Indology list ,Hinduja

[Burt M Thorp]

How did Monier-Williams fit into the Wilson-Mueller-Macdonnell lineage?   
I had assumed he was the one who beat out Mueller for the Boden chair.

Burt M. Thorp
University of North Dakota
Internet:  bthorp at plains.nodak.edu

On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, Paul B. Courtright wrote:

> 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   
> 
>