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

Author: Joseph Sramek
Published on: Jul 9, 1999

Orientalism, Anglicism and the Development of Indian Educational Policy, 1772-1813

The Development of Orientalism: From Amateurism to the College at Fort William (1772-1800)

Before 1772, there was little if any formal training for East India Company [the institution that ran India until 1858, when it became a Crown Colony, administered by the British Government until 1947] officers, who prior to 1765 were principally merchants and traders. Practically all of the positions within the Company had been filled through patronage, and with many interested in only creating private fortunes and adventures, becoming acquainted with the Indian peoples, their languages, cultures, and traditions was not a priority for many. As historian Percival Spears noted in his The Nabobs, most officers were pitifully and "frequently ignorant of the country languages and the debased Portuguese..." [1] When the British were merely merchants and traders, this probably was seen as deplorable, but by no means a serious problem. After 1765, however, this deficiency became seen more and more as a liability that could harmfully affect British rule in India than as a personal oversight on the part of individual officers.

In 1772, Sir Warren Hastings became Governor-General [the chief adminstrative post in India at the time, roughly equivalent to Royal Governor of a Crown Colony] of Bengal. Appalled at the large number of "pity tyrants" among his officer staff, Hastings was one of the first persons to fully realize the detrimental effects that resulted from the lack of proper training. [2] To remedy this problem, Hastings would implement a variety of voluntary programs during his tenure which--while not as substantive as those that later followed--were certainly important as they established a rationale for later policies. Thus, in order to understand Orientalism as it developed, it is important to first understand Hastings and his opinions on India that influenced the former set of policies in so many ways.

Hastings, like so many of his contemporaries, went to India seeking fortune and adventure. However, unlike many of the other "Nabobs," [3] he became enchanted by Indian culture. As historian V.B. Kulkarni wrote, Hastings

Knew that the quickest route to the heart of a people is through the language of the country and had accordingly acquired proficiency in Bengali and Urdu, besides a fair acquaintance with Persian, the language of the Muslim court. Sitting in a remote Bengali town, with ample leisure for reflection, Hastings wondered at the vastness of the country, its richness and variety, and above all the antiquity and splendour of its civilization. [4]

This is not an unquestioned view as there is some scholarly debate as to whether Hastings truly had a deep understanding of Indian culture. [5] Nevertheless, at least one thing is clear: he had a real love for Indian languages, a love that permeated to many of his subordinates, as well as numerous Oriental scholars.

Yet this was not a love of Indian languages for their own sake, but rather a love based fundamentally on a pragmatic need to administer India in the most effective way possible. Hastings may have appreciated these languages as a namateur scholar, but he appreciated them all the more for facilitating British rule. He believed "...to rule [India] effectively; one must love India; to love India, one must communicate with her people; and to communicate with her people, one must learn her languages." [6] Thus, it follwed for Hastings that there was "a direct correlation between an accultured civil servant and an efficient one..." [7] According to Hastings, this process of acculturation would have to be

...conducted thenceforth not only on a level of social discourse but also on that of intellectual exchange. Inasmuch as the British servant was expected to work alongside his Asian counterpart in the administrative hierarchy, the Englishman would have to think and act like an Asian. Otherwise, the British would be treated as aliens, rapport between ruler and ruled would break down, and the empire would ultimately collapse. [8]

To this end Hastings did or tried to do several things. Immediately upon taking office in 1772, he appointed those who knew Urdu and Persian to his first committee of revenue, bypassing officers who had more seniority but who were not conversant in these languages. [9] To assist future officers in the acquisition of these languages, Jones offered lavish financial support for the hiring of munshis (language tutors) as well as for scholarly translations of Sanskrit and other languages. Officers who could pass comprehensive exams in any of the several Indian languages as well as Hindu and Moslem law were given significant financial awards. [10] Finally, in 1784, Hastings helped to form the Asiatic Society of Bengal; an organization dedicated to Oriental research and scholarship. This group greatly helped to transform Orientalism from being merely an administrative policy into being a major scholarly movement. [11]

