Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's 'The History of British India' and Orientalism.

• Author: Kopf, David

Majeed's book of essays on James Mill, William Jones, and Orientalism is a welcome relief from much of the present historiography on Anglo-Indian civilizational interaction under British colonialism. In the first place, Majeed has gone back to the early nineteenth century for his sources and facts rather than to Edward Said, whose highly politicized concept of Orientalism seems to have become an alternative to serious scholarly research, perspective, and thought. Secondly, by immersing himself in the period within which James Mill and his contemporaries lived, Majeed avoids the current trendy dabbling in the past euphemistically called "historical discourse."

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Majeed should emphasize his goal in the book of attempting to reevaluate Mill's The History of British India within the context of contemporary British political and philosophical thought. From this perspective, Mill's History, with its controversial portrait of Hindu civilization, is a textual weapon in the arsenal of Utilitarianism and philosophical radicalism against the "conservative" ideologies of the day, which included Orientalism. In fact, Majeed's title, Ungoverned Imaginings, applies to Mill's critique of the so-called "Oriental" mind as lacking discipline and "philosophic intelligence" and of the "susceptible imagination" of British Orientalists such as William Jones for being too easily impressed "by the idea of Eastern wonders". It is wrong, Majeed believes, to condemn Mill for lack of tolerance or sensitivity to other cultures. To be sure he was dogmatic in his assertions, but he was consistently and universally opposed to all "systems of despotism and priestcraft," to "ridiculous" manners and customs, and to "idle superstitions". Here was the justification for attacking Hinduism and the Orientalists who defended the monstrous system.

Another convincing explanation as to why Mill reacted so negatively to Hinduism, Orientalism, and to artistic imagination of all sorts lies in Majeed's thoughtful biographical and psychological analysis of the great philosopher in the final essay. Interestingly enough, there is a strong possibility that the vicious indictment of Hinduism and Orientalism that appears in Mill's second book of the History was not so much the creation of a philosophical radical and atheist as it was the work of a fundamentalist Christian apologist who had once said of the Bible that it comprised "an extraordinary...