Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-zzh7m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T15:28:49.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Orientalist Constructions of India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ronald Inden
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Extract

Now it is the interest of Spirit that external conditions should become internal ones; that the natural and the spiritual world should be recognized in the subjective aspect belonging to intelligence; by which process the unity of subjectivity and (positive) Being generally—or the Idealism of Existence—is established. This Idealism, then, is found in India, but only as an Idealism of imagination, without distinct conceptions;—one which does indeed free existence from Beginning and Matter (liberates it from temporal limitations and gross materiality), but changes everything into the merely Imaginative; for although the latter appears interwoven with definite conceptions and Thought presents itself as an occasional concomitant, this happens only through accidental combination. Since, however, it is the abstract and absolute Thought itself that enters into these dreams as their material, we may say that Absolute Being is presented here as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition (Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 139).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tr. by Gerth, H. H. and Martindale, D. (Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1958).Google Scholar This book has been crucial in setting the agenda for the sociological study of India (and especially of ‘modernization’ or ‘Westernization’) in the last twenty-five years. The last chapter, ‘The General Character of Asiatic Religion,’ p. 340Google Scholar, makes it quite clear that Asia excludes the Middle East.

2 His global treatment is divided into three volumes. One is entitled ‘Primitive Mythology’. The other two deal with ‘civilization’. One is entitled ‘Occidental Mythology’; the volume on the Orient does include a treatment of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, but takes great pains to show that, very early on, this part of Asia was culturally continuous with the West. It then turns to the true cultural Others of Asia, India and China. First published in 1962 (New York, Viking), it has been reprinted many times, most notably by Penguin.

3 Hegel, G. W F., The Philosophy of History, tr. Sibree, J. (New York: Dover, 1956).Google Scholar

4 Cast into outer darkness by Russell, Bertrand (18721970)Google Scholar, the logical positivists, and Karl Popper (b. 1902), Hegel, a rationalist and idealist, has had a very bad reputation among the mostly empiricist and realist scholars of Britain and the U.S. in this century. It is, therefore, not implausible to suggest that most Indologists in those countries have probably not read his seminal Philosophy of History. Basham, A. L., The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove), p. 487Google Scholar, mentions Hegel only in connection with the part his reading of Indian texts may have had in the development of his ‘monism’. He does not, however, refer to him in his discussion of Indology (pp. 4–8). For a brief review of Hegel's views and his treatment earlier in this century, see Cottingham, John, Rationalism (London: Granada, 1984), pp. 91108.Google Scholar More extensive is the ‘reading’ of Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), especially pp. 389427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Hegel and Indian philosophy, consult Halbfass, Wilhelm, Indien und Europa: Perspektiven ihrer geistigen Begegnung (Basel: Schwabe, 1981), pp. 104–21.Google Scholar

5 American Council of Learned Societies; in Britain one would also want to mention the University Grants Committee.

6 Social Sciences Research Council; its British counterpart is the recently renamed Economic and Social Science Research Council.

7 Basham, , The Wonder That Was India, p. 9.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., pp. 122–8.

9 Nehru's, Jawaharlal comments on this topic in his, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Books, 1951), pp. 59, 89–90, 428–9, are most interesting.Google Scholar

10 New York: Pantheon, 1978.

11 Informative from a Marxian perspective is the review by Irwin, Robert, ‘Writing about Islam and the Arabs,’ Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (Winter, 1981/1982), 103–12.Google Scholar

12 Renou, Louis, Religions of Ancient India (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).Google Scholar For a brief biography and a bibliography of his works, see Mélanges d'Indianisme à la Mémoire de Louis Renou (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1968), pp. ix–xxix, 15.Google Scholar

13 I refer here to the ‘crisis’ precipitated by the historical enquiries of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, among others, into how scientists actually worked. See Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 117, 6574.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Freud, Sigmund, On Dreams, tr. Strachey, James (New York: Norton, 1952), pp. 93–6.Google Scholar

15 Freud, Sigmund, On Dreams, pp. 4059Google Scholar; his The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. Strachey, J. (New York: Avon, 1965), pp. 312–44.Google Scholar

16 Freud, , On Dreams, pp. 7382Google Scholar; his Interpretation, pp. 526–46.Google Scholar

17 Consult, regarding the utilitarians, Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 4780.Google Scholar On Mill's evolutionism, see Burrow, J. W., Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 27–9, 42–9.Google Scholar

18 On Jones and the establishment of the Society, see the excellent study of Mukherjee, S. N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 8090.Google Scholar

19 Mouffe, Chantal, ‘Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,’ in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. Mouffe, C. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 168204, esp. pp. 193–4.Google Scholar

20 (London: J. Madden; Piper, Stephenson and Spence, 1858).

