the anger of a Hebrew prophet, wanting to whip the Hindus, especially the
priests, from the stinking lairs that were their temples (Garbe 1925: 56). But it
behooves us to remember how far away India was from the west before airplanes
- both Garbe and Deussen give a careful account of the ships in which they
voyage to India. Very little was known about how Hindus lived and thought.
There is nothing to be gained by reduplicating Garbe’s moral indignation and
heaping it back on him, for he lived on a different planet; and he had a very good
understanding of Samkhyan and other texts.
Said’s reversal of the meaning of the word Orientalism has been so success-
ful because there was a need for a word for western misunderstanding and mis-
treatment of the East, but his choice was unfortunate. No one has offered any
evidence that Indological Orientalist learning, in the strict old sense of linguis-
tic and textual study, served imperial ends. Those concerned with conquest and
exploitation, with practical affairs, had no time and little sympathy for such
studies.^2 Warren Hastings was the exception here, but he had a great love of all
things Indian. It was he who set Orientalism – in its old and original meaning –
in train in India. He found Hinduism scarcely less attractive than Christianity.^3
He spoke of himself as well as others when he told the man he was sending to
explore Tibet, “there were ‘thousands of men in England’ who would listen to
the story of an expedition ‘in search of knowledge’, with ‘ten times’ the interest
they would take in ‘victories that slaughtered thousands of the national
enemies’ ” (Feiling 1996: 105). Nor does colonial discourse theory make
allowance for the kind of love of learning that led Anquetil-Duperron to enlist
as a soldier so that he could get to India and study Old Persian and Sanskrit
(Anquetil-Duperron [1771] 1997: 75–7). Indeed, Said speaks of “the madness
of Anquetil-Duperron’s life” (Said 1984: 252).
Not only does Inden without a shred of justification accuse Renou of attribut-
ing “the same dreaming irrationality to the Indian mind that Hegel did,” he
makes the astonishing claim that the writings of James Mill (The History of
British India) and Hegel were hegemonic texts for Indology (Inden 1992: 4). As
Trautman says, “neither Mill nor Hegel learned an Indian language or set foot
in India” and “they used their secondhand knowledge to fashion arguments
againstthe authority of the Orientalists and the enthusiasm for India with which
it was associated” (Trautman 1997: 23). Numerous writers today claim that
Mill was studied at Haileybury, the East India Company’s college in England, but
a rare published account of life there makes no mention of the History of British
India. John Beames, an Indian civil servant whose love of learning led him to
write a Comparative Grammar of Indo-Aryan languages, describes his time at
Haileybury learning languages, but nothing whatever about life in India, not
even what Mill has to say.
[I]t was considered “bad form” to talk about India or to allude to the fact that we
were all going there soon. Even the study of Oriental languages, which was the
chief feature of the place, and in fact the reason for its existence, was carried on
as though we had no personal interest in the countries in which those languagesorientalism and hinduism 49