Yet was there such a defined tension between ideal and reality? Historian Javed Majeed does not think so. Instead of being hegemonic, Majeed notes that Jones' efforts to preserve indigenous Indian cultures were to the chief reasons for attacks by James Mill and others. [1] In addition, there was no major tension, as S.N. Mukherjee argues, between Jones' political views in England and his views in India. Rather whatever tensions did exist were much more a result of his attempt "...both to understand cultures in their own terms, and to measure and define them according to some culturally neutral standards" than any preconceived notions of Indian inferiority or British superiority. [2]
However, in Majeed's analysis, as in Mukherjee's, there is a major tension. If at one level this attempt to measure and define according to a neutral standard or set of standards is to be lauded, as it lacked many of the commonplace racial stereotypes of the period, at another it is condemned as a means by which the British Empire could be consolidated and further unified. [3] Thus, while Jones might have been motivated mainly by self-interest or even desires to improve the lives and cultures of the Indians, he was, nevertheless, co-opted by the colonial project. Furthermore, Majeed suggests that he was co-opted willingly. Noting that Jones learned Sanskrit in large part to compose a reliable digest of Indian laws for the Supreme Courts, he suggests that his motivation was mainly to check the power of the pandits [Indian religious scholars]. [4] While Majeed concedes that Jones' work was key to the development of a renaissance among the Indian intelligentsia, one has to consider, as he does, the cost of such stimulation.
Edward Said answers this question by quoting from one of Jones' letters to the second Earl of Spencer [5] on August 17, 1787: "...it is my ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it." [6] The impulsive desire for knowledge was inherited by his successors and served to cause India to take on a property-like form; as a result, Jones and his later British counterparts became the only ones who were capable of understanding and speaking for India. [7] As a result, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India at the-turn-of-the-century, was able to explain 115 years later, "...the East is a University in which a scholar never takes his degree...", [8] thus implying that Britain was needed in India indefinitely.
