online essays after mid-1999. Repeatedly, Said argues that the Palestinian cause cannot succeed unless it develops the capacity to build affiliations with others in the international community. The task is cultural, political and ethical at once, its aim, as he put it in ‘The Only Alternative’, quoting Mandela, coexistence, tolerance, and ‘the realisation of humane values’ (‘Only Alternative’ AW 2001: para 3).

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In his first discussion of the Across the Borders Project, Said wrote of his hope that the young refugees at Deheishe would ‘communicate directly with the outside world’ across ‘borders and geographical distance’ to ‘restore a common identity’. The identity he spoke of then was specifically Palestinian, as he imagined then that nearly all of his readers were Arab. But in his late essays at al-Ahram and elsewhere online, the recognition of mutuality extends as far as his increasingly diverse audience. It is inclusive of modernizing currents in Israeli society, advocates of secular civil institutions across the Arab world, NGOs in Palestine and elsewhere, human rights and women’s movements, environmental and anti-war activists, civil rights advocates, labour unions, artists, writers, intellectuals and students. One only need look at the websites that reprint Said’s last preface to Orientalism to see how far the constituency of this ‘common identity’ extended. And despite repeated allegations of antiAmericanism, one only need look at such essays as ‘These are the Realities’, ‘Thinking Ahead’, ‘The Other America’, and ‘Dignity and Solidarity’ to see that Said’s inclusiveness extended specifically, in some ways he believed most crucially, to constituencies in the United States (‘Realities’ AW 2001; ‘Dignity’ AW 2003). To say that Said’s online essays represent a politics of inclusion is not to say that they are temperate, equivocal or polite. Early and late, they are both radical and a continued substantiation of what Hitchens called Said’s great argument against the ‘moderate cast of mind’. In the beginning they remain often at the level of polemic, their inclusiveness nominal and strategic, an appeal for Palestinians and to Palestinians to recognize ‘affiliated communities’ that might lend strength to the Palestinian struggle for subjectivity and self-determination. But then something remarkable happened. The affiliated communities were able to listen in as the narrative unfolded, and recognized something meaningful in its authority and constancy. Said’s politics of inclusion became, in this way, a prophecy self-fulfilled. In time the authority of the audience became a part of the authority of the message, and Said’s Palestine became a multivocal sign, a chord resolved into many keys, both in the listening and in the playing— contrapuntally, Said might have said, if anyone had thought to ask him.

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The online essays address a wider range of subjects than Said’s early work intended for an Arab audience—they include eulogies for Yehudi Menuhin, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, appreciations of Naguib Mahfouz, Daniel Barenboim, and others, and examinations of the nature and meaning of cultural identity and hybridity, secular civil society, and the crossing of borders imaginary and real—but even the majority that directly address Palestine, Israel or the United States, separately or together, do so for an audience and within a conceptual field that has shifted. By March 2001, when the al-Ahram essays began to appear simultaneously at CounterPunch and often also at Outlook India, AMIN, ZNet, the translated archives and elsewhere, it had become clear that they were not, as Hitchens had suggested of Peace and its Discontents, unwelcome news that ‘people do not want to hear’, but something very much the contrary, a body of work addressed to and sustained by a large and heterogeneous community of readers in the Arab world, the Americas, Europe, across Asia and elsewhere, which was engaged as much by the double vision of the traveller and the migrant as that of the exile. It is in this context that Said’s late return to Orientalism most profitably may be read. The international stir the book caused in 1978, and for a quarter century afterward (as I write), does not alter the fact that it was intended as a strategic intervention, a sort of Trojan Horse, within the well-fortified walls of the American academy (Brennan 2000: 558–83).13 I do not intend to question its immense importance in breaching parts of that and related strongholds, but I would like to suggest that as Said moved beyond the field and the frame in which the book was positioned, a large part of his early readership failed to follow the movement. This includes, for example, the strangely transformed Christopher Hitchens, who in the only essay to date about Said’s last preface to Orientalism attacks its ‘direly excessive rhetoric’ and claims that (1) ‘cultural-political interaction … must be construed as dialectical’, (2) in Orientalism ‘every instance of European curiosity about the East’ is seen as ‘part of a grand design to exploit … [an] ultimately contemptible “Oriental” sphere’, and (3) Ahmed Chalabi represents the ‘hope of cultural and political crosspollination’ between the ‘Orient’ and ‘the citizens of the Occident’ (Hitchens 2003: para 6, 17, 18). Said’s response, in ‘Dreams and Delusions’, the last essay he wrote, addresses Chalabi’s ‘record

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as informant and banker’ and without naming him outdoes a recognizable Hitchens in his own art of elegant denunciation (‘Dreams’ AW 2003: para 9–11). My point is not primarily that Hitchens’s reading is on all counts wrong, or in its misunderstanding of Orientalism reminiscent of the most ignorant of the book’s many interlocutors, but rather that exactly what Said had moved beyond between Orientalism and its twenty-fifth anniversary preface was the idea that cultural and political interaction is necessarily dialectic. As early as ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ in 1985 he noted that among the ‘methodological’ and ‘moral’ issues raised by a reconsideration of Orientalism is the question of ‘how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as opposed to sectarian, ends’, although also that ‘the dismantling of systems of domination’ involves a ‘siege’ and a ‘war’, of both ‘maneuvre’ and ‘position’ (Said 2000: 200, 215). In the ‘Afterword’ to the 1994 re-issue of Orientalism, in discussion of the ‘several different books’ his ‘partisan book’ had become in its reception, he noted that it ‘quite specifically abjures’ the idea of ‘fixed identities battling across a permanent divide’ (Said 1994a: 336). In these later reconsiderations of Orientalism Said expresses gratitude and surprise bordering on bewilderment at the book’s reception, and addresses some of the more egregious misrepresentations of what he actually had written, but except for extended fulminations on the ‘unrestrained anti-intellectualism’ of Bernard Lewis (Said 2000: 204–5; Said 1994a: 341–45), he largely avoids entering into the academic debates Orientalism had occasioned, claiming in both ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ and the ‘Afterword’ that he had not understood at least some of what had been written (Said 2000: 198; Said 1994a: 330). The remarkable career of Orientalism continued to flourish, nonetheless, extending in 2004 to translations in thirty-six languages and a fully-formed academic industry—no subject has occasioned more Master’s and Ph.D. theses in English departments this quarter century—but as Said turned more frequently to an Arab audience, he stopped writing about or even referring to Orientalism at all. He increasingly had come to believe the vocabulary and stance of much academic writing, including some of his own earlier work, exclusionary, (Said 2004d: 103; Said 2004e: 230–31; Said 2004a: 72–73) and he had been deeply disappointed in the misreading of Orientalism in

