ORIENTALISM

THREE

THE ORIENTALIST ANGLICIST CONTROVERSY

One of the most striking cases of orientalist involvement in the world of politics was that which occurred in India in the rst quarter of the nineteenth century, when an elite group of orientalists, enlisted in the service of the East India Company, played a decisive part in shaping the educational and cultural policy of the Company. Initially, following their victory at Plassey in 1757, the British had concentrated their attention on trade, conquest and extortion, but following the Companys decision to stand forth as Diwan (take over direct responsibility for management of the revenue, in effect the government) in Bengal, the Orientalists as an elite group of Company ofcials controlling educational and cultural policy became known adopted a more responsible approach to the problems of government they now faced, based on the conservative principle that where possible local institutions, laws and culture should be preserved and the use of local languages encouraged. But in the end, despite its evident success in winning popular and elite support, mainly in Bengal, the policy adopted by the Orientalists did not prevail. In the 1830s, under the inuence of the so-called Anglicists a loose alliance of evangelical, utilitarian and liberal groups, made up mainly of the Clapham Sect (Wilberforce, Grant,
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Macaulay, Parry, Shore, Zachary, Thornton and Venn), the Baptist Mission Society and the Foreign Bible Society the Company was persuaded to abandon the conservative educational and cultural policy previously pursued, and opt instead for one based on the principle that progress and modernization in India would be best attained by a radical expansion in the use of English, both in the administration and in the educational institutions concerned. The progenitor of the Orientalist approach to the problems of government faced by the East India Company in India was, according to David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), Warren Hastings, who was appointed governor-general in 1772. Believing that British power in India could only be preserved in the long run with the support of the Indian people, Hastings took a series of steps to obtain their support. In 1773, he drafted a proposal for the establishment of a professorship of Persian at Oxford (never implemented); in 1784, in conjunction with William Jones and others, he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, later to become famous throughout Europe; and in 1790 he made provision for the employment of tutors to teach company ofcials Persian (the language of the Mogul court). At the same time competence in Indian languages was made a prerequisite for promotion, and Hindu pandits were encouraged to settle in Calcutta to teach Company ofcials Sanskrit and translate ancient texts. As a result of these and other measures, Hastings quickly succeeded in creating an elite group of Company ofcials, uent in local languages and sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim religion and culture. Other governors-general continued to implement the educational and cultural policy laid down by Hastings. In 1800,
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Marquess Wellesley, appointed governor-general in 1797, created the College of Fort William, a university of the East, designed to train the servants of the Company and implement the principles of educational policy laid down by Hastings. At the College Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and six Indian vernacular languages were taught, together with Hindu, Muslim and Indian law, world geography, mathematics, and the principal sciences. In 1803, in order to promote high standards in the learning of oriental languages, Wellesley, together with the College Council, introduced a system of public examination and disputation, held in the recently erected Government House in Calcutta. For many years the ceremony at which the disputations were conducted was seen as the principal social event of the year. Meanwhile, at the College of Fort William printing presses were set up, to publish textbooks and copies of the Indian classics, and a library was opened, later to become a major depository of rare manuscripts. Working together with the Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Serampore Mission, earlier established by Baptist missionaries in Serampore, then a Danish settlement, in the following years the College, which employed H.T. Colebrooke and William Carey, two of the most outstanding orientalists of the period, published a series of foundational works, including Bengali and Sanskrit grammars, translations of Hindu and Muslim classics and studies of Indian history, culture and law. In 1811 Lord Minto, who succeeded to the governorgeneralship in 1807, introduced a programme to promote Hindu culture and, about the same time, a series of measures designed to improve the Calcutta school system. In 1816, Lord Moira (later Marquess Hastings), Mintos successor, supported the foundation of Hindu College, a
