Orienting America: Sanskrit and Modern Scholarship in the United States, 1836–94

Abstract

This work explores the history of American Orientalism,¹ in the form of the academic study of Sanskrit in America, in the context of its earliest foundations and its development in the nineteenth century into a discipline of exceptional importance and a field of intense contemporary interest. Although it has received little attention from scholars, Orientalism in America existed as a scholarly subject and a rudimentary disciplinary formation, as well as a means of organizing ideas, from as early as the 1830s. In Orientalism, Said acknowledged the founding of the American Oriental Society (AOS) in 1842, but barely alluded to the long history of the scholarly study of the East and the institutionalization of Oriental studies in America from the 1840s until the second half of the twentieth century.² The history of Oriental studies in America for Said began with post-war American academic research and contributions to Middle East policy, such as that illustrated by the career of H. A. R. Gibb, a Scottish Orientalist, and Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, who became Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard in 1955. This is unsurprising, since Said was concerned with launching a moral critique of an Orientalism whose telos lay in postwar and contemporary American politics, which he saw as directly inheriting the British and French Orientalist traditions rooted in their colonial relationships with Islam and the Middle East.