roots, transmitted to him through the teachings of his mother, reading Homer
alongside the Vedas. The opposite process, Europeans becoming immersed in
Indian culture, also took place, and JasanoVgives the example of Charles
Stuart. However, the description of him as ‘eccentric Irish-born’ and his
nickname as Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart clearly reXects the rejection his compat-
riots felt towards his sympathetic attitude towards Indian customs.
In archaeology, the work of Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822–91), theWrst of
India’s Sanskritists, has been noted as a discordant voice (Cohn 1996: 95).
His name is placed alongside those of the architectural historian Ram Raz and
the archaeologist Poorno Chunder Mukherji, among others (Singh 2004:
308–36). Mitra was a member of the Asiatic Society and started a photo-
graphic society in Bengal. He was appointed by the Bengal government to
accompany the party sent to Bhuwaneshwar to obtain casts of some of the
more important examples of Hindu architectural ornaments in 1868–9
(Chakrabarti 1988: 99–100). In hisThe Antiquities of Orissaof 1875 and
1878 he showed his opposition to the assumption that Indian ancient art
was inferior, and lacked originality and inventiveness. This led to what
Chakrabarti (1997: 231) has denounced as ‘an explosive racial outburst
against’ him. He was severely criticized by, among others, the expert in
ancient Indian architectural studies, James Fergusson (Chakrabarti 1997:
111–13; Guha-Thakurta 2004: 103–11). ‘His patriotic soul’, scorned Fergus-
son, ‘wasWred with uncontrolled indignation at the bare idea of his country-
men having taken a hint from foreigners, or borrowed a single idea from such
people as the Greeks’ (in Chakrabarti 1997: 114). Fergusson denounced Mitra
as imprudent and ill-trained, for Indians, despite being able to learn the
English language, had ‘but only a superWcial familiarity with the principal
features of our arts and sciences’ (in Cohn 1996: 95–6). Fergusson’s comments
were not the only ones, as shown by the hand-written notes in the copy of his
book kept in the Archaeological Survey of India. ‘This book is a violent
attack on Cunningham, Growse, myself and Rajendralala’ read one of
them, apparently made by J. D. M. Beglar, Alexander Cunningham’s assistant
(Singh 2004). Years later, in 1911, Jean Philippe Vogel (1872–1958), a Dutch
Sanskritist appointed to the Archaeological Survey of India who later became
Professor of Sanskrit at Leiden, still maintained that the Indians were unable
to produce good science. He argued that ‘without doing injustice to their
memory, I may say that they [the early Indian archaeologists] do not rank
equal with most of the [Western] scholars’ (in Chakrabarti 1997: 115).
Yet, from the start, there seems to have been a wish to employ ‘intelligent
natives’ at the Archaeological Survey of India. A hierarchy was, however,
tightly observed. Some locals were employed as photographers. Nevertheless,
as Sudeshna Guha has noticed, in contrast to the acknowledgement that
South and South East Asia 229