Partners in Knowing

Tirthankar Roy

oreigners to make honest profits from f hybrid k nowledge.

Architects of Orientalism

he contours of orientalism are too well known to be restated. In a broader meaning, the term refers to European scholarship of India in the 18th and 19th centuries, and, in turn, to a complex process of cultural engagement quite unparalleled in world history in depth and scope. The term was given a narrower political meaning by Edward Said. Said used orientalism to mean an enterprise of knowledge formation, which aimed to project the oriental civilisation to be the opposite of the European one, thus underlining the superiority of the E uropeans and supplying a justification for conquest and colonisation. Said, who was inspired by Michel Foucaults gloomy analysis of modern techniques of rule, i llustrated the thesis with reference to the Arab world. India, with a long colonial past, should be an appropriate test of the thesis. Indeed, some cultural historians who take orientalism seriously believe that modes of characterising Indian civilisation that we treat as commonplace t oday had roots in European understanding of Indian society: the notion for example, that Indian society had always displayed fixed patterns of caste hierarchy. Nevertheless, the application of the narrower meaning of orientalism has posed difficulties. One difficulty arises from the diversity of scholars whom we may call orientalists. William Jones who studied language and James Mill who studied history were driven by different aims. They would have disagreed on many things had they been contemporaries. Another difficulty arises from the process by which knowledge was constructed in the 19th century. European knowledge of India was hardly one-sided. It took shape through transactions bet ween Indian intellectuals and European intellectuals. No matter what preconceptions the European scholars carried into India, what they wrote and published were always coloured by the perceptions

book review
Orientalism, Empire and National Culture India, 1770-1880 by Michael S Dodson (New Delhi: Foundation Books), 2010; pp xvi+268, Rs 395. The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India edited by Thomas R Trautmann (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2009; pp x+334, Rs 875.

of the Indians about themselves, and i nfluenced by that segment of the Indian intelligentsia rooted in indigenous systems of learning. In trying to understand Indian agency, cultural historians have r ecently moved away from E uropean w ritings and assumptions to studying the context of collaboration and e xchange. There are other difficulties with orientalism that cultural historians influenced by the idea handle less well. The Saidian project proceeds by avoiding two knowledge formations that could upset its theoretical assumptions. European writings on Indian society began before colonialism began. The early writings were produced not by administrators but by merchants. Common threads of ideas can be found between the precolonial and the colonial discourses, and yet, the precolonial material did not serve power. There was a sense of civilisational difference in many such writings, but one cannot find a uniform ranking of India and Europe in them. The Saidian project goes through either by ignoring the precolonial material, which is bad history, or assuming their equivalence with the colonial writings, which is bad theory. The second know ledge formation that plays no role in the Saidian enterprise is an economically useful practical knowledge, the kind used by merchants, artisans and peasants, and where knowledge transactions should be driven by the profit motive rather than by racial presumptions. Almost all of orientalism scholarship is confined to the elite literati. The Saidian framework allows no role for either indigenes or

The two books under review move away from the narrower political definition of orientalism, and try to recover a ground in which the term could be useful, and yet be safe from the charge of a Eurocentric bias. Michael Dodson does this by means of the phrase constructive orientalism. The collection of essays edited by Thomas Trautmann returns to the broader meaning of orientalism as European scholarship of India, while also regionalising that meaning. Both books explicitly engage in analysing the Indo-European collaboration that was involved in the creation of a formal description of Indian culture. D odsons examples are the pandits of Benares in their role as co-authors of books and articles, and Trautmanns authors study what they call the Madras school of Orientalism. Both books are firmly cultural histories, that is, they stay focused on language, with occasional forays into history, astronomy and law, and carry what we might call an elitist bias. They nevertheless take the history of Indo-European knowledge formations to interesting new directions, shedding light on some of the indigenous learning institutions and practices that had earlier been obscure, or at least, a bsent from mainstream historiography. Two Britons in the employ of the East India Company, Colin Mackenzie (17531821) and Francis Whyte Ellis (1777-1819), represent what the Trautmann book calls the Madras school. Engineer, surveyor, cartographer, and officer of the army that fought the last Anglo-Mysore wars, M ackenzies significance for present-day historians rests on three things. First, he created a collection of inscriptions, manuscripts, and other source materials, which had remained undervalued in his lifetime, was poorly catalogued a long time afterwards, and has been rediscovered and r evaluated by cultural historians more r ecently. Second, he was a pioneering scholar of Jainism. And third, he nurtured a team of researchers, translators, and draughtsmen consisting of Indian and half-caste individuals, some of whom

