Sir William Jones (1748-1794): The "Good" Orientalist?, Part I

This next series of articles is my first attempt at historiography, or debates about the roles and significances of a particular event, person, or idea, etc. on history since I started writing for the Suite a year ago. Recently, I have done some research into the role of the British Orientalists, a group of scholars in the late 18th and the early 19th century who went to India and began to study India's culture, history, languages, and society. This group was then followed by what has come to be known as the Anglicists, scholars such as James Mill [not John Stuart!], the noted historian Thomas Babington Macauley, and others who believed that India was a fundamentally backward place, and that it was the Indians who should learn English and English customs, rather than the way around...

Traditionally, Orientalism has been seen as a good thing, but over the last twenty years, mainly due to Edward Said's Orientalism (NY: Vintage, 1979), it has become seen by many as fundamentally racist, and as being a chief fundament for British colonial control of India for nearly two centuries. I only focus my articles here on one individual, the noted philogist and linguist Sir William Jones, who studied and translated ancient Sanskrit texts, and who in 1786 determined its link to classical Greek and Latin, thus establishing the modern notion of the "Indo-European" family of languages. In a broader sense, the debate about Jones and his fellow Orientalists reflects a wider debate over the merits or lack thereof of colonialism itself. As we all live in a world in which major colonial empires existed as late as the 1970s [Portugal only relinquished control of Mozambique and Angola in 1974] and where approximately three-quarters of the nations in the world are less than 50 years old, this issue is of obvious importance. Thus, through these articles, I intend to bring a debate within academia to main street, and show how a historical debate about the British Orientalists still continues to have real meaning for many people.

Hope everyone enjoys!

Joe Sramek

In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, thus sparking debate among scholars of Indian history that has continued unabated ever since. Once of the more complex and contentious debates has been in the historiography of British Orientalism, and of Sir William Jones in particular. As a result of Said's work and subsequent ones, the once common historiographical view of British Orientalists being scholars who translated ancient texts, reconstructed India's ancient past and caused a "renaissance" among Indian intellectuals [1] has been seriously challenged by another view: that they were primarily agents of the colonizing project. The Orientalists, so this argument follows, proceeded to first establish and then perpetuate British hegemony in India. Whatever differences there were between the Orientalists and the later Anglicists are largely irrelevant as both groups' purpose was to maintain British power indefinitely. [2] Even seemingly benign studies, such as Sir William Jones' discovery in 1786 that Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin were part of the same language family, are condemned for being comparative and inevitably deleterious toward the Indians. [3]

As can be expected, such a stark contrast from the earlier historiography has produced a recent backlash. While most pre-Said scholars and their disciples have conceded that a major motivation for Orientalism was to facilitate imperial rule, they have continued to insist on a stark differentiation being made between Orientalists such as Sir William Jones and H.T. Colebrooke and later ones such as James Mill and Thomas Babington Macauley. As this latter group was instrumental in halting the study of Indian languages, culture, and history, they are the only ones who warrant Said's attacks. One pro-Orientalism scholar even goes so far to maintain that had later scholars and administrators "... been like Jones and his most productive followers, the unsavory quality of European political and cultural exploitation might never have developed." [4]

Thus, as one can see, the dichotomy between the two positions is stark. This series of essays does not intend to explore the expansive historiography on Orientalism as ideology or praxis and its merits or lack thereof, but rather the historiography on the effect that Jones had on India both when he served there and after. Examining four works - Garland Cannon's Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), (NY and London: New York University Press, 1994), S.N. Mukherjee's Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Attitutes To India, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968), Javed Maheed's Ungoverned Imaginings, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Edward Said's Orientalism, (NY: Vintage, 1979) - which represent different strands of thought on Jones and his legacy, I attempt to find out whether there can be some sort of bridging of these seemingly irreconcilable positions. Can there be such a thing as a "good" Orientalist, or is this an absurd, and perhaps even offensive, oxymoron?

And thus, this gives you a good introduction into the scope of the debate, which will be fleshed out further in Parts II and III.

Footnotes:

[1] David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), passim.

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism, (NY: Vintage, 1979), p. 215.

[3] Ibid., p. 78. See also Javed Maheed, Ungoverned Imaginings, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 15.

[4] Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine, eds., Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), (NY and London: New York University Press, 1994), p. 78.