Aryans and British India.

• Author: Kopf, David
• Position: Review

By THOMAS TRAUTMANN. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1997. Pp. 274. $35.

At a time of academic orthodoxies such as deconstructionism, social constructivism, and "hegemonicmaniaism," it is refreshing to come across a book of history which simply seeks to tell it as it was, backing up assertions with concrete evidence. The subject of Professor Trautmann's historical work is British intellectual curiosity and scholarly output on India during the nineteenth-century era of the British Raj. "Orientalist" was a term applied to Britishers in India in the early nineteenth century who took a serious interest in Asian cultures, learned Asian languages, produced scholarly work on Asia, and otherwise treated Asians and their civilizations with respect and dignity. They also conducted the cultural policy of the British in India from the time of Warren Hastings and the founding of the Asiatic Society in 1784, to their defeat at the hands of the Anglicists - Bentinck, Macaulay, et al. - in 1835. It is not that "Orientalism" disappeared after that but it became transformed as the British grew more and more powerful in world affairs and as Asians, regardless of their classical achievements, became the "white man's burden."

Trautmann dedicates his book to the eminent twentiethcentury Orientalist, A. L. Basham, author of the popular textbook on classical South Asia, The Wonder That Was India. Trautmann has also revitalized an historiographical tradition on British Orientalism in India that has become politically incorrect nowadays. Such works as Garland Cannon's Oriental Jones (1964), David Kopf's British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance (1969), and O. P. Kejariwal's The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of lndia's Past (1988) were all painstaking attempts to understand the Orientalists as historic figures rather than the politicized caricatures they have degenerated into in the current literature.

It is precisely because of prevailing ignorance about Orientalism as a historic phenomenon that Trautmann's work assumes the importance it does. The revelation from a respectable source that Orientalism was not simply a conspiracy to undermine Asian civilizational integrity, but was subtle and complex, with positive aspects, gives Trautmann the aura of an intellectual hero trying to redress the damage done by Edward Said and his disciples. To the reader unaware of Orientalist historiography, Trautmann's is an original work...