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left their own mark upon the projects initiated by Mackenzie. Ellis was an administrator who, while the collector of Madras, was instrumental in establishing the college of Fort St George. The college a dvanced research on Ellis principal theoretical proposition, that the Dravidian language family was distinct from the Sanskrit-derived Indo-European language family identified by William Jones. Four themes Mackenzies assistants, language teaching and research in the college, the shaping of a new literary culture, and Ellis theoretical interventions dominate the essays in the book, giving it a level of cohesion rare for a conference collection. Chapters contributed by Jennifer Howes, Rama Sundari Mantena, and Lisa Mitchell describe the nature of the colla borative enterprise between Mackenzie and the Kavali brothers, the legacies that it produced, and analyse the social origins of the collaborators. Sylvia Vatuk, A R Venkatachalapathy and Sascha Ebeling, in their respective contributions, describe the teachers, pedagogy, and the research and codification enterprise carried out at the college. The transformation of the south Indian languages and the birth of a print culture important spillover effects of the Mackenzie-Ellis dissemination pro jects are subjects of chapters written by Philip Wagoner and Bhavani Raman. One of the larger arguments that emerges from the book concerns the implications of Ellis proposition for jurisprudence. The Madras school remained relatively obscure during the 19th century, partly owing to a growing mental distance with respect to its dominant partner, Calcutta. Calcutta orientalists, for example, H T Colebrooke, proceeded to study Indian culture by drawing an identification among Sanskrit language, Hindu religion and the Dramasastra as embodiment of legal codes. The Madras school, by showing the distinctness of the Dravidian languages, upset the equation between language and religion on the one hand, and between law and the smrtis on the other. This tension is explored by Donald Davis, Jr Leslie Orrs study of research on Jainism and Thomas Trautmanns essay on one of the few books Ellis could publish in his lifetime, one on Mirasi rights. They touch on some of the issues that engaged the

M adras orientalists that have received less attention than they deserve. Trautmann argues that the Mirasi tract was m otivated by an implicit aim to show the antiquity of private property right in land in south I ndia, in an attempt to question the a dministrative orthodoxy that eventually led to the ryotwari settlement. Nicholas Dirks and partly Trautmann in the editorial introduction talk about the Mackenzie collection in a reminiscing mood. By contrast with the Trautmann volume, Dodsons offers a more coherent and ambitious argument, but a narrower set of characters. The project is a similar one, studying the contexts of intellectual collaboration, and discerning the authorship of orientalist knowledge. If in Trautmann, the Saidian framework is all but absent, in Dodson, its basic premises are retained, but a relatively larger role in the construction of Indias Sanskritic past and literary culture is attributed to Indian scholars. Although the book devotes space to Jones and Colebrooke, stalwarts of the Calcutta school, its distinctive empirical contribution lies in a study of the scholastic tradition in Benares and the works of two pandit intellectuals, who were members of the team that served the Scottish Sanskritist and the principal of the Government College of Benares, James Robert Ballantyne (1813-64). The detailed and insightful study of Ballantyne allows the author to show how deeply his mission, to express European thoughts and books u sing a Sanskritic vocabulary, owed to the help he received from offbeat Indian intellectuals. In turn, the association displaced the pandits themselves from their own milieu and established conventions. The outcome of that process was that the pandits felt free enough and powerful enough to leave an imprint on interpretations of Hindu past, constructed in books and articles written in English and consumed by the English-speaking readers. The theme of the book, then, is a cultural empowerment of the pandits as a consequence of the peculiar brand of I ndian studies that took shape in Benares. The theme runs contrary to many of the common assumptions historians hold about the traditional scholars in a time of colonial modernisation, usually telling a story of decline and marginalisation.

D odson not only qualifies the story, but goes further, and suggests in an afterword that the empowerment had a political d imension as well. It fed into the image of Hindu history that formed an important part of early nationalism. The empowerment of the pandits via orientalism, thus, restored the high civilisational status of Hindu literary culture.

From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism

Although Dodson, mindful of the imperial context, seems to disapprove of cosmopolitanism as a description of what was going on, the intellectual collaboration that these books discuss is best captured by that word, especially when one sets these exchanges against the closed and i nsular communities that dominated literary culture in India. The two books represent a new trend in the writing of cultural history during early colonialism. One distinctive feature of the trend is that it is less Eurocentric than the Saidian version of orientalism, suggesting instead that indigenous knowledge contributed to and even shaped the orientalist enterprise. The bearers of indigenous knowledge appear in the two books as a collection of individuals chosen by accident, like the Kavali brothers or the two Benares pandits, and not necessarily as institutions, systems, communities, forms of organisation, or modes of learning. This is a limitation. Still, the hypothesis makes a significant difference. A second distinctive feature of the trend is the shift of focus away from Calcutta to the regional centres of learning. Future research will tell us if we should see in these places a more eclectic and less hierarchical order of Indo-European partnership than was possible in Bengal. The regional shift in cultural history is now several years old, the two books represent its maturation.
Tirthankar Roy (t.roy@lse.ac.uk) is at the London School of Economics.

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november 20, 2010 vol xlv no 47 EPW Economic & Political Weekly