Aryans and British India, Thomas R. Trautmann, New Delhi, Yoda Press, 2004.
…In Gobineau [Arthur De Gobineau, Essay on the inequality of the human races (Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines) 4 vols, Paris: Firmin Didot Freres, 1853-55] (p.xiv) race become the historical cause of causes, the fundamental motor of world history and the rise and fall of civilizations. He asserted that all or most of the world’s civilizations were produced by the white race, and all but one of them—northern Europe—had declined because of racial intermixture. This noxious idea supplies the theoretical base for all subsequent forms of the politics of racial hate in Europe and America.—Preface, to the Paperback edition, pp.xxiv-xxv
…I have examined the period prior to Sir John Marshall’s 1924 interpretation of the Indus Civilization and its relation to the Veda, which may be said to be the beginning point of the standard view that is currently being called into question by the proponents of the alternative view. This is not the place to undertake an analysis of the alternative view, which is barely mentioned in the book and which truly falls outside its purview. I will however just say, to satisfy the inevitable questions of readers who may be perplexed by the debate and who will read the book through the Aryan debate, so to say, that while the standard view has been modified considerably over he years, the alternative view has yet to make a convincing case to replace it, in my opinion. The most telling obstacle to the alternative view is that there is very little evidence to show that the Indus people were users of horse-drawn, spoked-wheeled chariots, as the Aryan warrior class of the Veda abundantly was. In addition, the patterning (p.xxvi) of retroflex sounds in Indian languages goes against the alternative view, proponents of which have offered no counter-explanation for the pattern. That is, retroflex consonants appear in the Dravidian languages, and in Sanskrit and its descendant languages in North India and Sri Lanka, but not in the other Indo-European languages, which goes to show that Sanskrit acquired retroflexion from Dravidian languages which were already in India (including North India) when Sanskrit arrived from without. This is the view established long since by Emeneau and Burrow (see, for example, M.B. Emeneau, “Linguistic prehistory of India,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98, 1954: 282-92; M. B. Emeneau and T. Burrow, Dravidian borrowings from Indo-Aryan, University of California publications in linguistics no. 26. 26, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962; and T. Burrow and M.B. Emeneau, Dravidian etymological dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Proponents of the alternative view need to come up with a convincing new paradigm that will overcome the well-tested standard view by showing that it better accounts for the patterning of evidence than the standard view does. So far, they have not done so.—pp. xxvi-xxvii
Ch. 1. Introduction
…In British eyes India presented the spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized, and as such it constituted the cenral problem for Victorian anthropology, whose project it was to achieve classifications of human variety consistent with the master idea of the opposition of the dark-skinned savage and the fair-skinned civilized European.1 To this project India was an enigma, and the intensity of the enigma deepened in the course of the nineteenth century, bursting into scholarly warfare over the competing claims of language and complexion as the foundation of ethnological classification (p.3)…. By century’s end a deep and lasting consensus was reached respecting India, which I call the racial theory of Indian civilization: that India’s civilization was produced by the clash and subsequent mixture of light-skinned civilizing invaders (the Aryans) and dark-skinned barbarian aborigines (often identified as Dravidians). The racial theory of Indian civilization has proved remarkably durable and resistant to new information, and it persists to this day. It is the crabgrass of Indian history, and I should like to uproot it.—pp.3-4
1. This notion and he problematic place of India in it appears to have a very long genealogy, extending back to Islamic writers of an early period, for whom Indians were a source of wisdom and science as well as black descendants of Ham. For example, Said ibn Ahmad Andalusi, in his eleventh-century ethnology (Science in the medieval world: “Book of the categories of nations” (Tabaqat al-umam). Trans. Semaan I. Salem and Alok Kumar. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991]1068:11), says that the Indians were the first nation to have cultivated the science, and that although black, Allah ranked them above many white and brown peoples….—p.3
…the knowledge of India that is current today is the product of the colonial situation and to have elucidated the process of its production by a wide variety of types such as Orientalists, missionaries, and administrators, and by state institutions such as the census….—p.18
What needs to be kept in mind when weighing the claims of the book is that for Said—and this is a crucial move—Orientalism is not limited to the intellectual product of Orientalists. Said’s Orientalism includes as well (as we could expect from a literary critic) the Orientalism of poets, and painters, and more. Orientalism is “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient00dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having an authority over it” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books.1978:3). In the end, for Said, Orientalism is any European pronouncement about the Orient that is made with a show of authority. The Saidian expansionary redefinition of Orientalism unites the productions of Orientalists and non-Orientalists, both of the colonial past and of the postcolonial present.—p.20
…But, for Said, Orientalism is the whole, more or less, of Western authoritative pronouncements on Asian societies.
There is nothing inherently wrong with such inflationary redefinition of a familiar word, which happens all the time. But it creates the problem that new and older senses of this word trip up one another in discussions of India. Let us tag these two meanings so that we can distinguish them in discussion; call them Orientalism1 (knowledge produced by Orientalists, scholars who know Asian languages) and Orientalism2 (European representations of the Orient, whether by Orientalists or others). In India the British Orientalists were by no means a unitary group, but Orientalists constituted the core of a distinct policy group who, as I have said, had been dominant since the time of Hastings and who had devised the Orientalizing policy. This group constituted a faction promoting education in the vernacular languages; these “Orientalists” were in opposition to the “Anglicists,” Evangelicals, and others who promoted English as a medium of instruction. The Anglicists were also involved in the production of knowledge of a kind Said calls Orientalism. In this case orientalism1 was one party to a dispute within Orientalism2, and the Saidian expansion of Orientalism, applied in this context, tends to sow confusion where there once was clarity.
