Making of Modern India

Module 2
Colonial State and its Ideology: Orientalism

Academic Script

Imperialism was not merely a system of political and economic domination. In order to
legitimize imperial rule, the British imperialist ideologues created ideas and images that
sought to underline the moral superiority of the European nations over their colonial
subjects. Such ideas evolved through different stages in the same way as features of
political and economic control had undergone changes over the duration of imperial rule. In
India, for example, the early phase of mercantile domination subsequently gave way to
India’s deployment as a recipient of British goods and a secure area for British financial
investments. The latter features of British economic domination in India paralleled the
growing confidence of British imperialism resulting from the collapse of Indian resistance in
the course of the early two decades of the nineteenth century. The growing self-confidence
of British imperialism made its impact on what has been described by historians as cultural
imperialism. The discussion on cultural imperialism requires the understanding of the
stages through which British imagination about India’s essential inferiority was understood
and articulated in a series of stereotypes and images.

In the development of British cultural imperialism it is easy to identify three distinct stages.
In the development of this imperial ideology, there were attempts to legitimize imperialism
by consigning the colony to an inferior status in the hierarchy of races and nations. In the
first stage when the future of imperial control was still uncertain and there was a political
compulsion to make accommodation with the indigenous society and political order, the
expressions of moral superiority were usually cautious and guarded. Once in the early
nineteenth century the subjugation of Indian rulers generated a measure of confidence,
assertion of moral superiority became more strident. Later after the revolt of 1857 the kind
of civilizing mission that notions of moral superiority had created in the earlier phase was
replaced by a more conservative stance of leaving India alone on grounds of India’s
endemic resistance to change. In the early part of the nineteenth century a new crop of
officials, inspired by the ideals of civilizing mission in India came to believe that they had a
mission to fulfill in India through schemes of westernization and Christianization. Trained in
England, rather than in institutions like Fort William College in Calcutta, the new class of
officials was very different from the first generation of Company’s servants. The latter were
mostly fortune hunters without any high professional or aristocratic standing of their families
in English society. They did not share the kind of contempt that later generations of civil
servants recruited from English upper classes had for Indian people. The eighteenth
century officials stayed in India for a longer period of time since their arrival in India at a
fairly young age. In view of the great commensality that they developed with the local
population, their attitudes were somewhat different from their nineteenth century successors
who constituted in India an exclusive white ruling class. It was only in the nineteenth century
that the idea of India’s difference became more pronounced. And as such notions of
difference implied a status of Asiatic or Indian inferiority, civilizing mission entailing a policy
to recast India in the western mould was an inevitable consequence. The discussion on
Orientalism and the subsequent rejection of Orientalism as a matter of policy falls within
such linear developments in British cultural attitudes towards India. Orientalism as an
aspect of cultural policy, practiced by early British rulers, called upon Europeans to undergo
a process of cultural assimilation in India, promoting orientalist researches into India’s
antiquity, society, language systems and legal systems. From 1820s onwards, this was
replaced by a certain stress on how India needed to be turned into a new west under British
guardianship. This was of course a new kind of imperialism which came to contain a
different kind of cultural statement, associated with men like James Mill, Bentham or
Macaulay.
Orientalism and the Study of ancient societies
Orientalism as a concept carries a number of meanings which have some relevance for the
study of ancient societies in the non-European world, particularly in regions like Egypt,
China or India which could boast of great civilizational advances in antiquity. British
Orientalism which began to flourish in India since the late eighteenth century around
institutions like the Asiatic Society or the Sanskrit colleges in Calcutta or Benaras
demonstrates the general European curiosity about ancient civilizations as they featured in
the study of inscriptions, language systems and religions. It was not unusual for men like
Henry Colebrook whose main objective was to compile a digest of Hindu laws to be equally
interested in ancient Sanskrit inscriptions. Knowledge of Sanskrit, for such men was
essential to pursue these academic goals. The other prominent example from the late
eighteenth century was William Jones. As a judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, Jones
frequently summoned local Pundits to interpret for him the complexities of the Indian legal
system, particularly those relating to laws of property and inheritance. In the process, Jones
acquired a measure of proficiency in Sanskrit, in addition to his knowledge of Arabic and
Persian that he acquired as a university student in England.

