Indology list ,Hinduja

[Paul B. Courtright]

A couple of comments regarding the Boden chair and the politics of 
religious/Orientalist discourse in 1832 when Wilson took up the chair.  
Wilson's candidacy for the appointment was contested by some within the 
Church of England on the grounds that he was not religious enough and had 
perhaps not lived up sufficiently to the acceptable levels of personal 
decorum (he had three illigitimate children, one by an Indian mother and 
the other two by an Irish woman active in the Calcutta theater!).  The 
records in the Bodleian show that Wilson was hired over his competition, 
the Rev. Mills, who was then the principal of Bishops College Calcutta.  
Mills made his case for the chair ont he grounds he wanted to train 
English students to learn Sanskrit so that they could translate the 
Christian scriptures into Sanskrit in order that the Brahmanical elites 
would embrace the gospel in their own language.  Wilson, in what may have 
been the last stand of the Orientalists, argued that it was more 
important to teach students to read Sanskrit and translate its content 
into English.  Mills was backed by the more evangelical voices in the 
EIC, Wilson by the older guard whose interests were mre scholarly, and 
whose social standing was more aristocratic. 
Finally, Wilson won out because he was a better scholar.  His opponent 
had only one publication (if I recall correctly) One wonders how the history 
of British India might have gone had Oxford decided differently.  As it 
turned out Wilson had very few students, lived in London, directed the 
EIC Library.  His chair passed to MacDonnell (a Scot) rather than Max 
Mueller (A German expatriate), who had no particular ties to the Church 
of England as far as I know. 

In the present momement of "Post-Orientalism" it is important to look at 
what the historical "facts on the ground" were.  By today's standards all 
of them look alike in that they thought Indian culture was inferior to 
Western culture.  What separated Wilson and Max Mueller from the James 
Mills of his generation was that they did believe that Hinduism's 
creative genius had been obscured and "buried" in the early texts.  Like 
the archaeological projects in Egypt and Babylon, Wilson and others saw 
themselves as digging up and reclaiming a "lost" past.  What, of course, 
they did not do, was pay attention to what was going on in front of them 
in their own day.  The religious practices of Hinduism after the turn of 
the 19th C. were increasingly reclassified as barbaric, superstitious, 
and childlike.  The debates over sati need to be read in the light of 
this cultural shift.  Put on the defensive, the Hindu "community"--i.e., 
a coalition of tradition Brahmanic scholars and their noveau-riche 
patrons in Shobabazaar split between a reinvented Hinduism that excised 
the "medieval" accretions of image worship, pilgrimages, and sacrifice of 
animals (and humans, in the case of sati, "ghat murders", and suicides at 
Prayag and under the wheels of the temple car in Puri--a shrine that the 
Company was complicit in managing and from which it collected money.  
This reform position was articulated by Ram Mohun Roy.  It was an 
inventive and creative move, exemplifying, as some have argued, a 
"Renaissance" in Hinduism.  The other strategy was followed by the 
so-called "orthodox" under the leadership of Radhakanta Deb.  Both Deb 
and Roy were contemporaries, lived near each other in North Calcutta, 
presided over informal gatherings of influential people with serious 
money.  Deb threw the most lavish Durga Puja's which Roy either refused 
to attend or wasn't invited to (I can't get a clear answer to this 
question).  Wilson was friends with Deb, supported him as a fellow member 
on the board of the Sanskrit College in Benares and at other junctures.  
Wilson wrote harsh criciticsm of Carey and the Serampore missionaries, 
and did not appear to have much regard for Roy's reconstruction of the 
"essence" of Hinduism.  

Some random thoughts on a very important period of "paradigm shift" in 
India and Britain with respect to cross cultural (mis)understanding and 
hegemony and resistence.  

Paul Courtright
Emory University