Help preserve cultural diversity (Was: Language barriers --- financial barriers)

[victor van Bijlert]

I do not wish to defend British policies from the days of the Company Raj,
but I am only pointing to the fact that Macaulay edited the Indian Penal
Code which is still in use in South Asia (with the necessary amendments).
Moreover, Bengali Renaissance reformers like Raja Rammohun Roy, prince
Dwarkanath Tagore and Vidyasagar were far more incisevely critical of the
Brahmanical culture of their day than Macaulay ever could be. The fiercest
critics of Indian culture were not the British but the Indian reformers
themselves. Macaulay's Minute on education was fully endorsed by the then
Hindu reformers. The Indian reformers themselves were clamoring for English
education. I think we should not forget this fact. 
Presentday criticism of Macaulay may ultimately be used to tacitly endorse
upper-caste Hindu reactionary world-views.

Victor van Bijlert


-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Indology [mailto:INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk] Namens Gruenendahl, Reinhold
Verzonden: zondag 22 maart 2009 18:16
Aan: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
Onderwerp: AW: Help preserve cultural diversity (Was: Language barriers ---
financial barriers)

I have great sympathy for Paolo Magnone's point. However, there is one
aspect
that I see differently. 
 
Paolo Magnone wrote:
 
... 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. 
 
...
 
To leave that heroic age of the beginnings (the age of the "Renaissance
orientale", contributed to by many but eminently embodied by German
Romanticism ...
 
_______________________
 
With regard to Hegel, "German longing", Romanticism etc. it may be helpful
to
take a look at the chapter on Hegel in Wilhelm Halbfaß's "Indien und
Europa".
Here are a few quotes from the English translation (1988):
 
p. 86:
[Hegel] sought advice and information from his colleague at the University
of
Berlin, the pioneer Sanskritist and linguist F. Bopp [and read H. T.
Colebrooke's first essay "On the Philosophy of the Hindus"], ....
 
[...but, it bears reminding:]
p. 85:
(...) Hegel was not an indologist.
[Paolo Magnone correctly addresses Hegel as a philospher.]
 
p. 95:

Hegel's interest in India is inseparable from his anti-Romantic attitude and
his criticism of the Romantic glorification of India. However, F. Schlegel
himself subsequently revised and modified his evaluation of the Indian
tradition, and he distanced himself from the unqualified enthusiasm of his
earlier statements.

 
p. 85:
Hegel's interest in India is inseparable from that of the Romantics: He was
one of the heirs, but also the most rigorous critic of the Romantic
conception of India. What distinguishes his approach above all from that of
the Romantics is his commitment to the present, and his sense of an
irreversible direction of history. He does not glorify origins and early
stages. The spirit of world history progresses to greater richness and
complexity. What has been in the beginning cannot be richer and more
perfect.
It may be true that India, as part of the Orient, is a land of "sunrise," of
early origins and "childhood." But this does not justify nostalgia and
contempt of the European present. We cannot and need not return to the
Orient: It is a matter of the past.
 
______
 
I may add that, so far, I have not come across a "German indologist" of any
description who had a "typically German longing for the ineffable
transfactual", or who wanted to reverse the course of history according to a
presumed "Oriental" model. This is but a small illustration of the
fundamental flaw of Raymond Schwab "Oriental Renaissance". As I have pointed
out elsewhere: When Edward Said stumbled across Schwab's book, roughly two
decades after its publication (1950), he decided that it had been
"unreasonably ignored". This is one point on which I take the liberty to
disagree with Said.
 
Reinhold Grünendahl