Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay by Balachandra Rajan (review)

356 letters in canada 1999 pleasure to handle. (ROGER SARTY) Balachandra Rajan. Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay Duke University Press. xii, 268. US $49.95, US $17.95 Balachandra Rajan's fascinating new book is passionately concerned with the interrelation of two national communities, England and India. It tells the story of that interrelation as it is articulated in the diverse responses to India of such English and other European writers as Camoes, Milton, Dryden , James Mill and Hegel, Elizabeth Hamilton and Sydney Owenson, Southey, Shelley, and Macaulay. Rajan's highly conflicted loyalties are immediately apparent in his own characterization of the book as `a historical study that has its center of gravity in the romantic era, carried out from a postcolonial vantage point.' That is, while Rajan the postcolonial Asian reader casts a cold eye on the English discourse of empire, he still finds the most compelling examples of its potential disruption in the empathy of the English Romantic poets. To be precise, he finds that much of the Romantic literature to which he has devoted his professional life is`troubled not simply by the forces of instability, textual and thematic, that reside in any discourse but also by the competitive presence ... of another discourse.' At the heart of that other discourse is the Copernican perception of late eighteenth-century scholars like Sir William Jones that Hinduism might be seen `as central not marginal,' that its ancient language, Sanskrit, might be seen as `a parent language of humankind,' and that Hindu philosophy and literature might be seen as `distinguished statements in the history of civilization.' Much of Romantic literature, Rajan feels, `acquires its richness by being written on the fault line between these two discourses' B the rival discourses of empire and empathy. Much of Rajan's book, it might be argued, acquires its richness by being written on an analogous fault line. Ironically enough, the dominant discourse which both enables Rajan and with which he has to contend is not the discourse of empire but its contemporary antithesis, the postcolonial master narrative of Europe's exploitation and dispossession of its many others. There is no question that he feels the extraordinary emotional pull of this bitter story. Even as that bitterness is ameliorated in the complicating nuances of recent critics like Spivak, Bhabha, and Sara Suleri, he urges us not to forget the `coercive strength in imperial discourse.' He is at his most moving in describing all that has been occluded or vulgarized by this writing. When he looks back on the glory of the sixteenth-century Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, for instance, as its achievements are trivialized in Camoes's tawdry epic, it is difficult not to recall Gibbon contemplating the ruins of ancient Rome and the triumph of insinuating Christianity. Rajan's account of Camoes's humanities 357 representation of the Zamorin's gateway adorned with images of India's conquerors is a tour de force: it captures all the pathos of Edward Said's point that the West's solipsistic triumphalism routinely humiliates the colonized by insisting not only that they accept submission but that they also acknowledge it as proceeding from their own identity. Not even Milton escapes Rajan's ire. Unlike so many contemporary apologists, critics like David Quint and David Armitage, Rajan knows that Milton's great epic authorizes colonial activity even as it satirizes its abuses:`Paradise Lost is the work of a totalizing energy by which the dreams of empire cannot but be nourished.' At the same time, however, Rajan believes that literature, even canonical English literature, has the power to`flow around ideologies,' `to interrogate them through circumvention rather than the simpler forms of protest,' indeed, to anticipate the cultural work of the postcolonial empire now writing back so eloquently to the centre. In Rajan's narrative, the heart of imperial darkness is to be found in the works of James Mill and G.W.F. Hegel; most importantly, in Mill's History of British India (1818) and Hegel's Philosophy of History (1827-31). More than anyone else, it is these writers who establish the stereotype of India, especially Hindu India, as a civilization irredeemably...