Something like this seems to have happened in Inden’s book, Imagining India, when the author makes the surprising claim that the writing of James Mill and G.W.F. Hegel on India constituted hegemonic texts for Indology (Ronald, Inden, Imagining India, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1990:43-48), which is tantamount to making them the authors of Orientalism for the Indian “case.”…. (p.23) Orientalism of the Saidian variety that we find in Mill, or Hegel, or, ultimately, Henry Kissinger is parasitic of the Orientalism produced by the Orientalists, but it is often hostile to it at the same time. Said himself is well aware of such conflicts within his Orientalism, but what he wants to draw attention to is the common ground that unites the opposing parties. We need to redraw the distinction in order to understand the production of the Orientalists, which has a coherence and ideology of its own. Thus the relation of the two kinds of Orientalism needs to be problematized and investigated.
The application of Said’s thesis to India also faces a problem of a more general kind. Said declines to examine the value of Orientalist scholarship, dismissing it, moreover, not as an open question, but with prejudice. He asserts that “Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a verdict discourse about the Orient” which it claims to be, and that its durability shows it to be “more formidable than a mere collection of lies” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books. 1978:6)….—pp. 23-24
…Said’s simple inversion of the idea of Orientalism as monument-of-colonialism is hardly satisfactory. It seems to betray a feeling that one cannot seriously weigh the value of orientalism’s substance without running the risk of finding some of it good and, in that measure, a justification of a regime of colonial power….—p.25
…But any view one holds or may construct about India is built and will continue to be built in part upon the work of Orientalists of the last two centuries, so that the continual reassessment of that body of work is something we cannot refuse. We cannot do without a critical and expert winnowing of that work.—p.25
Ch. 2 The Mosaic Ethnology of Asiatick Jones.
[Sir William] Jones [the founder and first president of the Asiatic Society] shows in his discourses that the Persian nation surely, and the Chinese probably, are not original stocks but branches of the Hindu or Indian nation, leaving three original stocks in Asia: Hindus or Indians, Arabs, and Tartars. He then identifies these with the three sons of Noah—the Indians with Ham, the Arabs with Shem, and the Tartars with Japhet. It becomes clear in the ninth discourse that the entire project is one of forming a rational defense of the Bible out of the materials collected by Orientalism scholarship, more specifically a defense of the Mosaic account of human history in its earliest times….—p.42
…I blush for him [Jone’s], to name the three exact equivalents he finds in Sanskrit materials to support the Hamian character of the Hindu nation and prove that Sanskrit literature is a distant echo of the events of early history recorded by Moses: The Biblical Cus or Cush answers to Kusa, a son of King Rama; Rama himself is the Biblical Raamah; and the Biblica Misraim (or Mizraim), from the root Misr, “Egypt,” corresponds to the Sanskrit misra, “mixed,” which is a common surname in eastern India. All these Biblical names occur in the line of Ham, son of Noah (Genesis 10:6-7). Jones believes that Indian civil (p.46) society, or civilization as we would say, was instituted by Rama shortly after the flood of Noah, and thus India is one of the oldest of civilizations….—pp.46-7
For sake of argument, Jones says, he has treated the narrative of Moses as he would any other (secular) text and found its truth confirmed by outside sources, especially Sanskrit ones, namely, the story of the flood, which is also found in the Padma Purana; the Tower of Babel, remembered in the story of the man-lion avatar of God (Narasimha) who bursts forth from a pillar (!); the dispersal of the nations; and so forth. Thus the truth of the Mosaic narrative is confirmed by the testimony of other nations, and its inspired nature is further proved by the predictions of the Old Testament which are fulfilled in the Gospel.—p.51
…it is not perhaps surprising that we find some aspects of Jones’s particular instantiation of Mosaic ethnology prefigured in Muslim sources. First was the determination that the Hindus were descendants of Ham. India was one of the many nations not named in Genesis because it did not fall in the text’s narrow geographical horizon, but it had long since become a commonplace of Muslim histories that the Hindus had descended from Ham….—p.53
…In Abul Fazl’s Akbar Nama (1908, I:chap. 16), likewise, the distribution of Noah’s descent is specified, and Ham has sons named Hind and Sindh; Japhet was the most just of Noah’s sons, with whom the lofty lineage of the Mughal emperor Akbar was lined. Any of Jones’s encounters with Muslim-Indian texts or scholars would have reinforced his application of the Mosaic ethnology to India and India’s place in the Hamian line….—p.53
…had Jones not gone to India the Indo-European doctrine would have been discovered by someone else but also that, in fact, it had been discovered, in a measure, before Jones. It shows, too, that it is not important to which branch of the descent of Noah Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were assigned, so long as they were assigned to the same branch. What is important is the conjuncture of persons educated in Latin and Greek encountering Sanskrit and interpreting their similarities by means of the segmentary structure of the Mosaic ethnology….—p.55
Integral to the Mosaic ethnology was a certain frame of time. The exercise of matching up distant nations to the nations named in the Bible also required that the unfolding of the whole ethnological story be contained within the short chronology that the Peoples of the Book allotted to the peopling of the earth after the flood of Noah. There were many calculations as to when exactly this was, but for British Protestants the matter had been settled by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth century. God had created the world in 4004 B.C. and the flood of Noah had taken place in 2349 B.C. That meant that the development of all ethnological variety, and the spread of the human race across the earth, had begun only for thousand years ago, and its completion had to be accounted for in a quick-tempo history.
