natural tendency of all peoples to believe themselves and their ways the best, has
one supremely bad quality. This is ranking, forming a hierarchy, asserting supe-
riority and inferiority. Without going into the question of what is race and what
is caste, the clearest model of such ranking of peoples is the caste system, where
birth determines value and status. It is striking how the notion of caste comes
to permeate English discourse in the nineteenth century, to the point that Marx,
for example, worries about his daughters losing caste through not being able to
return hospitality (letter to Engels 1867 in Wheen 2000: 298). Doubtless the
notion of caste resonated with aspects of the class system in Britain, but the
implacable and powerful presence of caste in India, it may be argued, had a pro-
found effect on the British. This effect was much greater once Muslim power was
crushed, and the British had ever more consequential dealings with Hindus,
whose quite different patterns of hospitality became increasingly significant. It
is surely likely that British exclusivity mirrored the pre-existing caste exclusivity
of the Brahmans. Cannadine finds similarity between British and Indian society,
but the radical change from Georgian to Victorian society marches in parallel
with the British discovery of caste. The separation of human levels in the
Victorian country house, for instance, where “it was considered undesirable for
children, servants and parents to see, smell or hear each other except at
certain recognized times and places” (Girouard 1979: 28) parallels the newly
discovered social distinctions of the caste system in India.
A term used tirelessly from the appearance ofOrientalismis “the Other.” Its
origins go back to Hegel, and Jacques Lacan made much of it. In the context of
the Orient, it has been grossly overworked. MacKenzie makes the important
point that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Britain’s principal
“other” was France; and in the century and a half that followed, France, Russia,
Germany and the Soviet Union (MacKenzie 1994: 16). Risley’s misinterpreta-
tion of the monkey in the Sanchi sculpture referred to above is perhaps less
obnoxious when we remember the story that during the Napoleonic wars
Hartlepool fishermen hanged a shipwrecked monkey because they took it for a
Frenchman. The rudimentary logic of self and other has today led to an exag-
gerated idea of the importance of the East for nineteenth-century Europe. Bayly
points out that “Indological debates were almost always occidental debates as
well; Orientalism was as much a representation of the Contested Self as it was
of the Other.” Many of the offensive characterizations of Hindus made by
Englishmen “are indistinguishable from what contemporaries were saying about
those addicted to the Demon Drink, the working class, the Irish, Roman
Catholics in general, or indeed about women” (C. A. Bayly 1990: 1313).
Orientalism and the Female
It is fascinating to note how the contemporary decline of philology, of the study
of foreign literatures in their original languages, has been accompanied by the
orientalism and hinduism 55