were spoken, and no attempt was made to practise talking them or to acquire any
practical familiarity with them. If at any time one wanted to know what sort of
place India was, or what one’s future life or work there was to be like, it was impos-
sible to find anyone who could give the requisite information. (Beames 1996: 64)The indifference to India on the part of Beames and his fellow students seems to
be innocent of any knowledge of the Historyof James Mill.
Oriental Despotism
Coppola transposes the Horror from the African jungle with its cannibals and
fences topped with skulls to the jungle of Cambodia, where the giant heads of
the divine kings of Angkor loom out of the vegetation. Angkor, “The City,” from
the Sanskrit nagara (“city”), was on the eastern edge of the huge spread of
Sanskritic culture. Sanskrit was “the paramount linguistic medium by which
ruling elites expressed their power from Purusapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara in
the northwest of the subcontinent to as far east as Panduranga in Annam (south
Vietnam) and Prambanam in central Java” (Pollock 1996: 198). In describing
the formation of what he calls the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, Pollock refers to the
“efforts of small groups of traders, adventurers, religious professionals. There is
no evidence that large-scale state initiatives were ever at issue, or that anything
remotely resembling ‘colonization’ took place” (Pollock 1996: 241).
Yet, however Sanskritic religious culture spread to southeast Asia, the huge
temple-palaces in Cambodia are patent manifestation of royalty’s will to power.
An important early instance of Said’s version of Orientalism is the European
notion of Oriental Despotism, a category that allows the west to dismiss eastern
political concerns as inherently inferior. The notion goes back to Aristotle:
“Asians are more servile by nature... hence they endure despotic rule without
protest” (Aristotle, PoliticsIII, ix, 3 cited in Anderson 1974: 463). Francois
Bernier (1620–88), philosopheand traveler, is here a key figure, for his account
of the despotism of the Mughals was taken up by Montesquieu and Marx, to
name only two. In fact, as Murr suggests, Bernier’s account of India under
Aurangzib and his predecessors reflects his fear that the absolutism of Louis XIV
might degenerate into tyranny. He studiously resists using the term despot, and
presents Aurangzib as by no means a barbarian, but as a great king worthy of
comparison with European kings (Murr 1991). The Mughal emperors differed
from European kings in that the most powerful son rather than the first-born
became the successor; and in parallel with this lack of regularly rewarded
primogeniture there was no landed aristocracy as independent counterweight
to the sovereign, since nobles were salaried and liable to dismissal if their
performance was not satisfactory. Oriental Despotism becomes a key concept in
pro-imperialist interpretations of ancient Indian politics and society. Anquetil-
Duperron was the first European to argue against the notion that there was no
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