The same year, Sir William Jones arrived in India. During the ten years that he was in India, from 1784 to 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 and literature critic Edward Said, among other scholars, who have seen it and Jones' actions as fundamentally hegemonic. Cohn wryly notes that Jones' main intention in studying Sanskrit law and other texts should not be seen as an intention to "rescue" an old, decaying civilization, but rather one to "...free the British judges in India from dependence on what he thought was the venality and corruption of the Indian interpreters of Hindu and Muslim law." [15] Jones, according to Cohn, betrayed this ulterior motive in February 1785 in a letter to then Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, writing that he was almost "...tempted to learn Sanskrit, that I may check on the pandits in the Court." [16] Said joins in this criticism by noting that Jones' desire, as he wrote to his close friend and financial backer the second Earl Spencer in August 1787, was "...to know India better than any other European ever knew it." [17]

Yet while Cohn and Said are, in my opinion, largely correct to attack Jones and others for having additional, mostly negative, motivations for their actions, I think it is unfair to suggest that Jones' only purpose in India was to help establish cultural hegemony. Jones' saw his purpose as much nobler: in a letter written four years later to Spencer, he wrote:

...I speak the language of the Gods, as the Brahmens [sic] call it, with great fluency, and am engaged in superintending a Digest of Indian Law for the benefit of the 24 millions of black Indian subjects in these provinces: the work is difficult & delicate in the highest degree & engages all my leisure every morning between my breakfast and the sitting of the court; the natives are charmed with my work, and the idea of making their slavery lighter by giving them their own laws, is more flattering to me than the thanks of the company and the approbation of the king, which have been transmitted to me [emphasis mine]...." [18]

As shown by this letter, Jones honestly believed that he was articulating a new, more humanitarian mission for the British. Whether in the final analysis Jones should be attacked for being a chief "imaginer" of India [19] or praised for being one of the greatest humanitarians that ever lived, [20] remains unclear. One thing, however, remains perfectly clear. When Jones died at the unfortunate early age of 47 in 1794, unable to complete his Digest, his vision of a humanitarian mission for the British--one in which the British would help "rescue" the Indian civilizations and reinvigorate the intellectual and cultural life of the various peoples--carried onwards. Not only did it find itself enshrined in the establishment of the College of Fort William, but it was also the basis for many of the Evangelical attacks on Orientalism after 1800.

Footnotes:

[1] Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India, (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 127.

[2] Sisir Kumar Das, Sahibs and Munshis, (Calcutta: Orion Publications, 1978), p. 1.

[3] Nabob was a term given to English merchants and traders who came to India seeking adventure and fortune. Many were from lower-middle class backgrounds and thus saw India as the only opportunity they had to become wealthy.

[4] V.B. Kulkarni, British Statesmen in India, (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, Ltd., 1961), pp. 28-9.

[5] Das, p. 2.

[6] Kulkarni, p. 25.

[7] David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengali Renaissance, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 17-18, quoting Warren Hastings, Memoirs of the Life of Right Honorable Warren Hastings, vol. 1, compiled by G.K. Gleig, (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), p. 215.

[8] Ibid., p. 18, quoting A.M. Davies, A Biography of Warren Hastings, (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1935), pp. 340-1.

[9] Das, p. 2.

[10] Kopf, pp. 18-20.

[11] Alexander Murray, ed., Sir William Jones, 1746-1794: A Commemoration, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 98.

[12] Kopf, p. 38.

[13] Sir William Jones, ed. by Garland Cannon, The Letters of Sir William Jones, vol. 2, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 794, Letter to Lord Cornwallis, 19 March 1788.

[14] Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine, ed., Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), p. 46. See also Kopf.

[15] Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 29.

[16] Jones, ed. by Cannon, p. 665, Letter to Sir William Pitt the Younger, 5 February 1785.

[17] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 79.

[18] Jones, ed. by Cannon, p. 885, Letter to the Second Earl Spencer, 20 February 1791.

[19] Ronald Inden, Imagining India, (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwood, 1992), p. 46 and passim.

[20] Cannon, passim.