21 Basham, A. L., ‘James Mill, Mountstuart Elphinstone and the History of India,’ in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), ed., Philips, C. H., pp. 217–29Google Scholar; and his, ‘Modern Historians of Ancient India,’ in the same volume, pp. 266–74.Google Scholar

22 Burrow, , Evolution and Society, p. 2.Google Scholar

23 Renou, , Religions, pp. 1920, 47–8.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., pp. 52–3, 109.

25 Lorenzen, D., ‘Imperialism and the Historiography of Ancient India,’ in India—History and Thought: Essays in Honour of A. L. Basham, ed. Mukherjee, S. N. (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1982), p. 86.Google Scholar

26 Le Goff, Jacques, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon,’ in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, tr. Goldhammer, A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 197.Google Scholar

27 Rau, Heimo, ‘The Image of India in European Antiquity and the Middle Ages,’ India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, ed. Deppert, Joachim (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 205–6.Google Scholar

28 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 82.Google Scholar

29 I have consulted the English translation of Thomas Nugent, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: Haffner, 1949).Google Scholar

30 For a collection of Marx's writings on the subject, see Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Avineri, Shlomo (New York: Doubleday, 1968), but beware the misleading introduction.Google Scholar

31 The most accessible introduction to both ideas is to be found, with references, in Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979; 1st published in 1974), pp. 462549.Google Scholar On India itself, see the rather disappointing essays in Contributions to Indian Sociology, IX (Dec., 1966), by Thorner, Daniel, ‘Marx on India and the Asiatic Mode of Production,’ pp. 3366Google Scholar, and Dumont, Louis, ‘The “Village Community” From Munro to Maine,’ pp. 6789.Google Scholar

32 Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 178220.Google Scholar

33 Well worthwhile (and a complement to Said) is the critique, following Hindess and Hirst, of the Asiatic mode in relation to Islam and developmental sociology of Turner, Bryan S., Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).Google Scholar

34 Asad, Talal, ‘Two European Images of Non-European Rule,’ in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by him (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), pp. 103–18Google Scholar, shows how colonialist images of the Islamic states (which they did not rule) emphasized repression, while those of the ‘tribal’ African states (over which they did rule) emphasized consent as the essence of those states.

35 Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other—How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31.Google Scholar

36 Consult, for example, the multi-authored, ‘China, History of,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., IV, 297358.Google Scholar

37 Mill, , History of India, II, 165.Google Scholar

38 Nehru, , The Discovery of India, p. 71.Google Scholar

39 The latest and most sophisticated is that of Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980).Google Scholar

40 On the important idea of substantialized agency (to be distinguished from the notion of ‘code and substance’ in my own earlier work), see Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 34, 42–5, 47–8, 81–5.Google Scholar On essentialism in Southeast Asian studies, see Hobart, Mark, ‘The Art of Measuring Mirages, or Is There Kinship in Bali?’ in Cognation and Social Organization in Southeast Asia, ed. by Huesken, F. and Kemp, J. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984), in press.Google Scholar

41 Spear, T. G. Percival, India, Pakistan and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 57, 5960.Google Scholar

42 Bhaskar, Roy, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 25.Google Scholar

43 Mukherjee, , Sir William Jones, pp. 42–4.Google Scholar

44 Marshall, Peter, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 43–4.Google Scholar

45 On the earlier French scholars, whom I have neglected here, see Schwab, Raymond (1884–1956), The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, tr. Patterson-Black, Gene and Reinking, Victor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; 1st pub., 1950).Google Scholar More recent is Bies, Jean, Littérature française et pensée hindoue dès origines à 1950 (Strasbourg: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1973).Google Scholar For a (philosophically) critical review of the various American, mostly idealist, appropriations of Indian philosophy, see Riepe, Dale, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought (Springfield, II.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970).Google Scholar

46 Consult, for Herder and the early German romantics, Glasenapp, Helmuth von, Das Indienbild deutscher Denker (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1960), pp. 1432Google Scholar; and Halbfass, Wilhelm, Indien und Europa, pp. 86103 and references.Google Scholar

47 Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 202207.Google Scholar The title of Creuzer's work is, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker.

