India/western Sociology

[acharya]

The first such area is the concern of early European Orientalists, many
of them shaped by a Protestant culture, to establish a textual basis for
Hinduism. Many of the first direct translations from Sanskrit to modern
European languages were published by those connected with the British East
India Company’s establishment in Bengal.

Among these are Charles
Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad-Gītā (1785), William Jones’s
translations of the Gītagovinda, the Īśa Upaniṣad, some works of Kālidasā
and, most pertinently for Jones’s role as a judge, his translation of the
Manusmṛti under the title Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of
Menu (1794). While philological scholarship on Hinduism quickly
transcended its origins in British Orientalism in Bengal, the Company
continued, directly or indirectly, to support the publication of much of this
scholarship, including the Max Müller’s iconic critical edition of the Ṛg Veda
Saṃhitā.

While the concern to establish a textual basis for Hinduism is
attributable in part to the classical education and Protestant formation of most
of the Company’s servants, it seems clear that this was also driven by the
colonial state’s preference for written rather than oral authority.


Closely connected with this ‘textualization of Indian tradition’ was the
predominance in European constructions of Hinduism of the perspectives of
those who preserved and provided access to the texts whose authority was
both drawn upon and enhanced in this process. 2 At some significant points
the interests and the perspectives of the literate brāhmaṇa castes coincided
with those of European Orientalists, perhaps most obviously in the perception
of a general decline from an originally pure religion to which both the deist
inclinations of several early Orientalists and the purāṇic yuga theory
contributed. While the privileging of brahmanic perspectives is by no means
only a feature of the colonial era, recent scholarship has identified
colonialism as a significant factor in the reinforcement of their position and
the acceleration of the ‘brahmanization’ of Hindu society.


A third area in which European constructions of Hinduism have been
seen to be influenced by colonialism is in the identification of Vedānta, more
specifically Advaita Vedānta, as ‘the paradigmatic example of the mystical
nature of the Hindu religion’.3 Richard King reports the argument of
Niranjan Dhar that the reason for the choice of Vedānta as the ‘central
philosophy of the Hindus’ is to be found in fears of the spread of French
influence in British India and hopes that the supposed quietist and
conservative nature of Vedāntic thought would prevent the development of
revolutionary sentiment in the newly-established College of Fort William.