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the Arab world (Said 1994a: 331–32, 338–39; Said 2001: 437–38). ‘I think an author should continuously attempt something new’, he told an interviewer in response to a question about the book in the summer of 1999. It was ‘important’ to him that people read his books, but his ‘major interest’ was not in revising but in continuing his ‘journey’ a ‘bit further’ (Said 2001: 439). In the nearly 600 pages of Peace and its Discontents and the expanded edition of End of the Peace Process, Orientalism as either subject or book is mentioned but once, in passing. The re-emergence of the subject in Said’s writing coincides with the emergence of his writing online, but with a clear difference. What is missing in Orientalism is the Orient itself. Said himself was clear about this from the beginning: There were—and are—cultures and nations whose location is in the East [he wrote in the Introduction to the first edition], and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly (Said 1979[1978]: 5). He returned to the point both in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ and in the 1994 ‘Afterword’, in the latter noting in response to some of the more wilful misreadings of the book that it is ‘painstakingly careful’ in not ‘defending or even discussing the Orient and Islam’ (Said 2000: 203; Said 1994a: 331). As Orientalism re-emerges in his online writing, however, it is saturated with precisely the ‘lives, histories, and customs’ the book did not attempt or intend to address. In ‘Bridge Across the Abyss’ as early as September 1998, ‘traditional Orientalism’ is set against the ‘dynamic of cultures and the diversity of what is within them’, most particularly the ‘extraordinarily energetic debate … taking place from Morocco to Iran’ about ‘what Islam is, what it can be interpreted as, and where it might be going’. In ‘Cultural Politics’ in May 2000, the ‘history of Orientalism’ combines with ‘the absence of any serious cultural policy’ in the Arab world to obscure in the ‘North Atlantic’ a fifty-year ‘flowering of Arab art, writing, dancing, [and] music’, which is the subject of the essay.

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In ‘A Vision to Lift the Spirit’ in October 2001, it is the failure of Arab governments, intellectuals and others to have set forth ‘an adequate representation of culture, tradition and contemporary society’ that has led to these being ‘unknown in the West’, leaving ‘unchallenged’ the ‘picture of Arabs and Muslims’ as violent and fanatical. Other online essays that follow—‘The Arab Condition’, ‘Dignity and Solidarity’, ‘Imperial Perspectives’, ‘Dreams and Delusions’—position Orientalism within a like context (‘Bridge’ AW 1998: para 5; ‘Cultural Politics’ AW 2000: para 4; ‘A Vision’ AW 2001: para 9; ‘Arab Condition’ AW 2003: para 2; ‘Dignity’ AW 2003: para 7; ‘Imperial Perspectives’ AW 2003: para 9–10; ‘Dreams’ AW 2003: para 6, 13–14). What is important here is not the laying of blame for the banalities of Orientalism on the ostensible objects of Orientalist discourse, but rather the movement beyond objecthood itself, to a conception of agency that transcends a simple opposition between Orientalists and intellectuals and others who would resist them. Where are the ‘objects’ in the debates taking place from Morocco to Iran? ‘It is simply inadequate to keep repeating clichés about struggle and resistance that imply a military programme of action when none is either possible or really desirable’, Said wrote in ‘A Vision to Lift the Spirit’, speaking of something else, but with the usual double vision. What is at play in his online work as it addresses Orientalism and other matters, is an inclusive heterogeneity of subjectivities, not the ‘passive objecthood’ he earlier had attributed to Palestinian refugees—before the Across the Borders Project brought them opportunity to actualize their presence in an act of community, and thereby to demonstrate to themselves, and to Said, that borders may be transgressed in more ways than one. In ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ he had written of a ‘muteness imposed upon the Orient as object’, (Said 2000: 202) but in ‘Cultural Politics’ the artists make art, the writers write, the dancers dance, the musicians compose and play, as unhindered by Orientalism as by the man in the moon. The field of power does not overlap the field of becoming, and the monolith of Orientalism alone is not responsible for the obscurantism of the North Atlantic. It is possible for something to be done other than taking a hammer to the stone.

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Said’s new politics as it emerges online is, therefore, also a new ethics, an actualization of elements in his work that had been there all along, but that were constrained by the necessity of intending one audience over another. This is not to say that his political and ethical stance shifted when he addressed different audiences, but rather that it was in the convergence and exponential expansion of his constituencies online that the politics and ethics of inclusion were able fully to become a presence in his work. ‘The idea of an imagined community has suddenly acquired a very literal, if virtual, dimension’, he wrote in 2001 (‘Public Role’ ABC online 2001: para 25; Said 2004b: 131), just after the al-Ahram essays began appearing regularly also at CounterPunch and then the others. Said’s understanding, as it emerged and developed online, is neither utopian nor even, as the word is usually applied, optimistic. The computers at Deheishe were destroyed in an act of vandalism in the summer of 2000. As Said wrote his last ‘preface’ to Orientalism, Israel’s ‘collective punishment’ for the al-Aqsa intifada continued unrelentingly in occupied Palestine, and ‘the illegal and unsanctioned imperial invasion of Iraq by Britain and the United States’ was underway, with all its bellicosity and self-affirmation. But by the last preface, the vision that had been double all along has doubled again, or rather has passed beyond double vision altogether. There remain for Said ‘antagonists’ with whom ‘directly [to] engage’, as he put it in 2001; but the field of engagement has been transformed, and the voyage is out rather than in, ‘abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace’, ‘sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies’, in the ‘slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together’, to a field of undertaking in which ‘human beings … create their own history’ (Said 2003[1978a]: xxiii, xxvii, xxix).

Notes 1. ‘Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism versus the Empire Builders’, CounterPunch, 5 August 2003, expanded as Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition [of Orientalism] (London: Penguin, 2003). According to the Anchor Books/Vintage Books Fall 2003 Catalogue the American anniversary edition (Vintage, 2003), which includes the ‘New Preface’,