Men like Jones and Colebrook and many others who kept their company in the Asiatic
Society and other institutions were not mere academics or intellectuals who lived in their
ivory towers. These were high functionaries of the newly established British colonial state
who wished to know extensively about the Indian society and culture in order to rule India
effectively. This particular argument features as the main emphasis in the work of David
Kopf namely British Orientalism and the Indian Renaissance. Kopf shows how from the time
of Warren Hastings in Bengal there was an urgency to undertake translations of some of
the more important Sanskrit and Arabic texts dealing with the canonical foundation of civil
laws. Kopf describes this as Hastings’ cultural policy, motivated obviously enough by the
logic of governance. Yet the logic of governance in Kopf’s opinion created empathy among
these official scholars about Indian society and culture. There were certain tangible reasons
for this. English rule in India at that time had not achieved the kind of self confidence that
the military victories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century subsequently
created. In other words orientalism was the intellectual expression of a relatively weak
imperialism which was unable to impose its writ on the Indian society, and which was
obliged to rely on local collaboration for ruling the still territorially limited British Empire.
Empathy was born out of a lack of self confidence. It is common knowledge that this
sentiment later gave way to Anglicism of the kind that the generation of Macaulay and
Bentinck represented from the 1820s onwards. The purpose was no longer confined to the
pursuit of oriental learning by the British officials; it was in fact largely outweighed by the
official insistence on the spread of English education and western learning among Indians.
The most important text which announced the arrival of this new policy was James Mill’s
History of British India. The book was published in 1817 and the publication coincided with
the final defeat of the Marathas that had removed the last stand of Indian resistance against
colonial intrusion, generating in the process an imperial self confidence about Britain’s
responsibility in recasting an ancient and static Indian society, into a modern westernized
land. For a man like Kopf this was the end of orientalism, even though during the period
when orientalism ruled policy making, it created the basis of European understanding of
Indian history and culture, from which the Indian intellectuals drew freely in an attempt to
project India as the bearer of a rich cultural heritage.

These British scholar-officials depended on the Indian collaborators, the Sanskrit knowing
Pundits, or the Persian knowing maulavis for developing their ideas about India’s history,
languages and social customs. Orientalism in this sense became a meeting ground for
European and Indian scholars, both of whom were involved in acts of knowledge creation.
This is one aspect of Orientalism on which recent scholarship has placed a good deal of
emphasis. Once this knowledge about India was created, it was however capable of being
redeployed by later generations to suit different purposes. An imperialist influenced by the
ideological commitment to India’s westernization might use this knowledge to stress India’s
static conditions as they were revealed by social customs or intellectual concerns,
dominated by religion. He might work on the assumption that westernism would create a
modern rationalist secular society by replacing an old tradition-bound static social order. He
might, at a later time encounter resistance from an Indian nationalist who would be anxious
to establish India’s cultural superiority on the basis of the same kind of knowledge that was
created by orientalist academic enquires.

Edward Said and the concept of Orientalism

It seems therefore that if Orientalism was a part of knowledge creation by both Europeans
and Indians meeting in the world of scholarship, the politics of imperial domination was
however built into it. This has been precisely the basic lesson in the famous book by
Edward Said with the name Orientalism which was published in 1978. After Said’s work one
cannot think of Orientalism any more as a matter of policy, stopping short in the 1820s. Said
sees it as a state of mind among Europeans which sought to consign Asian colonies like
India into a position of permanent inferiority in order that they could legitimize their presence
in these countries as superior rulers of inferior men. The inferiority was measured in terms
of India’s changelessness and her failure to emerge as a modern society. This is of course
a skewed judgment coming from people who did not have adequate knowledge about India.
This mentality had many other dimensions too. If the west represented the growth of a
civilization based on private property and private enterprise,- commercial and industrial, in
India such possibilities were ruled out by a culture of despotism, implying that the despot
took away everything and left little for ordinary people to pursue enterprise and wealth.
Despotism represented a retrograde system waiting to be dismantled by British civilizers. All
this is indicative of how the term Orientalism has come to acquire manyfold dimensions and
varied meanings even as orientalists helped develop our knowledge of antiquity, stimulated
by textual and archaeological research.

The Varied Meanings of Orientalist Knowledge

Therefore Orientalism in the form of a body of knowledge was capable of different kinds of
meanings. There could be an imperialist Orientalism, as well as a nationalist Orientalism.
India’s difference can be a marker of inferiority, it might also be posited as a marker of
superiority and the politics behind such varied uses of a body of knowledge is scarcely
hidden. At a more fundamental level, the creation of this knowledge itself in different fields
of scholarly enquiry remains a very important aspect of Orientalism. It is through
Orientalism of the British official class that the East India Company’s scholar officials and
the Indian pandits came to engage with each other. There is a tendency among certain
groups of scholars to undervalue the role of the Indian pandits and munshis in the creation
of this knowledge by designating them as mere informants. In other words, the Indian
scholars, as this opinion goes, provided the Europeans with the necessary information
about local culture, religion and language, in order to enable them to attune their
government to Indian conditions, while at the same time creating a certain imagery of
European superiority. On the other hand, the view that the Europeans came to espouse
learning, often underlining their superiority, could be justified in terms of the scholarly
authority of the local informants.
Orientalism and the logic of colonial governance
The knowledge that the early orientalists created as a tool to enable governance, still put
stress on the notion of Asian difference, implying the manner in which the Indian society
and culture had intrinsic differences with the west which would not be so easily bridged.
William Jones for example, explained this difference in terms of stagnation and corruption,
which came to afflict Aryan virility and creativity. India to many of them represented
Europe’s past. Over time however, Europe surged ahead, while the Indians became
trapped in a state of changelessness. These assumptions could still act as symbols of
European superiority, inspiring a later generation of officials to work out new strategies to
transform the minds and societies of the colonized people into a dynamic modern culture.
This touches on the problem of redeployment of ideas invented in one historical period by
others, in another historical context. Orientalist assumption about the relative
changelessness of India could be used by an aggressive arrogant imperialism to recast
India into a western mould, verging therefore on a certain kind of cultural domination by the
west. The orientalist discovery of India’s rich cultural heritage, on the other hand could
easily become a resource in the hands of the nationalists to combat ideologically, the
cultural imperialism of the west.

