Abstract
The growth of evangelical distaste for Hindu India, with its accompanying tendency to employ the gothic mode when writing of the country, appeared to cast doubt on Orientalism as a viable literary form. The transition formed an obvious parallel to the switch from ‘Orientalism’ to ‘Anglicism’ identified by Eric Stokes in the realm of colonial government.1 Something of the vitriol outpoured on India after 1800 is evident in James Mill’s evaluation of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in his History of British India (1817):
These fictions are not only more extravagant, and unnatural, less correspondent with the physical and moral laws of the universe, but are less ingenious, more monstrous, and have less of anything that can engage the affection, awaken sympathy, or excite admiration, reverence, or terror, than the poems of any other, even the rudest people with whom our knowledge of the globe has yet brought us acquainted.2
Certainly Mill’s position is far removed from that of Jones, who in 1772 urged Europeans to search in the literature of the East for ‘a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind’, and ‘a new set of images and similitudes … which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate’, and much of the History is devoted to overturning Jones’s generally positive view of Hindu culture.3
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Notes
James Mill, The History of British India, ed. Horace Hayman Wilson, 10 vols (London: James Madden, 1858; originally 1817), vol. 2, pp. 35–6.
Mill, History of British India, vol. 2, p. 347.
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 195. Mill’s identification of Jones with the British ancien régime is highly ironic considering that both men sought East India Company patronage to support themselves financially. Unlike Jones (whose appointment came from the Crown), Mill was rewarded for his Indian scholarship with the post of Assistant Examiner of Correspondence in 1819.
Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward, ed. and trans. Richard Smith (London: J. & H.L. Hunt, 1825), p. 206.
Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1787), vol. 1, pp. 44–5. Page numbers for subsequent citations are given in the text.
For discussions of the sublime in a European context, see Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992); Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIIIth-Century England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960); and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 3 vols (London, 1787), vol. 1, pp. 141–7.
Jones, Works, vol. 4, p. 112.
Jones, Works, vol. 4, pp. 211–2.
Charles Wilkins, A Grammar of the Sanskrǐta Language (London: W. Bulmer, 1808), preface.
Ward, View of the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos, vol. 4, p. 374.
Charles Stuart, Vindication of the Hindoos from the Aspersions of the Reverend Claudius Buchanan, M.A. By a Bengal Officer (London: R. and J. Dodwell, 1808), p. 97. 20. Ibid., p. 69.
See Nigel Leask, ‘Francis Wilford and the Colonial Construction of Hindu Geography’, in Amanda Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 204–22.
Friedrich Von Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, trans. E.J. Millington (London: Bohn, 1849), p. 522.
Cited in Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, ed. Sebastiano Timpanaro (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1977), p. 29.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31. See also Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), for the role of Hegelian dialectics, particularly ‘The Oriental World’ section of Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1830) in bringing about ‘the phenomenon of Eurocentrism’ (p. 2).
Heinrich Heine, Travel-Pictures: Including The Tour in the Harz, Norderney, and Book of Ideas, together with The Romantic School, trans. Francis Storr (London: George Bell & Sons, 1887), p. 245. Despite this apparent scepticism for Hindu culture, Heine nevertheless published three sonnets inspired by Sakuntala in 1824.
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, 2 vols (London: Free Association Books, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 230–6.
Mill, History of British India, vol. 1, xxiii.
Mill, History of British India, vol. 2, pp. 34–5.
Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 11.
On the complex interrelation of colonial politics and educational curricula, particularly regarding the study of English literature, see Harish Trivedi, Colonial Transactions, and Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education’, cited in Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (eds), Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 58.
Coleridge, Lectures 1809–1819 on Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987-), vol. 2, p. 192.
Coleridge, Collected Works, vol. 5b, p. 191.
Ibid.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 64–8.
Morton, Poetics of Spice, p. 86. There is an extensive secondary literature on attitudes to consumerism in this period, including Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982); Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1992); James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997) and Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94), vol. 3, p. 101; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, p. 14.
Anon, ‘The Curse of Kehama’, Monthly Mirror 9 (February 1811), pp. 122–35, cited in Lionel Madden (ed.), Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 133.
John Foster, ‘The Curse of Kehama’, Eclectic Review 7.1 (January–June 1811), pp. 183–205 and 334–50 (p. 205).
Ibid., p. 186.
Thomas Moore, Poetical Works, 10 vols (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1841), vol. 6, preface.
Ibid.
Francis Jeffrey, ‘Lalla Rookh’, Edinburgh Review 21.57 (November 1817), pp. 1–35 (p. 1).
Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), p. 172.
Jeffrey Vail, ‘Thomas Moore in Ireland and America: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, Romanticism 10.1 (2004), pp. 41–61 (p. 52).
Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 6, p. 25.
Moore, Poetical Works, vol. 7, p. 69.
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© 2011 Andrew Rudd
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Rudd, A. (2011). Reorientating the Orient: Sympathy, the East and Romantic Period Literary Criticism. In: Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306004_6
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