In respect of time, India proved at once helpful and resistant to the (p.57) Mosaic ethnology. On the one hand, the flood narrative in the Puranas could be read, and was, as independent confirmation of the flood of Noah….. On the other hand, the ancient Indian doctrine of immense cycles of time repeating endlessly, on a titanic scale, dwarfed the time of the Biblical narrative….—pp.57-58
Jones’s reconciliation of the story of the past in Sanskrit literature with the Biblical narrative fixes upon the list of Vishnu’s ten avatars or “descents” into earthly form to save the good from destruction by forces of evil. The series begins with three avatars that were especially associated with the story of a worldwide flood: the fish, the tortoise, and the boar. The fish incarnation in particular seems readymade for identification with the Biblical flood, carrying Manu (the first human), his family, and the seven sages (rsis) in a ship (the Ark of Noah!) fastened to a horn on his head. Jones identifies Manu with Noah, distinguishing this Manu from an earlier one, the progenitor of the human race, whom he identifies with Adam. Manu II, then, and the seven sages can be identified with the eight humans aboard the Ark in the Biblical story (Noah, his three sons, and the four wives), from whom the entire human race has since been propagated. Jones furthermore identifies the fourth avatar of Visnu, the man-lion Narasimha, with the Biblical Nimrod, descendant of Ham. Bali, the demon who was overcome by the fifth avatar, the dwarf Vamana, is identified with the Biblical Bel. The seventh incarnation, king Rama of Ayodhya, Jones identifies with the Biblical Raamah, also in the line of Ham; with him begins “civil government” in India, or as we would say, civilization. In this manner the whole series of avatars of Visnu can be forced into the diluvian and postdiluvian chronology, and Sanskrit literature can be read as reporting the same historical events as does Genesis. But this reconciliation of Indian chronology with the Biblical chronology is only possible by simultaneously rejecting the vast span of time that make up the yugas, kalpas, and manvantaras of Indian time cycles. The four yugas are squeezed into the Ussherite chronology, rejecting the traditional figures for their duration (4,320,000 years for the entire cycle of four ages), or the traditional dating of the beginning of the Kali, namely 3102 B.C. In outline, Jones’s Mosaic reading of Indian chronology may be represented as follows (The works of Sir Willaim Jones. 13 vols. Ed. Anna Maria Jones. London: John Stockdale and John Walker. 1807,4:24,48; See Trautmann 1995):
Adam Manu I Krta yuga 4004 B.C.
Noah Manu II 2948 B.C.
The flood fish, tortoise, boar avatars 2349 B.C.
Nimroad Narasimha Treta yuga 2217 B.c.
Bel Bali 2105 B.C.
Raamah King Rama Dvapara yuga 2028 B.C.
The Buddha Kali yuga 1026 B.C.
Both the acceptance of Hindu flood mythology as history and the rejection of Indian cyclical time as mythology are part of the unitary project of the Mosaic ethnology.—pp.58-59
…The program of comparative religion that this vision entails, then, has a strong element in it of a search for ancient wisdom, a primitive monotheism, which Jones tends to identify with the teaching of the Veda, or rather, of the Vedanta.
All three of these elements, the Mosaic ethnology, the short biblical chronology, and the idea of ancient wisdom, had to come together to find a place for India that would sustain the hopes of an Oriental renaissance. For there was no question in Jone’s mind that Christianity was the only true religion and that Europe’s talents, on the whole, surpassed those of Asia, as they had since the times of the ancient Greeks. The three faculties of the human mind were everywhere the same: memory, reason, and imagination, the sources of history, science or philosophy, and poetry (The works of Sir Willaim Jones. 13 vols. Ed. Anna Maria Jones. London: John Stockdale and John Walker. 1807,3:5-6)….—p.60
Ch. 3. British Indomania
…Many of the elements of the way in which Hinduism is construed by the British in the period of [second half of 18th century] Indomania derive from Indians and Indian sources. It cannot be an accident that the superior value of ancient times and sources in British discussion of Hinduism is so strikingly consistent with the “degenerationist” character of Brahmin views of the historical process, involving among other things a decline in virtue and religion as the golden age of the Krta yuga recedes and the present age of iron (the Kali yuga), in which it is our misfortune to live, lengthens….—p.67
Thus Holwell’s admiration is such that he is led to class the Hindu scriptures with the scriptures of Moses and of Christ, the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible, as the three divine scriptures, of which only the Hindu revelation expounds the full scheme of the angelic fall and human redemption, articulated by transmigration. Transmigration accounts for the problem of original sin in the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians: All mankind stands accused for the guilt and disobedience of one man and one woman, a detail that is unintelligible without an understanding of transmigration. In fact, says Holwell, the fall of man occurred in heaven long before Adam and eve, who were fallen angels incarnate as are all humans and, indeed, the entire animal kingdom. This goes to show that the Bible is incomplete in itself and can be finally understood only in the light of the Hindu scriptures revealed by the new Orientalism. “The mission of Moses may without offense be considered as a very imperfect one, so designated by God himself; not only for that it was limited to one tribe of beings favoured of God, but also as it is totally silent upon all the primitive truths but one, viz., the unity of the Godhead” (John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting historical events, relative to the provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan, 3 Vols. London: T. Becket and P.J. De Hondt. Vol. I, 1765; vol. 2, 1767; vol. 3, 1771; 3:108). In relation to contemporary Christian belief Holwell identifies himself as a Christian deist. Consistent with the transmigration doctrine and his enthusiasm for the primitive truth as found in Hinduism, he became a strong advocate of (p.70) vegetarianism and opposed the Cartesian doctrine that animals are machines without souls.