Knowledge and governance in early orientalist research

Understanding the Indian legal system obviously was a matter of prime importance for the
rulers belonging to Warren Hastings’ generation. Abrupt imposition of English law on a
society which had a fairly ancient legal system was likely to create resentment. In 1772
Warren Hastings began to work on his plan of reorganizing the civil law and civil justice in
Bengal. The search for such laws inevitably persuaded the early compilers of Hindu law to
elicit information from the Dharmashastras, which contained a large variety of information
about how property was inherited, and the extent to which the property owners were liable
to taxation. It was assumed that in India, which was often seen as a land of despotism,
ordinary citizens did not possess the right of ownership while the entire land was claimed by
the despot as his property. This however was one important misconception about the Indian
social system. Yet by a way of understanding the shastric foundations of the Indian legal
system, some of the early official orientalists were discovering an ancient constitution.
Warren Hastings, for example believed that the perception that India had no civil law was
wrong. Some of these laws had come down to modern times from the remotest antiquities,
and the man who was entrusted with the responsibility of compiling these ancient laws in
order to create the basis of a new civil code was Nathaniel Halhed.

Halhed besides publishing a digest of Hindu laws namely A code of Gentoo Laws in 1776
also wrote on Bengali grammar. Obviously the knowledge of language was an
indispensable prerequisite for undertaking such research which involved translation from
ancient texts. A linguist from Oxford, Halhed, in this book, made a compilation of legal ideas
from Vivadarnabasetu. Halhed felt that the British rulers had a moral responsibility in
excavating the ancient foundations of the legal system in India. This was also expected to
correct the misconception that India was a land without laws. On the contrary it was a
civilized nation, whose concepts and ideas were enshrined in the ancient texts. Halhed then
goes on to argue that even if the religion of the Hindus was different, they had their own
principles of argument and rhetoric, which needed to be excavated from the ancient texts.
One of Halhed’s contemporaries Charles Wilkins sharing the same respect for ancient
civilizations of India, translated Bhagavad Gita from the original text.

William Jones as the leading orientalist

This was the larger context of the scholarly endeavours of a man like William Jones. Before
William Jones came to India, he had already developed a reputation as a scholar in Asiatic
languages. Subsequently on his appointment as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Calcutta
he was drawn to the study of Sanskrit, as the foundation of the ancient legal system. This
interest in Sanskrit arose naturally from his professional requirements involving an attempt,
following Halhed’s early example, to compile a reliable digest of local laws and usages. He
depended heavily on local informants, whose contribution to Jones’ understanding of the so
called Hindu laws was considerable. Even before he came to India he had written on
Muslim property law as a text for the use of the Company’s officials in India. The interest in
language however did not stop short at merely an interpretation of the shastras for a
possible codification of legal principles. He was drawn to literature, and became a student
of Kalidasa’s poetry, translating eventually the classical poetical work Abhigyanam
Shakuntalam into English language, going to the extent of describing Kalidasa as India’s
Shakespeare. One important result of this interest in ancient languages, was Jones’ study
of comparative language in which he tried to identify one common source of the Indo-
European languages, by practising what he considered to be a more advanced method of
comparison. Jones emphasized the grammatical structures as an important index of
comparison. On its basis he found Persian to be closer to Sanskrit, than to Arabic. The
study of language was intended not merely to establish the antiquity of Sanskrit, or its
richness in comparison to classical European languages. For Jones this was one of the
ways to reach the almost unknowable history of Indian antiquity by a more extensive use of
the ancient texts.

