Imagining India.

• Author: Kopf, David

In the foreword to a recent book on the contribution of Orientalism to the discovery of ancient India, the late A. L. Basham paid the following tribute to British Orientalists:

India is greatly indebted to this small band of gifted amateurs who commenced the long and as yet incomplete process of revealing her great heritage. That they happened to be Britishers is perhaps merely an accident of history, but they are nonetheless worthy of praise and admiration of posterity of any and every race, for their great contributions to the enrichment of the human spirit.(1)

The Orientalists Basham refers to owe their origin to Warren Hastings, whom the British East India Company chose as their first governor-general in 1772. It was because of his own love of India, "its richness and variety, and above all the antiquity and splendor of its civilization,"(2) that he aimed to develop a British civil service elite in India who would undergo an acculturation process rather much like his own. Hastings saw a direct correlation between a linguistically competent and intellectually acculturated civil service and an efficient one. As Percival Spear pointed out, he sought "to understand Indian culture as a basis of sound Indian administration."(3)

Hastings immediately organized a coterie of company officials whom he personally inspired with a love for Asian languages and literature. He was especially interested in the younger men recently arrived in India. Among the earliest intimates of Hastings were Charles Wilkins, who came to Bengal in 1770, and Nathaniel Halhed and Jonathan Duncan, both of whom began their tour of duty in 1772. William Jones, who came to India as a famous scholar and served as a judge, did not arrive until a decade later, in 1784. In this way, Hastings gave birth to British Orientalism:

Increasingly, Britishers in South Asia acquired a curiosity about the whole range and substance of what has been called Indian civilization. By 1784, when Hastings founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, his vision of an accultured service elite had been partially realized ...(4)

This brief introduction to British Orientalism is necessary because Ronald Inden's Imagining India, though purportedly a book on British Orientalism and India, contains nothing on the historical origins of the Orientalist movement in India, its growth, impact and the historical writings on its place in modern Indian history. Instead of scholarship, Inden chose to join the trendy school of politicized, Orientalist-bashing rhetoric. It should surprise no one that a chief source for Inden's intellectual mischief is Edward Said, who convinced many naive people in the late 1970s that Western conceptions of the East--even when reflected in impressive works of scholarship--were part of a huge conspiracy to deprive Asians of their cultural origins and innocence.(5) As a conformist, Inden has also turned to Antonio Gramsci for support.(6) In this context, Orientalists, for Inden, are best described as "hegemonic agents" who are "deployers of imperial knowledges".

For those who know the history of nineteenth-century Indo-British encounter, Inden's Orientalist is pure fiction, a product of an imagination shaped by social theory in defiance of historical accuracy. Inden's attempt to create a no-nonsense, deromanticized Orientalist type must be approached with a sense of humor. The only kind of relationship between a European and an Indian which Inden...