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

appeared in September 2003. Links to other electronic versions of the essay, including an abridged August 2 version at the online edition of the Guardian, may be found in David Ewick, ‘A Bibliography of Edward Said Online’. Said was diagnosed with leukaemia in the summer of 1991 and was seriously ill throughout the years the al-Ahram articles appeared. He addresses the long illness in two of the al-Ahram essays, ‘The Hazards of Publishing a Memoir’, and ‘Punishment by Detail’. After al-Ahram began publishing its online edition in April 1998, some work that had appeared earlier in the print edition was added to the site, including four essays by Said. The full list of his online work for the publication, with links to the texts themselves, may be found at al-Ahram Weekly, ‘Edward Said’, 25 September 2003, and, with annotation, in Ewick. Other archives noted do not have a static page of Said materials, but each has a search feature that will assemble a page of Said links on the site. Said’s understanding of the ‘situated’ nature of criticism is also situated specifically in several of the al-Ahram essays, including ‘A Desolation, and They Call it Peace’, 25 June 1998; ‘Heroism and Humanism’, and ‘Literature and Literalism’, 28 January 1999. Khalidi’s writing is available at the online editions of several publications, but it is the attention he has received from organizations such as Campus Watch, self-proclaimed ‘monitor of Middle Eastern Studies’ in the United States, that has led him, along with Said, to be the subject of frequent abuse in some of the more splenetic backwaters of the internet. The searches at were conducted on 24 June 2004 and repeated on July 24 with like results. Search terms included, for example, ‘Edward Said’, ‘Henry Kissinger’, ‘“Edward Said” and CounterPunch’, ‘“Edward Said” and Orientalism’, and ‘“Edward Said” and [“titles of Said’s other books”]’. The press runs are not public information, but the very success of earlier editions of Orientalism has precluded large sales even to libraries. Nine hundred and thirty OCLC libraries hold the 1978 Pantheon first edition, for example, 1,009 either the 1979 Vintage paperback or its 1994 re-release, 35 the twenty-fifth anniversary edition (OCLC WorldCat Advanced Search, ‘Edward Said’ [author], ‘Orientalism’ [title], 24 June 2004). The weekly al-Majalla is Saudi-owned but, like the daily al-Hayat, published in London and printed in many Arab capitals. Said’s essays for al-Majalla ran at least until February 1989, but according to Eqbal Ahmad, were ‘discontinued because the Saudis disapproved’ (‘The Question of Iraq’, Nation, 9 August 1993, 180). Said’s work for al-Hayat continued until the months before his death. Al-Ahram essays from September 1993 to April 1995 appear in Peace and its Discontents, and from May 1995 to January 2002, including sixteen that appear also at the online archive, in The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, updated edition. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map brings another forty-five of the al-Ahram Weekly Online essays to book publication. The 20 million figure cited for CounterPunch is the number of readers the site reported in May 2004. See the advertisement ‘New Reagan Memorial Edition’, 7 July 2004.

278 David Ewick 11. ‘On the Ground in Ramallah’ is no longer on the website at Birzeit University, but see Parry’s ‘“On the Ground in Ramallah” Diary’, Nigel Parry.com, June 1997, and ‘Permission to Narrate: Edward Said, Palestine, and the Internet’, the latter of which describes Parry’s 1999 meeting with Said. Said’s ‘Permission to Narrate’ appears in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994 (Said 1994b). 12. Both essays are translated in End of the Peace Process, as ‘Mandela, Netanyehu, and Arafat’ (1996) and ‘Strategies of Hope’ (1997). 13. Timothy Brennan traces the ‘American contexts’ of the composition of Orientalism with considerable insight in ‘The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Travelling Theory’.

References Books and Articles in Print Anchor Books/Vintage Books, Fall 2003 Catalogue. AbuKhalil, As‘ad. 1996. ‘Peace Politics’, Journal of Palestine Studies 26(1), pp. 100–102. Ahmad, Eqbal. 1993. ‘The Question of Iraq’, Nation, 9 August, pp. 178–82. Ali, Tariq. 2003. ‘Remembering Edward Said’, New Left Review, 24 November, pp. 59–65. Atton, Chris. 2002. Alternative Media. London: Sage. Brennan, Timothy. 2000. ‘The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Travelling Theory’, Critical Inquiry 26, pp. 558–83. Cockburn, Alexander. 1999. ‘Defending the Integrity of Edward Said’, Los Angeles Times, 29 August. Couldry, Nick and James Curran. 2003. Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield. Downey, John and Natalie Fenton. 2003. ‘New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere’, New Media & Society 5, pp. 185–202. Eco, Umberto. 1996. Afterword to The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hitchens, Christopher. 1996. Preface to Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. Judt, Tony. 2004. ‘The Rootless Cosmopolitan’, Nation, 19 July, pp. 29–34. Khalidi, Rashid. 2000. ‘Edward W. Said and the American Public Sphere’ in Paul Bové (ed.), Edward Said and the Work of the Critic. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 156–64. [Originally published in boundary 2, Special issue on Edward Said, Summer 1998]. Rainie, Lee and Peter Bell. 2004. ‘The Numbers That Count’, New Media & Society 6, pp. 44–46.

Said, Orientalism and Cyberspace 279 Rushdie, Salman. 2002. ‘Edward Said’ (October 1999), in Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992–2002. New York: Random House. Said, Edward W. 1979[1978]. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. ———. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1994a. Afterword to Orientalism. New York: Vintage. ———. 1994b. ‘Permission to Narrate’(1984) in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969–1994. New York: Pantheon, pp. 247–68. ———. 1996. Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. New York: Vintage. ———. 1999. ‘The One-State Solution’, New York Times Magazine, 10 January, pp. 36–39. ———. 2000. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 198–215. ———. 2001. ‘Orientalism, Arab Intellectuals, Marxism, and Myth in Palestinian History’ in Gauri Viswanathan (ed.), Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2003. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, updated edition. New York: Vintage. ———. 2003[1978a]. Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2003[1978b]. ‘New Preface’ to Orientalism, American Anniversary Edition. New York: Vintage. ———. 2004a. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004b. ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’ in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, pp. 119–44. ———. 2004c. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2004d. ‘Conversation with Edward Said’ in Amritjit Singh and Bruce B. Johnson (eds), Interviews with Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 84–103. ———. 2004e. ‘Cultures Aren’t Watertight’ in Interviews with Edward W. Said, pp. 230–43. Taylor, Mark C. and Esa Saarinen. 1994. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. London: Routledge. Weiner, Justus Reid. 1999. ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and other Fabrications of Edward Said’, Commentary, 108(2): September, pp. 23–31.

Online Resources I. Articles by Edward Said ‘The Challenge of Israel, Fifty Years On’, al-Ahram Weekly, 15 January 1998, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/360_said.htm. ‘Jerusalem Revisited’, al-Ahram Weekly, 22 January 1998, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/1998/1948/361_said.htm. ‘Scenes from Palestine’, al-Ahram Weekly, 26 March 1998, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/1998/1948/370_said.htms.

