India and Orientalist Europe:  A Review of Two Books

Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800  by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 394 + xvii

The Ruler’s Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective by Arvind Sharma, Noida, India: HarperCollins, 2017, pp. 427 + viii

These two books continue the discussion on the Orientalist legacy in India. They cover two different time frames (with some overlap) as Subrahmanyam’s study is mostly prior to British rule, while Sharma is focused on the British. Yet the conclusions reached complement each other. Both studies are careful to avoid facile generalizations, although both must be selective in their analysis as they cover centuries of history.

Subrahmanyam follows a largely biographical approach in his analysis of how Europe viewed India. His brief preface outlines how he came to write the book and speaks to the Orientalist project and how to interpret it. He rejects each of three “trajectories” (xv) for representing how Europe saw India from 1500 to 1800 (his chosen timeline); “one of these is simply cumulative, as a slow move from lesser to greater knowledge, mediated by ever-growing and deeper contacts” (xv). In the second approach it is considered that “an initial set of prejudices, often based on deep religious hostility, gave way to a far more ‘objective’ understanding, largely on account of the secularization of European knowledge-forms, especially as a result of the Enlightenment” (xv). Both of these are rejected as “quite simplistic” (xvi). The third viewpoint also rejects the first two and “portrays the existence of a persistent and stable (at least homeostatic) set of misunderstandings, and mistranslations, as characterizing the relationship between Europe and India” (xv). This is rejected as “for all intents and purposes ahistorical in nature” (xvi). Subrahmanyam summarizes that “different forms of knowledge and modes of knowledge-production existed, and sometimes they and their adherents struggled bitterly with one another. This is the reason a close attention to context is always essential…” (xvi).

Subrahmanyam’s introduction portrays two fascinating French figures in Mughal India before overviewing the entire period of his study. His first chapter is “On the Indo-Portuguese Moment,” where he goes as deep as his sources will allow in considering early Portuguese visitors to India like Fernᾶo Lopes (official chronicler for Portugal in the 1430s), his successor Gomes Eanes de Zurara and many other obscure historical figures up to the first official chronicler of the empire, Joᾶo de Barros, who died in 1570, and others into the seventeenth century. Subrahmanyam summarizes the Portuguese approach to India as initially philological/historical and later ethnographic (83). Most interesting here is the development of “caste” as a standard trope for understanding Indian society. Subrahmanyam dates this to the second half of the sixteenth century (94) and shows how it initially differed from the use of the term today.

Chapter two is on “The Question of ‘Indian Religion’.” Subrahmanyam points out that even up until twenty-five years ago speaking of “religion” was “unproblematic” (104). But the assumptions involved in exporting that concept from Europe are now clearly seen as massive impediments to true understanding. Throughout the book Subrahmanyam is interacting with art as well as writings, and this chapter interacts with a multi-volume set of prints produced by Bernard Picart between 1723 and 1737, along with other works. Early writings on Indian “religion” are shown to lack any consistent framework that would fit the rubric of “religion,” yet by the end of the seventeenth century a consensus was being reached that there was indeed a religion uniting India, although at that point it had no name (139).

Chapter three is fully biographical, a case study of James Fraser of Scotland. Fraser was back and forth between Britain and India and was an inveterate collector of manuscripts and art work (one of many such noted in this book). Fraser’s major work was a biography of Nadir Shah, published in 1742. This is analyzed at some depth for an understanding of how Fraser viewed Mughal India and Indians.

Chapter four is on “The Transition to Colonial Knowledge,” which begins with an overview of scholarly opinions about the colonial knowledge project. Subrahmanyan sees three stages; in the 1960s and 70s it was accepted that Europeans were at first ignorant, then gradually built up a reliable database about life and thought in India. In the 1970s and 80s that view came under attack; Subrahmanyam refers to art historian Partha Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters and Edward Said’s classic Orientalism and concludes that “these critiques demonstrated that the notion that Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were innocent gatherers of information in the world at large could simply not be sustained” (213). More recently there is a push back in defense of the colonial knowledge project, and Subrahmanyam’s critique of that is a crucial part of his book (213ff.)

This chapter then provides four more biographical studies; Portuguese Bishop Dom Antonio Jose de Noronha (1720-1776), Frenchman Charles de Bussy (1720-1785), Swiss Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Portier (1741-1795), and Scotsman Alexander Walker (1764-1831). Subrahmanyam concludes that by the middle of the eighteenth century a clear distinction between Europeans in general and “Asiatics” existed (284). With the acquisition of power the dynamics of information gathering and the development of “new forms of knowledge” are clearly seen (284).