In addition, his assumption about a common Indo-European origin understood initially in

terms of linguistic affinities, resulted in a comparative approach to Indian and classical
religion in Europe as well, involving a comparison between Indian gods and goddesses with
Greek and Roman deities. Yet whether it was religion or it was India’s ancient history, the
principal store-house of information, as far as Jones was concerned had to be the ancient
texts. In one of his anniversary discourses at the Asiatic Society, Jones also wished to
evolve a methodology along this line of studying ancient history. Certainly these early
orientalist methods were later refined with more developed knowledge of inscriptions.
Secondly, Jones was convinced that some sort of historical narrative could be recovered
from Indian legends. In his essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ he asserted that
mythology contained truths which became perverted into fables through imagination, flattery
and stupidity. In fables, truth and fiction became blended and in order to tease out truths
from legends, it is important to understand metaphors used in a language. Not unnaturally
such concerns created in him an interest in the Puranic deities on whom he wrote several
hymns, often making the point that the myths of the later times showed how Vishnu and
Siva marginalized Indra as the presiding deity of the Hindu pantheon.

Orientalist contribution to historical knowledge

All this anticipated some of the major historical researches in the nineteenth century, which
tried to identify a common origin of the Indo-European people. It addressed the issues of
Aryan homeland, emphasizing Iran as an important region in the history of the spread of
Aryan culture, and the later transformation of the Aryan religion into one based on Puranas.
Wilford, another distinguished orientalist scholar of the time made out a case for a common
origin in a lengthy essay in the Asiatic Researches. Wilford’s interest brings out the very
important dimension in orientalist knowledge which involved constant comparison between
India and the west. Comparisons could produce a respectful attitude, but at the same time
they contained references to differential achievements. If Europe had come a long way from
that ancient age, India had failed to complete the transition. If analogy to classical Europe
lent worth to Indian civilization, culture and language in such works by the orientalists like
Jones, the failure on India’s part to adopt modern science remained an equally important
reference point in Jones’ evaluation. In one of the lectures he mentioned how in the field of
science and mathematics Indians were mere children. This is where orientalism of men like
Jones despite their empathy for ancient Indian culture, failed to outgrow the ideological bias
of imperialism. India was once great but it failed to develop and remained backward. Such
bias notwithstanding, the study of comparative language and comparative religion created a
certain foundation on which later orientalist scholars began to build their knowledge of
ancient India, by reading and editing texts and also by leading early explorations into
archaeology. Inscriptions provided a meeting ground where textual scholarship and
archaeological knowledge could easily meet to create the basis of the study of ancient
history.

The Asiatic Society and the Discovery of India’s Past

The main centre of this initiative to create a more accurate history of India’s past was the
Asiatic Society in Calcutta. The Asiatic Researches of the late eighteenth century published
by the Asiatic Society contained a large amount of information about the contributions of
men like Charles Wilkins (1749---1836), Henry Colebrook (1765—1837) and William Jones
(1746—1794) to the development of epigraphic knowledge. A fairly detailed account of the
early epigraphic research is available in O. P. Kejariwal’s book The Asiatic Society of
Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past. Kejariwal points out that research in ancient
Indian history and chronology happened to be one of the main interests of the Society.
Against this backdrop the development of epigraphic knowledge from the early nineteenth
century made an important contribution to more scientific historical practices which sought
to outgrow the dependence on the legends and fables in the ancient texts. These orientalist
epigraphists felt that until the inscriptions were more accurately deciphered, the sequential
history of ancient India was difficult to construct. Yet the way men like Charles Wilkins or
Henry Colebrook were collecting these inscriptions and undertaking translations of them,
silently laid the foundation of a more accurate reading of ancient history. The climax of
course was reached when Prinsep deciphered the Mauryan inscriptions in 1837.

Orientalism and Imperialism

Orientalism, apart from being an educational programme for the early English rulers in
India, also implied a certain condition of the imperial mind that underlined a difference
between east and the west. The more sympathetic among the British rulers like William
Jones certainly had greater regard for an ancient civilization, something which the more
arrogant imperialism from 1820s onwards did not endorse. In a way this imperial arrogance,
born out of the new self-confidence that the defeat of the Marathas had generated, came to
be represented by James Mill in his History of British India. This was precisely the period
when the academic programme of early Orientalism was on the retreat, while the
assumption of Indian inferiority with which men like William Jones also concurred, began to
be deployed for a policy of comprehensive westernization of India.

James Mill’s main argument in the work was that in order to achieve a new beginning in
modernizing India, the Indian society needed to be freed from the ‘tyranny of the dead’. This
was precisely the reason why a man like H.H.Wilson, a famous linguist who was a leading
member of the Asiatic Society and the first Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, felt that Mill’s
History represented a harsh and illiberal spirit in its imperial contempt for Indian culture.
Wilson supported the stand of William Jones, when he contradicted Mill’s criticism of Jones
for needlessly exalting the richness of India’s ancient civilization. This debate shows how
the history of India written by rival schools of British scholars was expected to serve the
purposes of two different kinds of imperialism. Moreover Orientalism was capable of
generating varied meanings, so that there was a time in the late nineteenth century when
an Indian Orientalism emerged, that positioned itself against this kind of inferiorisation of
India and its cultural heritage through a celebration of Indian heritage.