Macaulay

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I am glad Dominic has presented this alternative bit of Macaulayian
bombast.  Macaulay himself is more complicated than his repellent and 
much-cited Minute would suggest.

But it is in any case so reductionist and essentializing to present 
Macaulay as the representative voice of Anglophone attitudes to India (or 
Hegel for the German case) that I think the general point is not well 
supported by this argument.

However, of course I'm all with Magnone for cultural diversity and the 
rich perspectivism inherent in different languages communities.

Best
Dominik (with a -k :-)

-- 
Dr Dominik Wujastyk




On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Dominic Goodall wrote:

> A quibble:
>
> I think I can see what you mean about "Anglosaxon matter-of-factness", but I 
> wonder whether it is really best illustrated by Macaulay's monstrous purple 
> prose.  Macaulay gets so carried away by the power of his own rhetoric, it 
> seems to me, that he no longer knows himself when he is being entirely 
> sincere.  Here's another passage, tending in the opposite direction, which 
> may be very seductive as a piece of magniloquent oratory, but which again 
> seems to me (particularly when laid beside the infamous "Minute...") somewhat 
> hollow.
>
> ``The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as numerous as 
> the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were at the same time quite 
> as highly civilised as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities 
> larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and 
> costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer than the 
> richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys whose splendour far surpassed 
> that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of 
> artillery which would have astonished the Great Captain. It might have been 
> expected, that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history 
> would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from 
> their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one 
> of the greatest empires in the world.''
>
> [From Macaulay's review of : The Life of Robert Lord Clive; collected from 
> the Family Papers, communicated by the Earl of Powis. By MAJOR-GENERAL SIR 
> JOHN MALCOLM, K.C.B. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1836.]
>
> What Macaulay rather illustrates, I think, is brilliant parliamentary bombast 
> disguised as "matter-of-factness".
>
> Dominic Goodall
> Pondicherry Centre,
> Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient ("French School of Asian Studies"),
> Pondicherry
>> 
>> Now, like all other objects, India is different — was opened up different — 
>> in the different worlds. While I don’t want to belabour this point (who 
>> does not admire the pioneering work of the English fathers of indology?) I 
>> certainly would not like to give up — just as an example — a world 
>> envisioning India as a “Land der Sehnsucht... [ein] Wunderreich... eine 
>> verzauberte Welt... [ein] gesuchtes Land,  ein wesentliches Moment der 
>> ganzen Geschichte” (Hegel), in favour of another, where we are made to ask 
>> ourselves whether “we shall countenance, at public expense”, preserving the 
>> culture of a land with an “Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at 
>> an English boarding school, History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, 
>> and reigns thirty thousand years long, and Geography, made up of seas of 
>> treacle and seas of butter” (English politician, historian and /poet/ 
>> Macaulay, only some fifteen-twenty years later). Of course, it would be 
>> unfair to the extreme to put a Macaulay up against Hegel (and a politician 
>> up against a philosopher); still, apart from the two personalities in 
>> themselves, I suspect there is as much typically Anglosaxon 
>> matter-of-factness speaking in Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian 
>> Education” as there is  typically German longing for the ineffable 
>> transfactual in Hegel’s winged eulogy of India. (By the way, Macaulay would 
>> have seconded the motion that indologists should give up writing in their 
>> respective mother tongues in favour of English, a language which in his 
>> opinion “stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west”, 
>> embodying a literature “of far greater value than all the literature which 
>> three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world 
>> together”).
>> 
>> --
>> Paolo Magnone
>> Lingua e letteratura sanscrita
>> Università Cattolica di Milano
>> 
>> Jambudvipa  - Indology and Sanskrit Studies (www.jambudvipa.net)