Raf Gelders (Ghent University, Belgium)
Genealogies of Colonial Discourse: Hinduism and the History of Orientalism
India’s ability to excite the British, popular imagination is evident in the large corpus of scholarship built through the late nineteenth century. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) indicted this corpus as unscientific and unreliable, and encouraged his colleagues to reconsider the politics embedded within the processes of European knowledge production on India. Bernard Cohn (1996), Nicholas Dirks (2001) and others have since emphasized that the conception of Hinduism as a unified religious entity was part of the British colonial project, intended to impose conceptual and administrative order upon a world alien to them. The continuing emphasis on the power of colonial knowledge has effectively overshadowed any sustained, or serious, engagement with the origin of these constructs and the history therefore, of the colonial discourse on India.
Focusing on European conceptions of Hinduism, my paper will develop two intersecting themes: (a) the close ties between British and Continental European ideas about India; and, more pertinently for our purposes, (b) the long history of Orientalism. The history of Orientalist discourse discloses a striking revelation: the dominant ideas about Hinduism in the intellectual and cultural life of nineteenth-century Britain emerged in the libraries of early-modern Europe. Drawing the latter to the foreground, this paper will engage with the larger reality of the Reformation that shaped contemporary representations of India. In so doing, it will emphasize that the prehistory of British Indology is preserved in the early-modern cosmographies produced in England, France, Germany and the Dutch Republic, and in the polemical treatises that permeate the archive of the Reformation.
Thus reconstructing the biography of Orientalism, my paper will explore an alternative framework (that of Christian theology and Reformation Europe) and therefore, point to an alternative history: the cultural history of Britain. The implication of the research thus breaches the immediate area of focus, that is, the construction of Hinduism. It reiterates, as already argued elsewhere (Gelders 2009), that we need to dig deeper into the cultural history of Britain—and of Europe more generally—in order to appreciate the ideas about India which found wide currency in late nineteenth-century Britain.
Focusing on European conceptions of Hinduism, my paper will develop two intersecting themes: (a) the close ties between British and Continental European ideas about India; and, more pertinently for our purposes, (b) the long history of Orientalism. The history of Orientalist discourse discloses a striking revelation: the dominant ideas about Hinduism in the intellectual and cultural life of nineteenth-century Britain emerged in the libraries of early-modern Europe. Drawing the latter to the foreground, this paper will engage with the larger reality of the Reformation that shaped contemporary representations of India. In so doing, it will emphasize that the prehistory of British Indology is preserved in the early-modern cosmographies produced in England, France, Germany and the Dutch Republic, and in the polemical treatises that permeate the archive of the Reformation.
Thus reconstructing the biography of Orientalism, my paper will explore an alternative framework (that of Christian theology and Reformation Europe) and therefore, point to an alternative history: the cultural history of Britain. The implication of the research thus breaches the immediate area of focus, that is, the construction of Hinduism. It reiterates, as already argued elsewhere (Gelders 2009), that we need to dig deeper into the cultural history of Britain—and of Europe more generally—in order to appreciate the ideas about India which found wide currency in late nineteenth-century Britain.
