Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (review)

Europe's "encounter" with the "Orient" has most often been explained (by Europeans at least) from the perspective of two opposing, generally intransigent positions. On the one side, there are those who, largely under the now remote influence of Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, cast any attempt to describe or understand any aspect of Asian culture as part of a strategy for malign distortion in a bid to seize control of a colonized "other." We have, on the other side, a more amorphous crew, who see the history of the relationship between Europe and India as either in terms of a growing awareness on the part of Europeans of the realities of Indian culture ("a slow move from lesser to greater knowledge," in Subrahmanyam's words) or in terms of the more forceful, more heavily laden claim that the secularization of knowledge in Europe and the rise of the human sciences in the eighteenth century led to a more sympathetic evaluation of all non-European cultures.

Europe's India takes a wholly different approach. It is an attempt to show how, in the period from 1500 to 1800, "European relations with and understanding of India . . . were the product of layered and intermittent conversations and distinct asymmetries in perception." European knowledge of India, Subrahmanyam demonstrates, was produced through a number of highly diverse, prolonged, and complex contacts not merely between the various Europeans who visited India and the Indians themselves, but also between the non-Indians—the Turks, the Iranians, the Arabs—who interacted in a variety of situations and locations with both Europeans and Indians. European knowledge, moreover, was produced not only by texts—although, save for a long section on the engraver Bernard Picart, texts are Subrahmanyam's prime concern—but also by drawings and artifacts, and not only by writers but also by collectors. The book moves through a series of linked, carefully constructed chapters organized around the lives and writings of a very large number of people who moved back and forth between India and Europe. In so doing, it "swims against the current," as Subrahmanyam puts it, of "the fashionable distaste for 'biography' " as a tool for historical understanding. The subjects of these biographies are characteristically unexpected. William Jones and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, among the better-known "Orientalists," are treated here as "somewhat inflated personages" and attention is given instead, in a memorable section, to the self-taught Scottish adventurer James Fraser, who, unencumbered by the logic of Enlightenment political philosophy, managed, in Subrahmanyam's words, to "portray the clash between political regimes but without resorting to formulations such as 'oriental despotism.' " In this way, he argues, Fraser may bring us "closer to a sense of who and in what terms precisely Europeans experienced and comprehended India and the 'Orient.' "

Europe's India (which concludes by "turning the glass" instead on India's Europe) offers a nuanced, multilayered, and immensely rich account of what can only ever be a hesitant, halting, and uncertain understanding of the "other." For, as the author says at the very end of his book, only those who have never "really experienced life across and between cultures can afford the illusion" that any such understanding "is a simple affair."