280 David Ewick ‘Fifty Years of Dispossession’, al-Ahram Weekly, 7 May 1998, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/1998/376/pal1.htm. ‘A Desolation, and They Call it Peace’, 25 June 1998, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ 1998/383/op2.htm. ‘Bridge Across the Abyss’, al-Ahram Weekly, 10 September 1998, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/1998/394/foc1.htm. ‘West Bank Diary’, al-Ahram Weekly, 10 December 1998, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/1998/407/op2.htm. ‘Truth and Reconciliation’, al-Ahram Weekly, 14 January 1999, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/1999/412/op2.htm. ‘Literature and Literalism’, 28 January 1999, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/ 414/cu1.htm. ‘Refusal to Surrender Quietly’, al-Ahram Weekly, 5 August 1999, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/1999/441/op2.htm. ‘Defamation, Revisionist Style’, CounterPunch, 26 August 1999, http://www. counterpunch.org/said2.html. ‘The Hazards of Publishing a Memoir’, 2 December 1999, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/1999/458/op2.htm. ‘A Place to Travel In’, al-Ahram Weekly, 24–30 June 1999, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/1999/435/cu1.htm. ‘Heroism and Humanism’, al-Ahram Weekly, 6 January 2000, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/2000/463/op10.htm. ‘Cultural Politics’, al-Ahram Weekly, 4 May 2000, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ 2000/480/cu2.htm. ‘The End of Oslo’, al-Ahram Weekly, 12 October 2000, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2000/503/op1.htm. ‘The Only Alternative’, al-Ahram Weekly, 1 March 2001, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2001/523/op2.htm. ‘These are the Realities’, al-Ahram Weekly, 19 April 2001, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2001/530/op2.htm. ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’, ABC Online, 20 May 2001, http:// www.abc.net.au/rn/deakin/stories/s299210.htm. ‘A Vision to Lift the Spirit’, al-Ahram Weekly, 25 October 2001, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/2001/557/op2.htm. ‘Thinking Ahead’, al-Ahram Weekly, 4 April 2002, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ 2002/580/op2.htm. ‘Punishment by Detail’, 8 August 2002, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/598/ op2.htm. ‘The Other America’, al-Ahram Weekly, 20 March 2003, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2003/630/focus.htm. ‘The Arab Condition’, al-Ahram Weekly, 22 May 2003, http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2003/639/op2.htm. ‘Of Dignity and Solidarity: The Meaning of Rachel Corrie’, CounterPunch, 23 June 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/said06232003.html. ‘Dignity and Solidarity’, al-Ahram Weekly, 26 June 2003, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2003/644/op12.htm. ‘Imperial Perspectives’, al-Ahram Weekly, 24 July 2003, http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2003/648/op2.htm.

Said, Orientalism and Cyberspace 281 ‘Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism versus the Empire Builders’, CounterPunch, 5 August 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/said08052003. html. ‘Dreams and Delusions’, al-Ahram Weekly, 21 August 2003, http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm.

II. Said Online Archives List Arabic Internet Media Network, ‘Dr. Edward Said’, http://www.amin.org/eng/ edward_said/index.html. Arabic Media Internet Network, ‘Edward Said’ (in Arabic), http://www.amin.org/ views/edward_said/index.html. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, ‘Edward W. Said’, http://www.feltrinelli.it/ SchedaAutore?id_autore=253701. Le Monde diplomatique, ‘Edward W. Said’, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/ dossiers/edwardsaid/. Outlook India, ‘Edward Said’, http://www.outlookindia.com/author.asp?name= Edward+Said. Rebelión, ‘Edward Said en Rebelión’, http://www.rebelion.org/said.htm. Reds, ‘Edward Said’, http://www.ecn.org/reds/etnica/palestina/palestina0310 said.html. RUR-55, ‘Edward Said Extra—Online Comments’, http://www.k2.dion.ne.jp/~ rur55/J/saidonline.htm. The Edward Said Archive, http://www.edwardsaid.org. ‘The Edward Said Archives’, http://www.zmag.org/meastwatch/edward_said. htm.

III. Other Online Articles and References al-Ahram Weekly. 2003. ‘Edward Said’, 25 September, http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2003/657/edsaid.htm. (Corporate) Author: Allied Media Corporation. n.d. ‘Major Arabic Newspapers: Al Hayat Circulation Breakdown’, Allied Media Corp: Multicultural Communication, http://www.allied-media.com/Arab-American/al_hayatcirculation.htm. (Corporate) Author: Al-Ahram Organisation. n.d. ‘Al-Ahram Weekly Distribution/ Subscription Report’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ advertise/circulation.htm. CounterPunch. 1999. ‘Commentary “Scholar” Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Said’, 1 September, http://www.counterpunch.org/said1.html. CounterPunch. 2004. ‘New Reagan Memorial Edition’, 7 July, http://www. counterpunch.org/christian07072004.html. Elon, Amos. 1999. ‘Exile’s Return’, New York Review of Books, 18 November, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/301. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) 1989. ‘Are You on the Nightline Guest List?’ 6 February, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2008. Hitchens, Christopher. 1999. ‘Commentary’s Scurrilous Attack on Edward Said’, salon.com, 7 September, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/09/07/ said/index.html.

282 David Ewick Hitchens, Christopher. 2003. ‘Where the Twain Should Have Met’, Atlantic Unbound, September, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200309/hitchens. Husein, Irfan. 1999. ‘Edward Said Fights for His Past’, Dawn, 2 October, http:// www.dawn.com/weekly/mazdak/991002.htm. Jaggi, Maya. 1999. ‘Out of the Shadows’, Guardian, 11 September, http://www. guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,,268488,00.html. Karmi, Ghada. 1999. ‘With Much Malice Aforethought’, al-Ahram Weekly, 2 September, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/445/op5.htm. Parry, Nigel. 1997. ‘“On the Ground in Ramallah” Diary’, Nigel Parry.com, June, http://nigelparry.com/diary/war/waressay.html. ———. 2003. ‘Permission to Narrate: Edward Said, Palestine, and the Internet’, Electronic Intifada, 25 September, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article 1975.shtml.

IV. Online Bibliography of Said Ewick, David. 2003. ‘Truth to Power: A Bibliography of Edward Said Online’, themargins.net, http://themargins.net/said.html. [All these sites were last accessed in July 2005]

About the Editor and Contributors The Editor Chandreyee Niyogi is a Reader in English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and has previously taught at Durgapur Government College. She is currently working on a monograph titled ‘Between Wife and Mother: Imagining India and Hindu Femininity’, derived from her doctoral work on western discourses on ‘Mother India’. Her translations have been published in various anthologies and her other writings, related to the politics of gendered nationalism and Orientalism, have appeared so far in English and Women’s Studies publications of Jadavpur University and the University of Calcutta, as well as in some Bengali periodicals. Email: chandreyeen @vsnl.net.

The Contributors Sudeshna Banerjee is a Reader in History at Jadavpur University and holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She is currently working on two monographs, one deriving from her Ph.D. thesis on colonial domesticity in late colonial Bengal, and the other focused on contesting discourses of poverty in colonial India. Her research interests, developed from a critical social history perspective, include the nation and other community identities, social constructions of marginality, politics of gender, the cultural politics of globalization and history of sports. She has contributed articles to learned journals, both national and international. Email: [email protected]. Sonali Barua is a doctoral student in the English department at Rutgers University, USA. Her research area is South Asian literature in English. She has a special interest in Indian verse forms, particularly those related to vocal music. Email: sbarua@eden. rutgers.edu.