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college set up by a group of wealthy Hindus, based mainly in Calcutta, designed to educate the sons of respectable Hindus in the English and Hindu languages and the literatures and sciences of Europe and Asia; and in 1817 18 he supported the foundation of the Calcutta School Book Society and the Calcutta School Society. Meanwhile, as president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he supported H.H. Wilson, its secretary, later professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, in the introduction of a series of measures designed to improve the working of the Society. But signs of a probable change of direction in Company policy were already present. In 1805, Castlereagh, the British foreign minister, agreed to a plan, put forward by the Company court, to establish a college in England, to which the European section of the curriculum taught at the College of Fort William might be transferred; and in 1807, with the creation of Haileybury College in Hertfordshire, this plan was implemented. Then, in 180713, following a massacre of British subjects at Vellore, a town in south-eastern India, an intense debate took place in England about the future course of Company policy a debate which turned on the crucial question of whether British missionaries should be allowed to operate freely in India. In the great debate regarding the work of the missionaries, which took place in England in this period, mainly in Parliament, the Court of Directors and the press, the Anglicists, supported by leading members of the Clapham Sect, the Baptist Mission and the Foreign Bible Society, argued that British power in India would in the future be effectively sustained only by a mass conversion of the Hindu people. Hinduism was, in the view of its Christian critics, incapable of reform. English education and Christian
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conversion alone would make the Hindu people prosperous and industrious; and, incidentally, open the Indian market to British manufacturers. The supporters of the Orientalist policy, pursued by Hastings, Wellesley and Minto, on the other hand, argued that the evangelical policies advocated by the Clapham Sect and their supporters would inevitably lead to the destruction of British power in India. As Thomas Twining, an enemy of Grants, put it: If ever the fatal day shall arrive when religious innovation shall set her foot in that country, indignation will spread from one end of Hindoostan to the other; and the arms of fty millions of people will drive us from that portion of the globe with as much ease as the sand of the desert is scattered by the wind (Kopf, 1969, pp. 1367). One of the strongest defences of the Orientalist position put forward in the OrientalistAnglicist debate was that mounted by Colonel Hindoo Stewart, an ofcer in the East India Company army, in a pamphlet entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Ofcer (1808). In this pamphlet Stewart argued that any attempt to convert the Hindus to Christianity was bound to fail, as the Hindu religion was in many respects superior to the Christian. The numerous Hindu gods represented merely types of virtue, while the theory of transmigration of souls was preferable to the Christian notion of heaven and hell. As for Hindu mythology, much ridiculed by the evangelicals, that too was in many respects superior: Whenever I look around me, in the vast region of Hindoo Mythology, I discover piety in the garb of allegory; and I see Morality, at every turn, blended with every tale; and, as far as I can rely on my own judgement, it appears the most complete and ample System of Moral Allegory that the world has ever produced (Kopf, 1969, p. 140).
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The nal stage of the debate between the Orientalists and the Anglicists regarding the work of the missionaries took place in Parliament in 1813, when the East India Companys charter came up for renewal. The outcome was victory for the Anglicists, who proved more successful in arousing public opinion in favour of their point of view. In May 1813, shortly after the passing of the Charter Renewal Act, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, himself a member of the Board of Control of the East India Company, informed Wilberforce that the British government was willing to see the establishment in Calcutta of a bishopric, and the grant of licences to missionaries wishing to evangelize in the area. The nal defeat of the Orientalists in India was accomplished by the Anglicists in the period of the governor-generalship of William Bentinck (182735). In 1834 Charles Trevelyan, an ardent Westernizer, wrote a tract aimed at justifying the abolition of the College of Fort William. According to Trevelyan, the policy pursued by the British of educating Europeans in the languages and cultures of the East was mistaken. Henceforth the British should seek to educate the Asiatics in the sciences of the West. Attempts made to revive Hinduism by means of a college-directed programme of literary and cultural revival were bound to fail. All they resulted in was a revival of antiquated errors. In February 1835, Thomas Macaulay, recently appointed President of the General Committee of Public Instruction in India, composed a powerful minute recommending that the government withhold further grants of public money to institutions conferring instruction in native languages; and in March Bentinck, an enthusiastic utilitarian and disciple of James Mill, whose immensely inuential indictment of Hindu civilization, The History of
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British India, had been published in 1817, issued an ofcial resolution, incorporating the main principle of Macaulays minute. This resolution stated:
His Lordship in Council is of opinion that the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science amongst the natives of India and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education would be best employed on English education alone. (Trevelyan, 1932, pp. 3703)