An interesting concluding chapter looks at Indian views of Europe, which was first a perspective on the European visitors without any sense of Europe as such, then gradually through Indians in Europe a sense of that continent. The arguments of the book are well summarized in the closing paragraphs (the third quotation below is the closing sentences of the book):

The central argument of this book has been to suggest … that even in the absence of an apparatus of political and military domination, European relations with and understandings of India in the centuries from 1500 to 1800 were the product of layered and intermittent conversations and distinct asymmetries in perception….The sixteenth century already witnessed a two-pronged approach, between an hesitant employment of a form of philology, and the use of ethnography to produce bold and slapdash generalizations, which somehow proved enduring. These concerned both the invention by the end of the sixteenth century of an idea of Mughal “despotism,” and a preoccupation with giving a radically schematic and systemic character to the society and “religion” of the “Gentiles” of India. (323)

Yet, as the eighteenth century wore on, and the conquest of the subcontinent by the Company proceeded apace, one sees more and more of a different combination of attitudes: an ill-disguised contempt, a growing impatience and an urge to infantilize the Other, and a tendency to generalize from Olympian heights in new institutions such as Calcutta’s Asiatic Society. (324)

What is undeniable … is that even five centuries after Vasco da Gama, the consequences of how India was represented in and by Europe in the centuries between 1500 and 1800 still weigh heavily on us. We must live with these consequences, but perhaps we can do so somewhat better in a fuller knowledge of their nuances and complexities. (325)

Arvind Sharma’s The Ruler’s Gaze comes to the same conclusions but in a much more direct fashion. This is directly an analysis, focused on India, of Said’s Orientalism thesis that power equations distorted Orientalist knowledge creation. The first chapter gives a broad survey of Indian history, suggesting that “if the contours of major developments in Indology were to match these political changes in a recognizable way, then such coincidence of events would lend credence to the Saidian thesis” (21). William Jones and Thomas Babington Macaulay become the test case for how British attitudes changed with the accumulation of power.

The second chapter discusses “The Anomalous Nature of British Rule over India.” The fundamental anomaly was a country taking over the rule of another country, and so it “required constant justification” (94, italics original). The vilifying of India was a necessary part of the colonial agenda, and becomes the focus of chapter three on “The British Depiction of Indian Society.” Suttee (sati), thugee, slavery, legal inequality, dowry, female infanticide, the caste system, and illiteracy are discussed, and it is shown that British rule contributed to these problems rather than solving them.

The fourth chapter looks at the distinction between high and low (Sudra) castes, and suggests that this is unduly exaggerated in Colonial discourse and scholarship. A major discussion of the Aryan Invasion theory is part of the broader discussion, and Sharma outlines B. R. Ambedkar’s objections to the theory, with his own conclusion that (following Ambedkar) the racial element of the theory is unacceptable: “The main point of the comprehensive exercise carried out in this chapter was to establish how desperate Orientalism was, and still is, to inject race as an element in the caste system and how little basis there was for it according to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a leader of the former untouchables, who had most to gain politically from such a racialization of the caste system” (192).

Chapter five compares ancient Greek perspectives on India with those of modern Europe. Chapter six compares Muslim accounts of India with British. Both chapters add up to discrediting the British. This reviewer did not feel the author was always fair in his choice of topics and presentation of material. That was most likely recognized, since the brief concluding chapter presents nuances and subtleties that need to be in play. There is room to allow for some altruism of some actors in the Colonial period, and there were indeed helpful discoveries and reforms. There is also the problem of knowledge and power within India itself, not just between India and the Colonial power. This includes an interesting segment on inter-dining, with Sharma opposing the long-standing tradition of refusing to eat with people of other castes and communities.

The last section of the conclusion suggests four ways to extend Said’s thesis. One is to recognize that what Orientalists said about other cultures reveals a great deal about their own culture (321). Second, Orientalism may well have been discovering or observing a reality which was “in some measure at least” created by their own involvement (327). Third, when a dominant culture imposes its solutions for problems in a subject culture, it may very well be a case where the “solution” creates the very problem that is supposedly to be cured (328). Finally, “on account of the global domination of the West over the rest, multicultural or multireligious societies may end up with mutually superimposed Orientalisms” (329), as is the case in India where Orientalist perspectives on Islam fed Hindu ideologies and vice versa:

The claim that the Hindus of India are a separate nation was one Orientalist construction; the claim that the Muslims of India are a separate nation was another Orientalist construction; and the claim of the British that without the British acting as an umpire, they cannot live together in peace, was a third Orientalist construction. The acceptance of Partition marks the convergence of the acceptance of the three different Orientalist constructions by three different parties. (330)

These books are both recommended reading. Subrahmanyam’s volume is heavier and maintains nuance throughout. Sharma’s is more directly polemical against the Orientalist heritage. Both paint helpful pictures of the confusion and scandal of Europe’s encounter with India.