Orientalism, Empire and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (review)

Substantial attention has been devoted to the nature and development of "colonial knowledge" in recent work on British colonial authority in South Asia. Literary scholars, anthropologists, historians, and postcolonial critics have debated the extent to which British rule can be understood as representing a "conquest of knowledge" and have disputed the role that the colonial state and its various functionaries played in transforming South Asian cultural categories and social identities, including "tribe," "caste," and "religion." It is very important to recognize, however, that that this work on colonial knowledge represents only one stream within an increasingly resurgent, nuanced, and rich body of work on South Asian intellectual history. Over the past few years, a diverse group of scholars has produced work that adds considerable depth and complexity to our understandings of the nature and development of South Asian knowledge traditions. Key contributions have been made, for example, by Sheldon Pollock on pre- and early modern literary culture and Sanskritic knowledge traditions; Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on historical understanding and writing in South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth century; Brian Hatcher on the shifting fortunes of pandits and learned lineages; and Javed Majeed and Ayesha Jalal on the intellectual and cultural affiliations of South Asian Islam.

Among its many insights, this broader body of work has made two key points that must be kept in mind by scholars primarily concerned with the colonial period and the cultural consequences of British rule. First, a range of complex, organized, and frequently competing knowledge traditions developed in South Asia prior to the arrival of the British. In other words, South Asian communities possessed learned "disciplines"; important groups and cohorts of scholars jockeyed for status, influence, and patronage; and South Asian states were themselves invested in the political value of knowledge long before the East India Company became diwan of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in 1765. Second—and following on the first—the British did not introduce what we might think of as "science," "linguistics," and "history" to South Asia; rather, East India Company officials, missionaries, and scholars contended with important local traditions of scholarship as they attempted to establish the universal authority of their own particular models for explaining the natural world, the nature of language, and the pattern of human experience.

Michael Dodson's Orientalism, Empire and National Culture draws upon these kinds of insights to forward a bracing reassessment of intellectual culture in north India between 1770 and 1880. This study focuses on the first century of British dominance, but it produces a subtle set of arguments that are greatly enriched by an understanding of the history of knowledge traditions that developed prior to and alongside the rising fortunes of the East India Company. Dodson's study is firmly grounded in the Hindi belt of north India and places particular emphasis on development on the city of Banaras, an influential ritual and intellectual center. It reconstructs both the shifting aspirations of various British officials and scholars and the efforts of South Asian scholars to draw upon Orientalism and European knowledge traditions more generally as they debated and defined their understandings of India's past, their conceptions of the nature of Indian civilization, and the possibilities of Indian nationhood. Dodson's careful unraveling of these cross-cultural engagements adds further weight to critiques of Saidian models of Orientalism and also rejects the instrumental sensibility of some recent work on colonial knowledge, as he paints a vivid portrait of the shifting ideological pressures, social layers, and intellectual cohorts that shaped knowledge production in India during the nineteenth century. Stressing the "double" nature of Orientalist learning, Dodson shows how Sanskrit pandits were able to bend the institutional settings of colonialism and rework the actual content of European knowledge to serve their own ends.

Dodson's examination of the transformation of Sanskritic knowledge in the face of British ascendancy moves over a wide range of issues and debates and is...