The effects of Bentincks resolution were, from the Orientalist point of view, disastrous. In a few short years the College of Fort William was effectively dismantled, and its precious collection of books and manuscripts dispersed, while the Asiatic Society of Bengal and other associated institutions were allowed to fall into decay. In October 1853, when Governor-General Dalhousie investigated the College of Fort William, he found no College, no buildings, no rooms, no professors, no lectures, but only a few Moonshis [language teachers] whom the Government pays but who have no employment (Kopf, 1969, p. 235). Three months later, on 24 January 1854, the by then nonexistent College of Fort William was ofcially dissolved. It is generally agreed that the orientalist policies pursued by the British in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contributed directly to a major extension of Western knowledge of the Orient, a renaissance of Bengali culture and an oriental enlightenment that was closely related to the romantic movement in Europe. The Anglicist approach later adopted led directly to an increasing polarization of Indian society, between colonizer and colonized, an acute crisis of Hindu, and to a lesser extent Muslim, identity, and the eventual rise of an Indian

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national movement independence.

that

was

determined

to

secure

That British orientalism in India was intimately bound up with the imperial project is not in doubt. It should not be forgotten that the object of Orientalist policy, as much as that of the Anglicist, was the preservation of British power in India. However, the accusation that the British orientalists concerned were orientalist, in the critical sense in which the word was later used by the critics of orientalism, in the period following the end of the Second World War, cannot for the most part be sustained. True, the Orientalists, like their opponents, the Anglicists, were inclined to exaggerate the passivity of the Hindu people, particularly those living in Bengal; and they displayed an exaggerated respect for classical text, imagining the existence of a golden age, from which Hindu civilization must have declined into its present state of barbarism and ignorance (Kopf, 1969, p. 103). But as David Kopf makes clear, in Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), as children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, rationalist, classicist and cosmopolitan, they were inclined to believe that man, though culturally different, was basically the same everywhere. Difference, where it existed, should be tolerated, not condemned. Moreover, unlike later Englishmen of the age of imperialism, they did not ensconce themselves in clubs or build a Chinese wall of racial privilege, to keep the inferior races at a distance (Kopf, 1969, p. 5). Rather, many Orientalists formed enduring relations with Indians, in particular members of the Bengali intelligentsia. Thus Warren Hastings, a man deeply skilled in Persian and Arabic literature, invited Hindu pandits to come to Calcutta to teach Sanskrit. Charles Wilkins, who lived in

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India for more than a decade and wrote a history of Indian land grants, set up, with the help of a number of very able Bengalis, the rst vernacular printing press in India, and translated the Bhagavat Gita, a foundational Hindu text. Nathaniel Halhed, who lived in India for more than two decades, published a Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) and a Grammar of the Bengal Language (1788). William Jones, the harmonious Jones, a linguist of extraordinary ability, who lived in India for more than a decade and died there in 1794, translated Shakntala, a noted Indian drama (1790), helped found the Asiatic Society of Bengal and rst identied Sanskrit as a source of the IndoEuropean language group. Henry Thomas Colebrooke, who lived in India for some thirty-eight years or so, and studied Hindu languages and culture at Benares, published a foundational work on the Vedas (1805) and Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus (1837), again a foundational work. Finally, William Carey, the Baptist missionary, who lived in India for the greater part of his life, became a professor of Bengali at the College of Fort William and published a Grammar of the Bengalee Language (1801). According to his own account, Carey lived in India for so long that he became, in effect, an acculturated Hindu, as did Colonel Hindoo Stewart and many others in that period. Were such men, one wonders, aficted by the narrow racialism, nationalism and parochialism attributed to them by the critics of orientalism? It would seem improbable.

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