Introduction Histories of Empire, Histories of Knowledge

Abstract

This is a book about orientalism in India. It examines the varied manifestations of literary, historical, and linguistic scholarly practices which were utilised to constitute the object ‘Indian civilisation’ through the literature of Sanskrit, from about 1770 to 1880. Given this scope, the book is necessarily selective in its focus. Yet the subjects discussed are unified throughout by the argument that the practices of orientalism were necessarily double; that is, while, on the one hand, such practices were utilised by the colonial state to consolidate and authorise its rule over the subcontinent, on the other hand, orientalism also depended to a large extent upon the social standing and cultural expertise of one of the state’s principal sets of Indian interlocutors, the Sanskrit paṇḍits. This doubling, in which European authority was grounded upon forms of Indian authority, which simultaneously needed to be displaced, opens a field of enquiry in which the scholarship of orientalism becomes a much more ambiguous, and potentially subversive, set of practices. Thus, this book discusses three principal themes, grounded chronologically: from the late eighteenth century, in which the East India Company used orientalist knowledge, and the relationships forged with paṇḍits, to underpin its burgeoning state in Bengal; to the uses made of orientalism’s methodologies in ‘constructive orientalist’ educational initiatives in the nineteenth-century ‘civilising mission’; and, finally, to the adaptation, by Indian Sanskrit scholars, of some of orientalism’s principal discursive, institutional, and social constructs in the production of newly inflected Hindu identities.