History of India 1

HISTORY

Subject : History
(For under graduate student)

Paper No. : Paper - IV

History of Modern India

Topic No. & Title : Topic - 3

Colonial State & its Ideology

Lecture No. & Title : Lecture - 1

Orientalism

Script

Colonial State & its Ideology: Orientalism

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 just 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
History of India 2

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
History of India 3

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
History of India 4

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.
History of India 5

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
History of India 6

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
History of India 7

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
History of India 8

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
History of India 9

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
History of India 10

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 many fold 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
History of India 11

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.
History of India 12

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
History of India 13

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
History of India 14

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
History of India 15

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
History of India 16

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,
History of India 17

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
History of India 18

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
History of India 19

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
History of India 20

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.
History of India 21

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
History of India 22

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.