By the end of his book Holwell has completely rewritten Christianity with the help of Hinduism or, at any rate, some rough approximation of it….—pp.70-71
Holwell and Dow [Firishtah, Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah Astarabadi, The history of Hindostan; from the earliest account of time, to the death of Akbar. 2. vols. Trans. Alexander Dow. London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt. 1768]quickly appeared in French translation, and Voltaire was “lavish in his praise” (Marshall, P.J. The British discovery of Hinduism in the eighteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970:8). These, together with Scrafton’s Reflections on the government… of Indostan (Scrafton, Luke, Reflections on the government, Etc. of Indostan: and a short sketch of the History of Bengal, from the year 1739 to 1756. Edinburgh: n.p.1761) plus a curious French text from India called the Ezour Vedam, were the main Indian materials with which Voltaire constructed the case for a pre-Mosaic deism against the claims of the Church. This last, as the admirable study by Ludo Rocher shows (Ezour Vedam, Ezourvedam, a French Veda of the eighteenth century. University of Pennsylvania Studies on South Asia, vol. I. Ed. Ludo Rocher. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Hohn Benjamins Publishing Company. 1984), had been composed by Jesuits to prepare Indians to receive the truths of Christianity, thereby giving a deist pre-Christian teaching a Hindu form: a Upanisad-like dialogue between Biach (Vyasa) and Chumantou (Sumantu). The tendency to minimize the differences separating Christianity and Hinduism operates here, too, but in another direction; instead of reading Hinduism through the lens of Christianity, a partial form of Christianity is read back to Hindus as Hindu scripture. It is ironic that it had the effect of giving Voltaire ammunition against Christianity.—p.72
Seen against the backdrop of the writings of these participants in the first wave of the new Orientalism, which gave it a reputation for testing the limits of reason in the construction of a favourable reading of Hinduism, Sir William Jones’s taking up of the Mosaic ethnology appears as nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Jones in effect showed that Sanskrit literature was not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of the Bible’s version of history after the flood. In this reading some parts of Hinduism’s testimony was magnified—the flood narrative of the Puranas above all—but one part had to be rejected: the long cycles of Indian times, so impossible to reconcile with Biblical time….—p.74
Francis Wilford, officer in the army of the East India Company, devoted his leisure to the study of the geographical sections of the Puranas, looking for evidence of Indian knowledge of Egypt and other civilization in ancient times…. (p.89) […] …Jones… adds two literal translations of supporting sources. One of these is a Skanda Purana passage in praise of the Nila River, supposedly the Nile of Egypt, which, Jones adds, all the Brahmins allow to be in Kusadvipa, that is, the Biblical Cush. The second, from the Padma Purana, is truly amazing, for in nine Sanskrit verses it reprises the story of Noah, his three sons, and the curse of Ham. The passage says that to Satyavarman (whom Jones had elsewhere identified with Noah) were born three sons, Sarma, Kharma, and Jyapati (i.e., (p.90) Shem, Ham or Cham, and Japhet) upon whim their father, the sovereign of the whole earth, devolved the kingship so that he could retire to a life of meditation….(p.91) […]….His mortification deepened when he found that he was the unwitting instrument, in his earlier article on Egypt, of an imposture perpetrated on the late Sir William, and that the verses on Sarma, Kharma, and Jyapati were nowhere to be found in the Padma Purana.—pp. 89, 90-92
…But it was [Francis Wilford, officer in the Army of the East India Company], whose researches provided the crucial material that resulted in [Charles] Vallancey’s pamphlet, The ancient history of Ireland, proved from the Sanscrit books of the Brahmins of India (Dublin: Graisberry & Campbell, 1787).
The gist of this new material is as follows. In the Puranas the British Isles appear (according to Wilford) under the name Trikutacala, “the mountain with three peaks”: “for the Pauranies consider all islands as so many mountains the lower parts of which are covered by the sea” (1797:9). The three peaks are the golden peak (Suvarnakuta), silver peak (Rajatakuta), and iron peak (Ayakuta); alternatively they are also called dvipas or islands. The Silver Island is more commonly called Svetadvipa or White Island, that is, Albion or England. The Golden Islan (Survanadvipa) or Peak (Suvarnakuta) is synonymous with Sukuta or S’kuta, that is, Scotia or Scotland; other derivatives (Suvarneya or Svarneya) are the origin of Juvernia and Jvernia (Hibernia). This Suvarneya was regarded as the abode of the ancestors, Pitrsthana or Pitrikasthana, Pitrka being Patricius, the Apostle of Ireland (St. Patrick!). This is only the beginning of Vallancey’s lucubrations on the amazing findins of Wilford, for in a passage from the Brahmanda Purana supplied by Wilford through another gentleman, Mr. Gore Ousley, then at Benares, Vallancey finds a proof that the Phoenicians colonized Ireland, a proof the details of which we will leave it to interested readers to find for themselves in the pages of this curious pamphlet….—p.95
…British Indomania was not a shapeless enthusiasm for thigs Indian, but a phenomenon with a structure, which is to say both an internal organization and boundaries. It was an enthusiasm for the Hindus or “native” Indians as distinct from, and even as opposed to, the Muslim “conquerors.” It was an enthusiasm for the ancient writings in Sanskrit, conceived as repositories of the primitive experiences and religion of the human race and, as such, confirmatory of the truth of Christian scripture. It was an enthusiasm for ancient wisdom as distinct from future wisdom; it had, so to say, a Mosonic character. And it was an enthusiasm for those Sanskrit writings as the key to the universal ethnological narrative.—p.97
Ch. 4 British Indophobia
…doctrines relating to transmigration (which promotes, [Charles] Grant alleges, a sense of fatalism about one’s condition rather than a sense of personal responsibility)….—p.105
[Charles] Grant argues to teach the Hindus English and, through simple writings in that medium, gradually and progressively to educate them in the elements of British arts, philosophy, and religion; they will “silently undermine, and at length subvert, the fabric of error” (the same). English is a key that will open to the Hindus a world of new ideas.—p.107
But is there not, in the era of the French Revolution, a serious flaw in the reasoning? Will not the people learn to desire English liberty, a share in the government of their country and commissions in the army, and finally throw off English rule and assert their independence? Will not the communication of the Gospel and of European light lead to popular government and the assertion of independence? [Charles] Grant considers these objections carefully and concludes that the influence of climate will prevail over love of liberty. Indolence, pusillanimity, and insensibility will be partially amended by moral improvement, but the tropical sun will still be oppressive. There is, then, no rational ground for apprehending that the Indians will become turbulent for English liberty. The spirit of English liberty is a growth of ages, and is not to be caught from a written description of it, especially by distant and feeble Asiatics.