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Prodosh Bhattacharya is a Reader in English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and at present engaged in doctoral research on the late-Victorian novelist Marie Corelli. He has previously taught at the Presidency College and other colleges under the University of Calcutta. As a state scholar in Oxford, he had specialized in Old and Middle English literature and his writings till date focus mainly on Old English literature. Email: prodosh_bhattacharya@ yahoo.com. Subhasis Biswas is a Lecturer in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, and his area of specialization is the environmental history of India. He has recently submitted his Ph.D. thesis titled ‘Nature and the Orient: The Colonial Perspectives in India’. He has more than twenty research papers on this subject, which have been published at the national and international levels. At present he is working on environmentalism in the twentieth-century world. Email: [email protected]. Pallabi Chakravorty is an anthropologist, dancer, choreographer and cultural worker. She is Assistant Professor of dance at Swarthmore College and founder of Courtyard Dancers, a dance ensemble in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in journals like South Asia, Visual Anthropology, Dance Research Journal, and in the UK-based dance magazine, Pulse. She organized an international symposium on South Asian Dance in 2002 and recently edited and published its proceedings. She is currently working on a book titled Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India and co-editing another based on a symposium she organized last year, titled Performing Ecstasy. Email: [email protected]. Rimi B. Chatterjee is a Lecturer in English at Jadavpur University. Previously, she was a fellow in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the IIT, Kharagpur. She is publishing a book with OUP India on the history of the Oxford University Press’s relations with India before 1947. She has material for a similar history of Macmillan which she hopes to complete in the near future. She has published widely on the history of the book in India, and has also worked

About the Editor and Contributors 285

in publishing and journalism. Her recent publication includes Signal Red: A Novel with Penguin India. Email: rimibchatterjee@ yahoo.co.in. Kitty Scoular Datta was educated at Edinburgh and Oxford and has taught at universities in Britain and India, including Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she was Professor and Head of the Department of English. Her research interests extend from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and she has worked extensively on the Scottish Enlightenment as well as on the manuscript history and reception of the Persian poet Hafiz in Britain. She is the author of Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell (1965). Kitty Datta lives and teaches in Oxford. David Ewick is Professor of Comparative Culture at the University Graduate School and Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Tokyo, and is Research Fellow at the Chuo University Institute of Policy and Culture. He has published on the relation of Orientalism and Modernism, the political economy of Japanese Modernism, the cultural history of Japan’s relation with Europe and the United States, and the Orientalist interests of Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats and other writers. Email: [email protected]. Ananya Jahanara Kabir is a Lecturer at the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. She has been research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge. She is now working on two research projects: medievalism and Empire, and literary and artistic representations of the Kashmir conflict. Her publications include Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (CUP, 2001) and Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (2005, co-edited with Deanne Williams). She has also written articles on medieval studies, medievalism, the partition of India, and representing Kashmir. Email: a.j.kabir@ leeds.ac.uk. Perundevi Srinivasan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human Sciences Programme at the George Washington University, USA. Her doctoral research focuses on the questions of body and modernity

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within a framework of the goddess cult in Tamil Nadu, India. Perundevi is a writer of poems, short stories and translations in Tamil. Her publications include a collection of poetry entitled Tiyuraittukkam. Email: [email protected].

Index A’in-i-Akbari, 51 Abrams, Elliott, 264 AbuKhalil, As‘ad, 266 Abul Fazl, 51 Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, 272 Abunimah, Ali, 267 Across the Borders Project, 268, 271 adibasis, in forests, 218–19, 223 Adigal, Maraimalai, 233, 235–37 After the Last Sky, 265 Ahmad, Aijaz, 135–41, 144, 159–60 Ahmad, Eqbal, 272 Ahmadi, 36 Ahmed, Aijaz, 102, 104, 108, 110–11, 113 Aiyar, Rangaswamy, 251–52 Ajanta caves, 94 Akbar, 251 Al‘Azm, Sadik Jalal, 117 al-Ahram Weekly Online, 259, 261, 263–66, 269, 271, 276 Alastor, 40–41, 44–54; geography of Alexander conquests in, 44–53 Alexander, Alastor and, 44–53; geography of conquests, 44–53; loss of liberty and, 53–55; mystery within Empire, 53–55; postEnlightenment interpretations of narratives of, 35–38; radical romantic poetry and, 38–44; Shelley’s readings on, 38–44 Alexanders Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Indian Ocean, 38 al-Hayat, 265–66, 269 Ali, Aga Shahid, 109–10 Ali, Tariq, 266

al-Jazeera, 263 Allen, Grant, 126 al-Majalla, 265 AMIN, 259–60, 262, 264–65, 272 Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, analysis of, 66–85; as constitutive moment, 77–85; discursive context of, 69–77 Anquetil-Duperron, AbrahamHyacinthe, 73, 138, 145 Anstey, Vera, 176–78, 183–84, 191, 193 Anti-Imperialist League, 184–86 anti-nautch movement, 91 Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins, 155 Arabian Tales, 48 Arafat, Yasir, 266 Arberry, Arthur J., 109, 113 Archaeologia, 75 Ardebeili, Ahmed, 38 Aristotle, 37, 54 Arrian, 36, 52 Arrian’s History of Alexander’s Expedition ... With Notes Historical, Geographical and Critical, 37 Arulnandisivam, 238 Arundale, Rukmini Devi, 89 Asahi, 262 Aseer, 106 Assassins, The, 42 Atlantic Unbound, 269 attitudes, colonial structures of, 228–30 Baden-Powell, B.H., 183 Bahadur Shah, 105 Bahu Begum, 107

288 Reorienting Orientalism baijis (courtesans), 106 Banerjee, B., 249 Barbauld, Ann Laetitia, 43, 72 Barenboim, Daniel, 272 Barsamian, David, 267 Basak, Nilmoni, 246 Bassnett-McGuire, Susan, 128 Bayly, Chris, 69–70 Beddoes, John, 38–40 Bedil, 106 Bengal Renaissance, 91, 127 Bernier, Francois, 51 Bhakti movement, 95 Bharat Muni, 95 Bharatnatyam dance, 89, 92, 98 Bharatbarsher Itihas, 246 Bhartrhari, 146 Blair, Hugh, 71 Booth, Charles, 190 Bourdieu, Pierre, 262 Brahmanical Hinduism, 234 Brandis, D., 218 Braudel, Fernand, 216 Brayne, F.L., 194 Brief History of the Indian Peoples, A, 245, 248 British colonialism, 192–93 British Forest Policy, 203, 219, 224 British Topography, 75 Bukhari, 106 Byron, 55 Caldwell, Robert, 230–34 Campbell, Thomas, 54 Cannan, Charles, 250, 253–54 Canning, F., 204–9, 224 Carey, William, 145 Carnegie, Andrew, 185 Carrington, Dora, 256 Carrington, Noel, 256 Cazotte, Jacques, 48 Chail National Park, 222 Champion, F.W., 204, 210–15, 224 Chandler, James, 41, 46 Chandra, Bholanath, 179 Charlie Rose Show, 265 Chatterjee, Partha, 91

Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 68, 127, 248 Chattopadhyay, Tarinicharan, 246 Chavis, Denis, 48–49 Chesney, George Tomkyns, 176 Chitrangada, 150 Christianity, 144, 151–58 Cilappatikaram, 238 Cintaamani, 234 Clapham sect, 145 Class Struggles in France, The, 144, 151 classical Indian dance, as cultural heritage, 99; body-centred approach to, 92; discourse of heritage and, 89–99; embodiment and cultural memory, 92–97; heritage as multiculturalism, 97–99; invention of tradition, 90–92; precolonial performance practice of, 91–92 Clayton, Richard, 36 Clerc, Jean Le, 37 Cockburn, Alexander, 269 Coleridge, 38, 46 Colonial Discourse Theory, 66 colonial forest policies, A. P. F. Hamilton on, 215–18; adibasis and, 218–19, 223; C. E. Hewetson on, 218–24; F. Canning on, 204–9; F. W. Champion on, 210–15; in India, 203–25; memoirs of foresters, 203–25; wildlife preservation and, 210–11 colonial Tamil context, agency and Orientalist discourse in, 228–40; Brahmins role in retrieving nonBrahmanical texts, 237–40; colonial structure of attitudes, 228–30; comparative textual traditions, 237–40; dichotomous accounts of Tamil identity, 234–37; Dravidian/ Aryan dichotomous identity, 234–35; Dravidian definition in missionary accounts, 230–34 Commentary, 268 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, 230, 234

Index 289 Comparative View of the Ancient Monuments of India, 75 Comte, Auguste, 144 Connerton, Paul, 90, 95 Coomaraswamy, A. K., 91 Corbett, Jim, 210, 213–15, 219 Corelli, Marie, 116–17, 119–22, 124–28 Cornwallis, 146 Corriere della Sera, 262 Count of Monte Cristo, The, 127 CounterPunch, 259, 262, 264–66, 269, 272, 276 Country Without a Post Office, The, 110 Cumberlege, Geoffrey, 256 Curzon, 176–78, 183, 185, 189, 191–92, 198, 254–55 Custer, 111 cyberspace politics and Said’s Orientalism, 259–76 D’Anvil, Monsr., 36 d’Ohsson, Mauradja, 36 Daemon of the World, The, 43–44 Daily Telegraph, 269 Dale, Thomas, 80 Dalhousie, 222 Dallmayr, Fred, 240 Dance of Shiva, 92 Daniell, Thomas, 76 Daniell, William, 76 Darling, Malcolm, 194–95, 197 Darwin, Erasmus, 50 Das, Mukunda, 158 Das Gupta, Amlan, 107 Dast-ambooh, 105 Dawn, 269 De Beneficiis, 37 Dejection, An Ode, 46 Deleuze, Gilles, 262 despotism, 68–70, 84 devadasi, 91 Digby, William, 184, 187 Disquisition, 52 Donovan, John, 47 Doty, Gene, 109–10, 113

Douce, Francis, 35, 50 Dow, Alexander, 40, 246 Drain of Wealth, 221 Dravidian, definition in missionary accounts, 230–34; ideology, 233; nationalism, 229 Dravidian Association, 237 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 55–56 Dutt, R. C., 178–82, 248 Early History of India, 249, 251 Eco, Umberto, 262, 265 Economic Development of India, The, 193 Economic History of India, 179–80 Edney, Mathew, 75, 77, 81 Education Commission of 1882–84, 248 Edward Said Archive, 262 Edwardes, S. M., 256 El Nino disaster, 189 Electronic Intifida, 263, 267 Elon, Amos, 269 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 246 End of the Peace Process, 265–66, 274 Engels, Fredrick, 139, 144, 151–52; on fundamental criticism of material conditions, 152–59 England in 1819, 41, 47 European Enlightenment, 66, 70, 151 Evangelical missions and ‘Hindoo civilization’, 140–46 Excursion, The, 46 Fahmida Riaz, 108 Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, 108 Falwell, Jerry, 264 famines, in India, 184–85 fards (extracts from ghazal), 106 feudalism, 68–70 Firdausi, 36, 50 Forbes, James, 76, 79 Forest Act of 1865, 208, 217, 219 Forest Act of 1878, 217, 219 Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, 205, 207, 224

290 Reorienting Orientalism forest resources, definition of, 211; exploitation of, 207–9; of Uttar Pradesh, 204–10; revenue extraction system for, 222–23; water resources, 216–17; wildlife, 210–11 Foucault, Michel, 135, 262 Four Hundred Quatrains, 233 Fox, Charles, 38 France, An Ode, 46 Frankfurter Allgemeine, 266 Fullarton, William, 40 Gacelen, 109 Ganna Begum, 107 Gauhar Jan, 107 gender-based oppression, critique of, 122–27 General, Historical, and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus, 51 Ghalib, Mirza, Adrienne Rich on, 102–5; beyond untranslatable, 105–8; grief of, 113–14; personalizing public form, 108–12 Ghaselen, 109 ghazals, beyond untranslatable, 105–8; Ghalib and, 102–5; personalizing a public form, 108–12; touching grief of Ghalib, 113–14 Ghosh, Kumaresh, 116–17, 120, 124, 127 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 260, 262 Gillies, John, 38, 41, 52 Gnosticism, 157 Goethe, 109 Goths, 81–83 Gough, Richard, 75 Gray, Elizabeth, 109–10 Guardian, 262–63, 266, 269 Guattari, Felix, 262 Guha, Ranajit, 246 Gupta, Abhinava, 95 Gupta, Iswarchandra, 126–27 Hafiz, 113 Haig, Alexander, 264 Hailey National Park, Kumaon, 206

Halhed, 145 Hallam, Henry, 70 Hamilton, A. P. F., 204, 215–18, 224 Hamilton, George, 181 Hamlet, 37 Hanaway, William, 106 Hastie, William, 145 Hazlitt, 41 Hellas, 54 Hellenic civilization, 139 Hellenic culture, 156–57 Hellenism, 137 Hewetson, C. E., 204, 218–24 Hindu civilization and evangelical missions, 140–46 Hindu Mission Vani Mandir, 143 Hindu religion and tradition, Marx critique of, 146–52 Hinduism, 95, 121 Hindustani classical music, 107 Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India, 37, 41 History of Ancient Greece, its Colonies and Conquests, The, 38, 41 History of Anglo-Saxon England, 75 History of British India, 176–77 History of Hindostan (1768–72), 246 History of India, 246, 248 Hitchens, Christopher, 266, 269, 271, 273 Hobson, J. A., 160 Hodges, William, 74, 79 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 41 Hookham, 42 Hossain, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, 122–26, 127–28 Hourani, Albert, 137 How Societies Remember, 90 Howard, Herbert, 204 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 260–61 Hunter, William Wilson, 245–49 hunting, 205–6, 208, 212 Husein, Irfan, 269 Il Giorno, 262 Imagining India, 69

