by pandits for whom it was a family tradition, but the patronage on which they
depended declined in the eighteenth century. The British presence brought new
forms of patronage, and a new kind of scholar: the European Indologist, who
drew on the work of pandits and depended on their assistance, but interpreted
the tradition through Western forms of thought. At first there were no profes-
sional Indologists: the only establishment for them at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century was Fort William College, a training college for the East India
Company’s British recruits which lasted only from 1801 to 1854 (Das 1978).
On the other hand, amateur Indology flourished, though it was rarely officially
rewarded except for work on dharma, which was considered to have a direct
application in the courts (Kejariwal 1988: 226f.). Pandits found new forms of
employment at Fort William College, at missionary establishments, as teachers
and translators to individuals, and in the law courts, where they were consulted
on questions of Hindu dharma.
An unintended consequence of the introduction of a judicial system on the
English model in 1773 was the appointment of Sir William Jones (1746–94) as
a judge. He came to Calcutta in 1783, imbued with Enlightenment ideas about
Indian culture, and eager to see it at first hand. He had drawn up a list of
research topics during his voyage out (Mukherjee 1968: 74), and in January
1784, within four months of his arrival, he founded the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, devoted to historical and literary research on India. The society had no
Indian members till 1829 – not as a matter of policy, but because none applied
(Kejariwal 1988: 152f.). However, the kind of research which it encouraged
brought British amateur scholars into collaboration with Indian scholars.
Similar collaboration was fostered by the employment of pandits in various edu-
cational institutions, and by missionaries.
For Hindus, such study led to a new view of the past. Ideas which had hith-
erto been the preserve of pandits trained in particular traditions of thought,
could now be studied through printed editions, translations, and historical
accounts. Most notably, Buddhism came to be part of the world of the Hindu
intellectual: not as a system of errors to be refuted, as it appears in Sanskrit texts,
but as a towering achievement of ancient Indian thought, and as a historical
reality whose monuments still stood on Indian soil. Even if it was viewed as
having been superseded by later developments such as Veda ̄nta or bhakti,
Buddhism was remembered as India’s spiritual gift to Asia.
Challenges
These developments in communication opened Hindu practices and ideas to crit-
icism from the outside. Such criticism had come before, of course, from Muslims;
and we must not forget the bhakti traditions with their often trenchant critiques
of particular social and ritual practices. But the new conceptualization of
Hinduism meant that the hostile accounts of image-worship, the status of
512 dermot killingley