We thus arrive at the grand question: How shall the British make the Indians love them? It had been the aim of Alexander [Hamilton, the Orientalist], Grant says, to establish his authority in the affection of the nations he had subdued… by abolishing all distinctions between the victors and the vanquished; thus his European and Asiatic subjects were incorporated and became one people, by (p.108) obeying the same laws and by adopting the same manners, institutions, and discipline. In short, they were assimilated. Britons should apply this principle; however they should not follow Alexander’s policy fully. It would suit neither the British nor the Indians “that the distinctions between the two races should be lost: by intermarriage (1796:82*), nor should the British impose upon India laws framed for their own country. They should rather attach their subjects to themselves by affection and interest, by winning them to their religion and sentiments, and in doing so add to the happiness of the Indians and render British authority permanent and secure. […]
* Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and on the means of improving it, written chiefly in the year 1792. Printed as Appendix I in Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company 1831-32, 3-92. Facsimile reprint, Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers. Vol. 5: Colonies: East India. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970
What Grant’s new version of the policy of love amounts to is this: The Indians should assimilate to the ways of the British, but the British should take care not to assimilate to the ways of the (p.109) Indians—and the two races should remain distinct. Alexander had his men take Asian wives as a part of the assimilation policy; Grant wanted to omit that part. East India Company servants, who often took Indian wives or concubines in the eighteenth century, were now to observe racial endogamy and promote the cultural assimilation of Indians to England without themselves succumbing to “the disease of indianization” ( Anthony Farrington, The records of the East India College, Haileybury, and other institution. India Office Records: Guides to archive Group. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. 1976:6). We might call this policy one way asexual assimilation. It became the official creed of nineteenth-century British India.—pp. 108-10
…Thomas Babington Macaulay (scion of a famous Evangelical family) in his well-know Minute on Indian education of 1835. It aimed, in Macaulay’s words, through English-medium instruction in the arts and sciences of Europe, to form an elite class that we “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay, Minute on Indian education. Reprinted in Selected writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinnery, 237-251. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972 1835:249), what [George] Smith (India and comparative philology. Calcutta review 29: 229-279. 1857:251)… called the “middle the Anglicised class” of Indians. The government of India, unable to educate the mass of Indians directly, would do so indirectly through this class; by a process of “filtration” or interpretation, European learning would be conveyed to the Indian masses by their Anglicized betters (Macaulay 1835:249). English not only is the language of India’s rulers but has become a repository of the best of European thought….—p.111
…opposing the “filtration” metaphor of the Anglicists [like Macaulay] with the metaphor of “engrafting” European learning upon the rootstock of Indian civilization, advocates of the Orientalist policy for education wished to develop the powers of the Indian vernaculars to become effective vessels of the new learning so that European knowledge should become domesticated to the Indian scene. In doing this they treated Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic as the equivalent of the Latin and Greek through whose literatures English and the other modern languages of Europe had been developed and had become repositories of the highest civilization. Thus Newtonian astronomy, for example, was to be grafted upon the astronomical knowledge of India contained in the Sanskrit texts of Jyotisa, through which European science would be seen to be a further, more perfect development of the Indian astronomical science. In a very real sense the clash of the Anglicist and Orientalist educational policies was an argument within the paradigm of modernization, not a clash of progressives and conservatives.—p.112
…Macaulyay … believed English to be to India as greek and Latin had been to England, and who regarded Sanskrit and Arabic as no better than repositories of a completely outmoded knowledge….—p.113
…Insofar as the Anglicist position tended to prevail over the Orientalist one 9without entirely overcoming it), Evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom.—p.113
Hitherto the British empire in India had no higher purpose than to yield profits to the shareholders o the East India Company. [Charles] Grant put forward a nobler purpose, the moral uplift of the Indians; [James] Mill [author of History of British India, 1817] promoted the civilizing project of liberating the Indians from their own past, to use the language of Majeed’s recent study of Mill (Javed Majeed, Ungoverned imaginings: James Mill’s The history of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). The appeal of such justifications of empire was irresistible. The price of having thus provided the Indian empire with a moral basis, however, was the systematic denigration of Indians and Indian civilization. Love of the English language and the arts and sciences of which it was the repository was made into the negation of Indian civilization. The price, in short, was Indophobia.—p.129
Indomania did not die out completely in Britain but became, so to say, recessive, finding a place under the aspect of eccentricity. Unitarianism, spiritualism, Theosophy, vegetarianism, pacifism … there remained, and remain, aspects of British culture, marginal to be sure but nevertheless indelibly British, through which Indomania was reproduced in some fashion. It is not an accident that the young Gandhi, trying to find some point of attachment in England, where he had gone to study law, found the vegetarians congenial and discovered his voice (p.129) in their meetings, and it was in Britain that he came to appreciate the Bhagavad Gita of his own country, in the mirror, as it were, of British Indomania….—pp.129-30
It is worth saying again: Indophobia did not spring up naturally from the soil of Britain, it was deliberately built. India was very different from Britain, to be sure, but Britons did not believe they were “every way different” from the Indians until Grant taught them to think so.—p.130
Ch. 5. Philology and Ethnology
Sanskrit came into this ethnology in two ways. At the global level it entered into ethnological thinking through its effect upon the formation and content of Indo-Europeanist comparative philology, serving to fix the place of Indians in the ethnological big picture as kin of Europeans and founders of civilization. At the level of the internal ethnology of India Sanskrit again played a capital role, for it was largely a question of the relation of the existing languages of India to Sanskrit. The ethnology of India in this second sense was in the charge of a specific sector of India hands—the British Sanskritists whether they were administrators or missionaries—interacting with their Indian teachers and assistants in India itself. It was mainly a british matter, or rather a British-Indian matter, in that it was based upon interactions between Britons and Indians in India under British rule.