Index 291 Impartial Spectator, 260 imperial medievalism, 65–66 Imperial Meridian, 69 imperialism, 160–61 impoverishment thesis, challenge of, 180–87 Inden, Ronald, 69, 239 India, challenge of impoverishment in, 180–87; colonial forest policies in, 203–25; discourse on poverty of, 169–76; forests of Uttar Pradesh, 204–10; histories from Hunter to Smith, 245–57; Mill and Morison on, 176–80; poverty on pre-British period in, 180–87; privately own forests in, 222 Indian Antiquities, 71 Indian Constitutional Reform Viewed in the Light of History, 254 Indian Peoples, 249 Indian Review, 251 Indian Village Community, 183 integral humanism, vision of, 137 Iqbal, Mohammed, 108 Ishrat Afreen, 108 Iskandar, 36 Iskandarnama, 50 Islam, 156 Ismail, Shah, 36 Ivanhoe, 68 Iyer, G. S., 179 Iyer, Krishna, 91 Iyer, Rajam, 239 Iyer, Visakapperumal, 239 Izouard, Delisle de Sales, 42 Jackson, Michael, 93 Jaggi, Maya, 269 Jahanara, 107 Jainism, 234–35, 238 Janki Bai, 107 Johnson, Edwin, 155, 157–58 Jones, William, 47 Judaism, 152, 155–57 Judt, Tony, 266 Jung, Karl Gustav, 138 Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow, 210 Justice Party, 237

Kakar, Sudhir, 146 Kandaswamy, S. N., 238 Karmi, 143 Karmi, Ghada, 269 Kathak dance, 92, 95–97 Kersenboom-Story, Saskia, 92 Khalidi, Rashid, 263–64 Khan, Hamid Ahmed, 103, 108 Kheri Trans Sarada forests, 207 Khidr (Hizir), 36 King Porus—a Legend of Old (1843), 55–56 Kipling, Rudyard, 185–87 Kissinger, Henry, 264 Knowles, L. C. A., 176–78, 181, 183, 191, 195 Kopf, David, 229 Krishna leela, 95–97 Kural, 234 Kyng Alisaunder, 35 L ’Espresso, 262 La Republica, 262 La Stampa, 262 Lahore Purdah Club, 149 Lannoy, Richard, 94 Laon and Cythna, 47 Le Clerc, 53 Le Gentil, Guillaume, 73 Le Monde diplomatique, 260, 262–63 Le Vieux de la Montague, 42 Leaf, Walter, 109 Leask, Nigel, 50, 69 Lenin, 160 Lewis, Bernard, 273 Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 47 Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, 42 London Review of Books, 262 Lorca, 109 Lorde, Andre, 108 Lotman, Juri, 125–26 Lucan, 37, 43 Ludhianvi, Sahir, 108 Lydgate, John, 35 Macaulay, Thomas, 84–85, 138 Macaulay’s Minute, 56

292 Reorienting Orientalism Mahabharata, 232 Mahfouz, Naguib, 272 Maine, Henry Sumner, 182 Mainichi, 262 Makdisi, Saree, 44, 53 Mallet, Paul Henri, 67, 81 Mandela, Nelson, 269–70 Manimekalai, 238 Manippiravalam, language style of, 235 Manu, 230–31, 234 Maratha banditry, 68 Margaret Cousins, 150 Marglin, F. A., 92 Marshman, John, 246, 248 Marx, Karl, attending to Tent beyond ideologies, 137–40; colonialism, 138, 140; discourse and counterdiscourse reading, 159–61; Hindoo civilization and evangelical missions, 140–46; ideals as critique of religion and tradition, 146–52; on criticism of material conditions, 152–59; on India, 135–61; participation in romantic Orientalist vision, 138–39; postcolonial critic vs Marxist scholar, 135–37; re-reading of on India, 135–61 Marxist scholar and postcolonial critic, 135–37 Mason, Lawrence, 204 material conditions, criticism of, 152–59 Maurice, Thomas, 71 Mavrocordato, Alexander, 54 medievalism, 65–66 Meduri, Avanthi, 92 Medwin, Thomas, 47 Meghnadbodh Kabya, 56 Menaka, Madame, 91 Menuhin, Yehudi, 272 Milford, Humphrey, 249–50, 252–57 Mill, James, 176–82, 184, 246 Milton, 56 Minute on Indian Education, 84 Missionary: An Indian Tale, The, 51 missionary Orientalism, 229 monotheism, 156–57

Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, 253 Montaigne, 111 Montesquieu, 38, 53 Morison, Theodore, 176–80, 182–85, 191–92, 194 Mughal despotism, 68 Mukherjee, Ashutosh, 250 Mukhopadhyay, Sourindramohan, 126 multiculturalism, heritage as, 97–99, 137 Murder of Delicia, The, 122–27 mushairas, 108 nabajagoran, 91 Naladi Nanuru, 233 Nammalvar, 235 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 262 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 178–79, 181–82, 187, 221 Nation, 262 National Review, 269 nature, concept of, 203 Natya Academy, Philadelphia, 89 Natyashastra, 91, 95 nazms, 113 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 229 New York Post, 269 New York Times Magazine, 267 New York Tribune, 135 Nightline, 264–65 Nil Darpan, 56 Nilakesi, 238 Nivedita, Sister, 141 Nizami, 36, 50 Northern Antiquities, 81 Nundy, Alfred, 179 occidental woman, in Murder of Delicia, 126–29; in Thelma, 116–27 Odissi dance, 92 Old North, antiquities of, 67, 71 On the Goths, 81 online-print, liberation function of, 259–65; politics of inclusion, 265–76 ordering nature, concept of, 203–4 Orient, study of, 90

Index 293 Oriental Antiquities and General View of the Othoman Customs, Laws and Ceremonies, 35 Oriental Despotism, 168, 181, 183 Oriental gothic, 65–66 Oriental Memoirs, 76 Oriental Renaissance, 159–60 Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 66–67, 77, 90, 137, 160, 203, 229; cyberspace politics and, 259–76 Orientalism, and its other(s), 135–61; critical engagement with, 168–98; definition of, 116, 228–29; discourse analysis of, 135–36; environmental history of India and, 203, 225; feminine and, 192–98; Hellenism, and, 137; historicism and, 141, 160; limits of, 89–99; Marx and, 137–61; Said interpretation of, 168–98 Orientalist discourse, in colonial Tamil Nadu, 228–40 Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India, 183 Oslo Accords, 266 Ouseley, William, 35, 50 Out of Peace, 270 Outlook India, 259, 262, 265, 272 Owenson, Sydney, 51 Oxford English Dictionary, 251 Oxford History of India, 251, 253, 256 Oxford University Press, and histories of India, 245–57 Palmyra, 54 Parappakkam, 238 Parry, Nigel, 261, 267 Peabody, Norbert, 69–70 Peace and its Discontents, 265–66, 272, 274 Peacock, T. L., 42, 54 Pennant, Thomas, 37, 43, 50–51 Percival, H. M., 250 Percy, Bishop, 71 Percy, Thomas, 67 Pharsalia, 37, 43–44

