Sanskrit Erudition and Forms of Legitimacy

Abstract

Studies of early orientalist research in India have only sporadically considered in any detail the material, social and political contexts in which that body of scholarship was produced. British knowledge about India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, has largely been delineated by reference to European metropolitan intellectual genealogies, reflecting the recent historiographical emphasis upon colonial discourse analysis and the role of the colonial imaginary. In recent historical studies, an explicit consideration of the processes underlying the political and military consolidation of the East India Company has largely been wanting, not to mention analyses of the important ways in which orientalist scholarship was closely linked to patterns of cultural patronage and the production of ruling legitimacy in the (pre-colonial) late Mughal imperial structure. In other words, intellectual histories of orientalism, like Edward Said’s famous study, while making the link to the rise of imperialism, have nevertheless neglected detailed analyses of the Asian social and cultural contexts, and enabling conditions, in which this body of scholarship was produced. In this regard, Tom Trautmann has noted in his Aryans and British India that the relationship of British orientalist scholars to their Indian teachers and assistants is ‘of fundamental importance’ in any analysis of orientalism.¹