The Coming of Age of Imperialism (1772-1813), Part II

his death in 1794, Jones deeply impacted not only both the British rulers and their Indian subjects and Orientalism in general, but also many European intellectuals of the time period and afterwards. By establishing in 1786 that Sanskrit was linguistically similar to Ancient Greek, Roman and the European languages that followed, Jones--David Kopf argues--"related Hindu civilization to that of Europe and reanimated the resplendent Hindu past." [12] Suddenly, Orientalism had a much greater purpose than merely enabling the British to better administrate India. By linking India irrevocably with Europe's past, Jones demonstrated that the study of Indian civilizations were important in their own right, as the study of them would shed much valuable light on European cultures and civilizations.

At the same time, Jones began to articulate a position for the British that went far beyond Hastings' narrow utilitarian one of making better administrators. On March 19, 1788, in a letter to Hastings' successor, Lord Cornwallis, Jones wrote:

...Nothing indeed could be more obviously just, than to determine private contests according to those laws [of the Hindus and Muslims], which the parties themselves have ever considered as the rules of their conduct and engagements in civil life; nor could any thing be wiser than, by a legislative act, to assure the Hindu and Musselman [sic subjects of Great Britain, that the private laws, which they severelly hold sacred, and a violation of which they would have thought the most grievous oppression, should not be superceded by a new system, of which they must have considered as imposed on them by a spirit of rigour and intolerance.... [13]

This took Hastings' policy one step further. In addition to serving the bureaucratic needs of the Company, Orientalism should and would also be used to protect the Indians, enabling them to live life according to the scriptures of their cultures and religions. Yet this was not all. For while Orientalism would enable the Hindu and Muslim subjects of Britain to preserve and maintain their respective religions, languages and cultures, the study of them by the British would also inevitably encourage a renaissance among the Brahmin pundits and Muslim maulvis [religious scholars who served as the intellectual elite, or intelligentsia, of these societies]. The British would help "rescue" the old, decaying Hindu civilization and "restore" it to its former magnificance. [14]

Yet this "moral mission" has been severely critiqued over the past two decades by anthropologist and historian Bernard Cohn

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