Philo, 156, 158 Philosophical View of Reform, A, 53 Picturesque Voyage to India, A, 76 pine forest, in Kumaon, 207 Pinkerton, 81 Pioneer, 251 Plato, 217 Pleasures of Hope, The, 54 Pleasures of Melancholy, The, 54 Plutarch, 38, 41 Pope, G. U., 233, 239 Porus, King, 37, 55–56 postcolonial critic and Marxist scholar, 135–37 post-Enlightenment socialism, 156 poverty of India, challenge of, 180– 87; discourse on, 169–76; during pre-British period, 180–87; kind of, 187–92; Mill and Morison on, 176–80; Orientalist voices of, 176–80; reading on, 168–98; social mapping of, 190–91; working class poverty, 188 pre-British poverty, challenge of, 180–87 Pritchett, Frances, 106 Prosperous British India, 187 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 146 qatas, 113 Queen Mab, 44 Qur’an, 36 Radcliffe, Ann, 72 radical romantic poetry, and Shelley’s readings on Alexander, 38–44 rainfall, in Indian forests, 215–17 Rajan, Tilottama, 44 Rajasthan, picturesque geography of, 77–85 Rajkahini, 68 Rajput feudalism, 68 Rajputs, 68–70, 81–84 Rajtarangini, 68 Ram, Kalpana, 99 Ramaswamy Naicker, E. V., 237 rasa, Indian aesthetic theory of, 90, 94–95

294 Reorienting Orientalism rasanubhuti, state of, 95 Rawlinson, H. G., 253, 255, 257 Rebellion, 260, 262 Reds, 262 Reflections on Exile, 265 Renaissance humanism, 137 Rennell, James, 36, 52 Representations of the Intellectual, 265 Resolution of 1894, 220–21 riaz of Kathak, 95–97 Rich, Adrienne, on Ghalib, 102–5; public form of ghazals, 108–12; touching grief of Ghalib, 113–14; translation of Urdu ghazal and, 105–8 Richard, Thomas, 247 Richardson, Michael, 229 Rieu, E. V., 250–51, 256 Robertson, William, 37–38, 40–41, 52–53 Role of the Environment, 216 Rotner, Sheila, 111–12 Roy, Ratna, 92 Royal Forest Society, 221 Ruckert, 109 Rufus, Quintus Curtius, 36, 41, 52 Ruins, 42 Rumi, 109 RUR–55, 262 Rushdie, Salman, 269 Russell, Ralph, 104–5 sacrifice, 158–59 Saddikni, Georges, 117 Sahitya, 148 Said, Edward, 66, 90, 116, 135–39, 144, 159–61, 203, 228–29, 239; online writings, 259–76; theory of Orientalism, 168–98 Saiva Siddhanta, 233, 236, 238 Saivism, 234–36 Saivite tradition, 233 Sal forests, 207 salon.com, 269 Samajpati, Sureshchandra, 148 Saminata Iyer, U. V., 239 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 262

Scandinavians, 81 Schimmel, Annmarie, 109 Schlegel, 109 Schlich, William, 205 Schwab, Raymond, 137–38, 160–61 Scott, Walter, 68 Scyths, 81 Selim I, 36 Seneca, 53, 156 Shah Jahan, 108 Shahnama, 50 Sharma, Shobha, 89 Sharon, Ariel, 266 Shastri, Hara Prasad, 248 Shelley, Harriet, 41 Shelley, Mary, 42 Shelley, readings on Alexander, 38–44 Shivaji the Maratha, 253 Shore, John, 145 Sicilian Romance, A, 72 Siculus, Diodorus, 36 Simlipal National Park, 222 Sivajnana Siddhiyar, 238 Smith, Vincent, editions of History and account of sales, 249–50; history of India, 245–57; posthumous revisions of works of, 255–57; revision to rectify imperialistic prejudice, 251–55 Smythies, E. A., 204 Society of Antiquaries, 75 Sorrows of Satan, The, 127 South Indian Liberal Association, 237 Southey, 38, 40, 48–50 sringara rasa, 95 Srinivasan, Amrit, 92 Sripuranam, 235 Stevens, Wallace, 110 Stoller, Paul, 92–93 Strabo, 36 Student’s History of India, 249–51, 255 Subrahmanian, N., 239 Subramaniya Bharati, C., 239 Sunderland, Jabez T., 184–85, 196 Suraiya Begum, 107 Surya Narayana Sastri, V. G., 235

Index 295 Swadeshi movement, 158 Swarupananda, Swami, 142–43 Tagore, Abanindranath, 68 Tagore, Rabindranath, 150 Tales of the East, 48 Tamil Nadu, analysis of discourse in colonial context, 228–40 tawaif, 91 Tegart, Charles, 142 Teignmouth, 145 Thalaba the Destroyer, 48, 50 Thelma, Orientalizing occidental woman in, 116–27; Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s critique of, 122–27 Third Reform Act of 1884, 191 thumri, 106–7 tillana performance, 97 Tod, James, 66–69, 75, 77–85 Travels in India, 74 Triumph of Life, The, 54 Troup, R. S., 224 Turner, Sharon, 77 Twain, Mark, 185 Urdu poetry, 106–7 Utilitarian Orientalism, 177 Uttar Pradesh, forest resources of, 204–10

Varnashrama Dharma movement, 237 Vatsayan, Kapila, 92 Vendetta, 127 Victorian medievalism, 65 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra, 127, 148 View of Hindoostan, The, 37, 43, 50 Village Communities in the East and West, 182 village community in India, concept of, 182 Vivaldi, 111 Vivekananda, Swami, 141–42 Volcker, 222 Volney, Francois de, 42 Voltaire, 38 Von Platen, Graf, 109 Wall Street Journal, 269 Weber, Henry, 35, 48 West-Ostlicher Diwan, 109 Whitman, 111 Wilberforce, William, 145 wildlife, 210–11 Wilkinson, Charles, 51 With a Camera in Tigerland, 210 Women Who Did, The, 126 worker’s socialism and Christianity, 152–58 Yogavashishtha, 146

Vairagyashatakam, 146 Vaishnavism, 233, 235–36 Vaitheespara, Ravindiran, 229–30, 233 Vallancey, Charles, 81 varna system, 232–33

Zebe, Aurang, 51 Zend-Avesta, 73 Znet, 262, 265–66, 272 Zohra Bai, 107 Zohra Nigah, 108