48 Mitter, Much Maligned, pp. 208–20.Google Scholar

49 Fabian, , Time and the Other, pp. 123–31.Google Scholar

50 For Creuzer's treatment of myth and religion, see Kramer, Fritz, Verkehrte Wellen, zur imaginaeren Ethnographie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977), pp. 1538.Google Scholar On his relationship to the other romantic theorists of the symbol, see Todorov, Tzvetan, Theories of the Symbol, tr. Porter, C. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), especially pp. 216–18.Google Scholar

51 Halbfass, , Indien und Europa, pp. 151–3.Google Scholar

52 Consult Lipsey's, RogerCoomaraswamy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), III (‘His Life and Work’). A good example of his views is ‘The Philosophy of Mediaeval and Oriental Art,’ (reprinted in Coomaraswamy, I, 43–70), where he opposes ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ instead of ‘Oriental’ to ‘Christian’.Google Scholar

53 Barbara Stoler Miller's biographical essay in the book edited by her, Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1983), pp. 329.Google Scholar

54 Brome, Vincent, Jung: Man and Myth (London: Granada, 1980; first published by Macmillan in 1978), pp. 120 and 290Google Scholar on Creuzer, and for other useful details.

55 Crome, , Jung, p. 236.Google Scholar For an excellent brief discussion of Campbell, see Riepe, , The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought, pp. 227–8.Google Scholar Riepe criticizes him for only talking about the naturalist, realist, and materialist traditions of India.

56 For some of the connections of Jung and of Goetz, Zimmer, and Eliade with Coomaraswamy, see Lipsey, , Coomaraswamy, III, 203–4, 210–13.Google Scholar A brief account of Goetz's career by Kulke, is to be found in India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, edited by Deppert, Joachim (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 1323.Google Scholar For the work of Kulke and his associates, see The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, edited by Eschmann, A., Kulke, H., and Tripathi, G. C. (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978).Google Scholar

57 Hacking, , Representing and Intervening, p. 5.Google Scholar

58 Bhaskar, , The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 25–6.Google Scholar

59 Hocart, Arthur Maurice, Caste: A Comparative Study (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 1719.Google ScholarHutton, J. H. in his hegemonic work, Caste in India (pp. 176–7)Google Scholar, reduces Hocart's views to one theory of ‘Origin’ to be mentioned among the many and then passed over. Louis Dumont and David Pocock wrongly, in my view, reject Hocart's focus on the king in their detailed review, A. M. Hocart on Caste,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology, Number 2 (1958), 4563.Google Scholar The thoughtful discussion of Hocart's views by Rodney Needham in his new edition of Hocart's Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) effectively ‘rehabilitates’ his work.Google Scholar

60 Said, , Orientalism, pp. 284328.Google Scholar

61 Lambert, Richard D., Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), Table 9.3.Google Scholar

62 For a general survey of Russian Indology, see Bongard-Levin, G. and Vigasin, A., The Image of India: The Study of Ancient Indian Civilization in the USSR (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984).Google Scholar

63 Crucial for this shift with respect to India is The United States and India and Pakistan, authored by the doyen of American Indologists, Brown, W. Norman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) and successively updated.Google Scholar

64 Pletsch, Carl, ‘The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIII. 4 (10 1981), 565–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 Robinson, Cedric, ‘Indiana Jones, The Third World and American Foreign policy: a review article,’ Race and Class, XXVI. 2 (Autumn 1984), 87.Google Scholar

66 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1967).Google Scholar

67 Dumont, Louis, Homo hierarchicus: Le système des castes et ses implications, first published in 1966. See the revised English translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 3349, 6572, 152–8, and especially, 287313.Google Scholar

68 Marriott, McKim and Inden, Ronald, ‘Caste Systems,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., III, 989.Google Scholar

69 Inden, Ronald, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in Middle Period Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 7382.Google Scholar

70 Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 13, 132–58.Google Scholar

71 A critique of evolutionism is Nisbet's, Robert A.Social Change and History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar On the anti-democratic implications of evolutionism, see Hirst, Paul Q., Social Evolution and Sociological Categories (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976).Google Scholar For a critique of functionalism see Giddens, Anthony, Studies in Social and Political Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 96129.Google Scholar A concise treatment of behaviorism is available in Ions, Edmund, Against Behaviouralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).Google Scholar

72 See the discussion of Hacking, Representing and Intervening, Part B, especially pp. 220–32.Google Scholar

73 Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Guha, Ranajit (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially Guha's Introduction, pp. 18.Google Scholar

74 Foucault, Michel, Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78108.Google Scholar