Thus both in British India … in the metropole, ethnology, as an inquiry into the relations of nations, stocks, or races, was principally a project of classification, conceptually identical with the classification of languages by philologists….—p.133
…the analysis of the vocabularies of the modern languages of India into words of Sanskrit, foreign, and local (desya) origin. In the hands of the British Sanskritists of Madras, Bombay, and elsewhere, this analytic of the Vyakarana tradition became a tool for the exploration of the notion (p.136) of an “aboriginal” Indian population prior to the coming of the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans….—pp.136-7
…the decipherment of the Brahmi inscriptions of Asoka … edicts, inscribed on rock faces and stone pillars, had been a closed book for perhaps a millennium. The credit goes to [Jampes] Prinsep, who used the bilingual coins issued by Greek kingdoms of the Panjab in the aftermath of Alexander’s expedition as his Rosetta Stone, but the accomplishment presupposed the built-up mass of Orientalist knowledge formed by the many Britons and Indians whose work had been motivated and directed toward this goal by the Asiatic Society….—p.137
The Indian subcontinent contains three major language families. The first is the Indo-Aryan, consisting of the descendants of Sanskrit, occupying most of the north, a good bit of the western coast, and much of Sri Lanka (i.e., the Sinhalese language). Second is the Dravidian family, dominating South India, having considerable representation in Central India and Sri Lanka (Tamil), with small remnants in North India (Maler) and Pakistan (Brahui). Third is the Munda or Austroasiatic family, represented in parts of east Central India and the northeastern regions of India and Bangladesh. (In nineteenth-century writings the Munda family is usually called Kol or Kolarian.)….—p.143
Although Ellis was wrong to classify Tamil (and the Dravidian (p.154) language family generally) with the Semitic family, the logic of looking to do so is perfectly clear in relation to the Mosaic or Biblical character of the then-prevailing ethnological model of Sir William Jones. If Sanskrit and other of what came to be called the Indo-European languages were spoken by the descendants of Ham, son of Noah, as Jones and Bryant [Jacob] had it, or if they were the languages of the descendants of Japhet, as others claimed, the logical place to look for the Biblical ancestors of the Dravidians of South India, once it is believed that they are non-Sanskritic, would be in the remaining line, that of Shem. Here again we see the ghostly trace of the Mosaic ethnology….—pp.154-55
Ch. 6. Race Science versus Sanskrit
Friedrich Max Muller was the creator of the notion of the Aryan race, and he was the most ardent and consistent advocate of the kinship between Indians and Europeans….—p.172
…The phrase “Aryan brethren” is Max Muller’s contribution to the Orientalist love story of British India, although it was often taken in vain by its opponents.—p.176
The two-race theory of Indian civilization, in Max Muller’s version, was meant to promote the solidarity of the two partners of empire as Aryan brethren to each other, based on the identity Japhetic = Caucasian = Aryan. Complexion thus is a malleable property, caused by climate. Darkness of complexion, it is true, is associated with savagery in this argument. But race is not destiny; a civilizing “regeneration,” moral and physical, is possible through long, preferably peaceful, association.—p.176
India was the critical battleground for the claims of ethnology and philology exactly because of its intermediate location, both in the scale of civilization as defined by Mill and for its variety of complexions lying between the extremes of the scale of physical types defined by race science. The Indo-European concept established a kinship between Indians and Europeans that was increasingly at odds with the search for discrete races.
The terms of the argument were radically altered in the 1860s by Darwinism and the collapse of the short six-thousand-year Biblical chronology for human history, which was due to the discovery of human remains adjacent to long-extinct animals. Now it became clear that the racial differences among humans had come about over a timescale vastly longer, measurable in the tens and hundreds of thousands of years at least, than the period in which the Indo-European languages differentiated themselves from one another and from their common ancestral language. It became clear as well that the formation of the Indo-European languages was an event that lay not near the beginning of human life, but was, in light of the newly discovered antiquity of man, comparatively recent. The effect of the suddenly expanding human time-frame was to disengage the study of race in the biological sense from the study of language. Thomas Huxley’s view (On the methods and results of ethnology. In Man’s place in nature and other anthropological essays, 209-252. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. 19101865) was that biology was now in charge of ethnological questions, philology supplying only supplementary findings over only the most recent period of human history; in any case it was apparent that language and race had no necessary connection, since people speaking the same language might be of different races and vice-versa. Max Muller accepted this conclusion fully, and he repented of not having distinguished between racial and linguistic groups.—p.183
In the end, examination of Taylor’s [Isaac Taylor, The origin of the Aryans; an account of the prehistoric ethnology and civilization of Europe. London: Walter Scott, c. 1889.] version of the meanings of the Aryan idea in late Victorian England yields an unearned increment of understanding of the formation of racist ideologies in Europe generally that was not looked for. It is not my ambition to clarify the story of the Aryan idea on the Continent, but one cannot help seeing that Yaylor’s reading of the current European, and especially German, scholarship captures the Aryan idea in process of becoming a politically usable and racially exclusive conception in the late nineteenth century. That is, the Aryan idea is now not merely linked to whiteness—that had been so to a degree already in the early Max Muller—but whiteness itself is now narrowed down to some conception of a small, pure, original “white” Aryan race that spread the Indo-European languages to different races in very early times. Thus the Indians came to be excluded from the Aryan concept to which they had supplied the name. That the Indians were excluded from the newly conceptualized originary Aryan race and were now no longer concerned with it was a by-product, of more importance to Britons than to other Europeans, of an argument about the underlying racial strands in the European population. This narrowing of the bounds of whiteness within Europe itself was accomplished by the archaeologists and craniologists, masters of the new race science, developing their own authority claims in opposition to the comparative philologists and Sanskritists.
It is only by grasping this crucial development, I believe, that we can (p.186) unpack the paradox that Aryanness came to be deployed by the Nazi regime to murderous effect not only against the Jews but also against the Gypsies—whose Indian origin and Indo-European linguistic credentials had been conclusively established by philologists and Sanskritists so long previous, and that it expressed no bond of sympathy between Germans and Slavs. The racialization of the Aryan idea made the Aryan race an exclusive group very much smaller than the Indo-European speaking population as a whole.—pp.186-87
…Macaulay [to Max Muller] began to relate his own experiences in India … giving a full account of his controversy while in India with men like Professor Wilson and others, who maintained that English would never become the language of India, expressing his own strong conviction to the contrary, and relating a number of anecdotes, showing that the natives learnt English far more easily than the English could ever learn Hindustani or Sanskrit…(p.188) ( Friedrich Max Muller, Auld lang syne. 1st ser. London and Bombay: Longmans, Green. 1898:162)…. He characterizes the governing attitude thus: “We can always find interpreters if we pay them well, and if we only speak loud enough the natives never fail to understand what we mean” (ibid).—notes. 5, pp. 188-89
Ch. 7. The Racial Theory of Indian Civilization.
…The abrupt decoupling of race and language was a reaction against the Aryan idea itself, especially against the assertion that Indians were kind to Europeans, and it attacked the authority of the comparative philologists and Sanskritists….—p.190
…at the beginning of their Indian empire the British regularly referred to the Indians as a nation, and at the end of it, as Indian nationalists were laying claim to independence, they were denying that Indians constituted what could properly be called a nation….—p.192
Up to about 1860 most learned opinion in Britain, and in Europe generally (some notable skeptics apart), adhered to a short chronology for human history that was based on the Bible. By the chronology of Archbishop Ussher, which prevailed in Britain, the world and the life within it had been created in 4004 B.C. Although early in the nineteenth century geologists had begun developing a timeline for earth history and for the history of fossilized plants and animals that was no constrained within this narrow limit, the ethnological time in which the human species diversified and covered the earth remained within the short Biblical chronology until the discovery of human remains in association with long-extinct animal forms forced the issue. The Brixham Cave excavation of 1859 was the breakthrough event. More or less simultaneously, Darwin’s On the origin of species (1859) appeared and precipitated vast changes in the story of living forms.—p.193
…The effect of rejecting the vast time-frame [yuga & kalpa] proper to ancient Sanskrit literature, and of situating that literature within the short chronology of the Bible, was to make of that literature, most especially the Veda as its oldest work, one of the earliest testimonies of human life, of “man’s primitive state” and of “primitive monotheism” in the original meaning of the word primitive. It was specifically within a short Biblical timeframe that India and the Veda acquired their heightened significance for Europeans as a window upon the original condition of mankind and of ancient wisdom.
The breaking open of the short chronology for human history and the new Darwinian reading of the history of biological forms had a variety of effects in the minds of Europeans, of which the leading one (p.193) as it concerns our subject was that India’s ancient literature was no longer a testament of the primitive state and was now seen to be quite recent in human history; the period of Indo-European origin of which it was the oldest evidence was no longer at the beginning of the human story. As a long period of prehistory opened out behind the oldest written records—the Veda, the Greek and Latin classics, and the Bible—the Ancients suddenly became very young. Indians among them. At the same time it became increasingly clear that the formation of races followed a much slower tempo than the formation of language families, putting strains on an ethnology that attempted to correlate race and language. In a curious way, even as Darwinism made it clear that race was not fixed and permanent, the deepening time of race formation acted to solidify the idea of race as an entity independent of language, an entity that was far more durable and had a far deeper history.
The paradox of these developments is that in spite of the growing distrust between Sanskritists and race science, the two sides of an often noisy dispute nevertheless collaborated, without really meaning to, in the creation of an enduring synthesis, what I call the racial theory of Indian civilization. By this I mean the theory, which by century’s end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilization, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines. It was a local application of the double binary that guided all nineteenth-century European ethnologies, the double binary of the fair and the dark, the civilized and the savage….—pp.193094
This first effort to find direct evidence of the physical features of the Indian aborigines in the Sanskrit text dating from the time of the Big Bang that brought Indian civilization into existence, therefore, boiled down to a matter of noses. Max Muller himself later abandoned his own interpretation of the word sipra, so that the evidence as to noses was reduced to a single word (anaasa) in a single passage (RV 5.29.10)….—p.197
In doing so he has of course greatly overstated the Vedic evidence; [Herbert Hope] Risley’s frequent references to the aboriginal nose which he says the Aryans often spoke of comes down, as we have already mentioned, to a single passage. Both Risley and Max Muller show a tendency to exaggerated the significance of noses in the ancient Indian evidence.—p.202
….First, darkness of skin was not a salient marker of Dasyu-Dasa identity to the humn writers, for whom the most important attributes of these enemies had rather to do with language and religion; the matter of flat noses is limited to a single disputed passage. Second, the Dasyus/Dasas are depicted as wealthy and powerful opponents [and not]…marginal, barbarous hill tribes [with] dark-skinned savage….—p.208
…mlechchha, which is derived from the root mlechchh, to speak rudely….—p.212
…Indian preference for a bride of fair complexion is attested in texts as ancient as Vasistha Dharma Sutra (18.18) and as recent as the matrimonial advertisements in last Sundays’ newspaper….—p.214
…Complexion is not race in and of itself, but it may be construed as a sign of race; what is in question is whether complexion was in fact taken by the authors of the Veda to characterize large and opposed groups that we may call races. The racial interpretation of Indian civilization says that it was, and in examining its case we become aware not only that its makers overread the evidence but also that they did so out of a sense of the objective character of race, especially of white and black races, and of the permanent, transhistorical nature of certain attitudes of whites toward blacks….—p.214
…The discovery of the Indus Civilization should have put paid to the racial theory of Indian civilization. Coordinating the evidence of archaeology and textual study is never easy and what successors to the Indus Civilization may have been meant by the Vedic expressions “Dasa” and “Dasyu” isuncertain, but it is clear enough from the texts themselves that these peoples were in some ways more economically advanced. What is more, race science has completely changed its nature since the 1950s; the evidence that races shade imperceptibly into one another is no longer resisted by appeal to ideal-type races, such that the races (as technical constructs of biology, and not the social entities we have been discussing) themselves have only a fleeting and statistical shape, and the correlation between race and civilization is given up as a bad job. That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith.—p.215
…I should like to suggest that the concept of race does nothing to illuminate our understanding of the ancient sources of Indian history and, on the contrary, has only served to corrupt our reading of them. What we know of the human resources out of which Indian civilization was built includes the following: We know that Sanskrit was brought to India from without and was spoken by people calling themselves Arya. We know that in India Sanskrit speakers encountered the speakers of distinct language families, including the Dravidian and the Austro-Asiatic. We know that there is a variety of complexions and physical features in the population of the Subcontinent today, and we grant that it is a perfectly legitimate scientific activity to study such variation. But, as has been argued since the 1850s, there is no necessary connection between race and language, or between (p.215) race and civilization, so fo what value is “race” as a biological concept for history?….—pp.215-16’
For Britons and Americans it is different. “Race” and “race relations” are meaningful terms with which they talk about the socially constructed “races” in their populations. But when they go to India, Britons and Americans cannot help being struck that these expressions disappear and that their functional equivalents in Indian discourse are “communities” and “communalism.” The markers of such communities are language, religion, and caste, but not complexion. Why then project an alien discourse onto the distant Indian past? It is more than three passages of the Rg Veda, [RV. 5.29.10 anasah & Mrdhravacah; RV. 1. 130. 8 & 6.40. 1.] one of them of disputed significance, can reasonably be said to prove.—p.216
Ch. 8 Epilogue …British ideas about the place of India … were dialogically constructed by Britons and Indians, subject to British guiding purposes, but Indian purposes governed the way Indians read the Orientalist scholarship in which they collaborated, of which they were consumers, or which they produced themselves. It is time to consider what is in some ways the more important question of the meaning of Orientalism to Indians and how the interaction of British Sanskritists and Indian scholars produced both shared and opposed meanings.—p.217
…while both Indians and Britons found (p.219) in the Aryan idea a new conception of the relation of India to Europe and to the world, in nineteenth-century Bengal the idea seemed to be subject to a kind of slippage, such that Aryan meant India plus Europe in some contexts but India versus Europe in others:
Aryanism and the Hindu reaction found some powerful protagonists though their influence proved to be short-lived. The most effective among them was Sasadhar Tarkachudamani and Krishnabihari Sen. Chandranath Bose was a milder exponent of the same tendency. Its literary lions included Indranath Bandyopadhyay and Jogindranath Basu. The central message of the movement was clear and simple: Hindu superiority and the unacceptabilityof western civilization. Indian Hindus were the most superior Aryans, no, even the only true Aryans. Everything in popular Hindu practice was based on higher reasoning and could be explained in a scientific way. All the discoveries of western science and technology had been anticipated by the ancient Aryans. [Tapan Raychaudhri, Europe reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in nineteenth-century Bengal, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 34]—pp.219-220
In this book I have assumed that race, insofar as it is a matter of human belief and action, is socially constructed, not given by nature. I need to elaborate a bit.
Under this assumption it is not just the conception of particular races that is socially constructed but race itself as a category of thought. Indianists will be familiar with Louis Dumont’s argument (drawing on Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, 1944) that racial essentialism is a recent and Western phenomenon, a pathology or dark side of the Enlightenment and the egalitarian values that had been put at the center of the idea of political modernism by the French Revolution (Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchies: The caste system and its implications. Trans. Mark Sainsbury,London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 1966:app.). According to this view, when the belief in universal human equality replaces the hierarchical values of the old regime, ideas of inequality are banished to the (newly constituted) realm of the biological and reappear as racism.—p.222
…The ancient slave trade of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples drew upon fair-skinned Slavs and Celts among others, such that “Rufus” (redhead) became a stereotypical slave name for the Romans and red hair a sign of a slavish nature. It was only with the closing off of the sources of light-skinned slaves and the concentration of the international slave trade upon black Africans that the idea of a slavish nature got firmly attached to blackness in Muslim and Christian countries, a process that began in the early Middle Ages, long before the creation of the Atlantic slave trade in which the English and the Americans participated so largely. To the old question of whether slavery created color prejudice or color prejudice created slavery, Evans [William McKee Evans, From the land of Canaan to the land of Guinea: The strange odyssey of the “Sons of Ham.” American historical review 85:15-43]gives a clear and persuasive answer: The fact of enslavement is the seedbed of the notion of a slavish nature. What aspects of the human body, language, religion, and so forth such a concept will fasten upon for its signs depends upon the contingent circumstances of slave taking.
Like the Slavs, whose enslavement by other Europeans in the long past turned their name into the English word slave, the Dasas of the Rg Veda show every sign of being an ethnic group whose enslavement gave Sanskrit its word for slave. There is abundant evidence that these Dasas among whom we presume the Aryans took slaves were strongly marked as different by language and religion. There is slight evidence to think that they were of dark complexion, so that there may be some beginnings of a linkage between darkness and a slavish nature in Vedic times. But nothing like the African slave trade of the Muslim Middle East and Christian Europe develops in India to thicken the linkage of slavery with dark complexion and project it across the centuries.—p.225
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