by Amartya Sen
Mill chastised early British administrators (like William Jones) for having taken ‘Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they have in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization’.11 At the end of a comprehensive attack on all fronts, he came to the conclusion that Indian civilization was on a par with other inferior ones known to Mill – ‘very nearly the same with that of the Chinese, the Persians, and the Arabians’; he also put in this category, for good measure, ‘subordinate nations, the Japanese, Cochinchinese, Siamese, Burmans, and even Malays and Tibetans’.12
How well informed was Mill in dealing with his subject matter?* Mill wrote his book without ever having visited India. He knew no Sanskrit, nor any Persian or Arabic, had practically no knowledge of any of the modern Indian languages, and thus his reading of Indian material was of necessity most limited. There is another feature of Mill that clearly influenced his investigations, his inclination to distrust anything stated by native scholars, since they appeared to him to have ‘a general disposition to deceit and perfidy’.13
Perhaps some examples of Mill’s treatment of particular claims of achievement may be useful to illustrate the nature of his extremely influential approach. The invention of the decimal system with place values and the placed use of zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so-called Arabic numerals, are generally known to be Indian developments. In fact, Alberuni had already mentioned this in his eleventh-century book on India,14 and many European as well as Arab scholars had written on this subject.15 Mill dismisses the claim altogether on the grounds that ‘the invention of numerical characters must have been very ancient’ and ‘whether the signs used by the Hindus are so peculiar as to render it probable that they invented them, or whether it is still more probable that they borrowed them, are questions which, for the purpose of ascertaining their progress in civilization are not worth resolving’.
Mill proceeds then to explain that the Arabic numerals ‘are really hieroglyphics’ and that the claim on behalf of the Indians and the Arabs reflects the confounding of ‘the origin of cyphers or numerical characters’ with ‘that of hieroglyphic writing’.16 At one level Mill’s rather elementary error lies in not knowing what a decimal or a place-value system is, but his ignorant smugness cannot be understood except in terms of his implicit unwillingness to believe that a very sophisticated invention could have been managed by such primitive people.
Another interesting example concerns Mill’s reaction to Indian astronomy and specifically the argument for a rotating earth and a model of gravitational attraction (proposed by Āryabhaṭa, who was born in 476 CE, and investigated by, among others, Varāhamihira and Brahmagupta in the sixth and seventh centuries). These works were well known in the Arab world; as was mentioned earlier, Brahmagupta’s book was translated into Arabic in the eighth century and retranslated by Alberuni in the eleventh. William Jones had been told about these works in India, and he in turn reported that statement. Mill expresses total astonishment at Jones’s gullibility.17 After ridiculing the absurdity of this attribution and commenting on the ‘pretensions and interests’ of Jones’s Indian informants, Mill concludes that it was ‘extremely natural that Sir William Jones, whose pundits had become acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe, should hear from them that those ideas were contained in their own books’.18
For purposes of comparison it is useful to examine Alberuni’s discussion of the same issue nearly eight hundred years earlier, concerning the postulation of a rotating earth and gravitational attraction in the still earlier writings of Āryabhaṭa and Brahmagupta:
Brahmagupta says in another place of the same book: ‘The followers of Āryabhaṭa maintain that the earth is moving and heaven resting. People have tried to refute them by saying that, if such were the case, stones and trees would fall from the earth.’ But Brahmagupta does not agree with them, and says that that would not necessarily follow from their theory, apparently because he thought that all heavy things are attracted towards the center of the earth.19
Alberuni himself proceeded to dispute this model, raised a technical question about one of Brahmagupta’s mathematical calculations, referred to a different book of his own arguing against the proposed view, and pointed out that the relative character of movements makes this issue less central than one might first think: ‘The rotation of the earth does in no way impair the value of astronomy, as all appearances of an astronomic character can quite as well be explained according to this theory as to the other.’20 Here, as elsewhere, while arguing against an opponent’s views, Alberuni tries to present such views with great involvement and care. The contrast between Alberuni’s curatorial approach and James Mill’s magisterial pronouncements could not be sharper.
There are plenty of other examples of ‘magisterial’ readings of India in Mill’s history. This is of some practical importance, since the book was extremely influential in the British administration and widely praised, for example by Macaulay (‘the greatest historical work … since that of Gibbon’). Macaulay’s own approach and inclinations echoed James Mill’s (as was discussed in Essay 4).
This view of the poverty of Indian intellectual traditions played a major part in educational reform in British India, as is readily seen from the 1835 ‘Minute on Indian Education’, written by Macaulay himself. The priorities in Indian education were determined, henceforth, by a different emphasis – by the need, as Macaulay argued, for a class of English-educated Indians who could ‘be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’.
The impact of the magisterial views of India was not confined to Britain and India. Modern documents in the same tradition have been influential elsewhere, including in the United States. In a series of long conversations on India and China conducted by Harold Isaacs in 1958 with 181 Americans – academics, professionals in mass media, government officials, missionaries and church officials, and officials of foundations, voluntary social-service groups, and political organizations – Isaacs found that the two most widely read literary sources on India were Rudyard Kipling and Katherine Mayo, the author of the extremely derogatory Mother India.21 Of these, Kipling’s writings would be more readily recognized as having something of the ‘magisterial’ approach to them. Lloyd Rudolph describes Mayo’s Mother India thus:
First published in 1927, Mother India was written in the context of official and unofficial British efforts to generate support in America for British rule in India. It added contemporary and lurid detail to the image of Hindu India as irredeemably and hopelessly impoverished, degraded, depraved, and corrupt. Mayo’s Mother India echoed not only the views of men like Alexander Duff, Charles Grant, and John Stuart Mill but also those of Theodore Roosevelt, who glorified in bearing the white man’s burden in Asia and celebrated the accomplishments of imperialism.22
Mahatma Gandhi, while describing Mayo’s book as ‘a drain inspector’s report’, had added that every Indian should read it and seemed to imply, as Ashis Nandy notes, that it is possible ‘to put her criticism to internal use’ (as an over-stern drain inspector’s report certainly can be).23 Gandhi himself was severely attacked in the book, but, given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he might have actually welcomed even her exaggerations because of its usefully lurid portrayal of caste inequities. But while Gandhi may have been right to value external criticism as a way of inducing people to be self-critical, the impact of the ‘magisterial approach’ certainly gives American perceptions of India a very clear slant.24
Exoticist Readings of India
I turn now to the ‘exoticist’ approaches to India. Interest in India has often been stimulated by the observation of exotic ideas and views there. Arrian’s and Strabo’s accounts of Alexander the Great’s spirited conversations with various sages of north-west India may or may not be authentic, but ancient Greek literature is full of uncommon happenings and thoughts attributed to India.
Megasthene
s’ Indika, describing India in the early third century BCE, can claim to be the first outsider’s book on India; it created much Greek interest, as can be seen from the plentiful references to it, for example, in the writings of Diodorus, Strabo and Arrian. Megasthenes had ample opportunity to observe India since, as the envoy of Seleucus Nicator to the court of Candragupta Maurya, he spent nearly a decade (between 302 and 291 BCE) in Pātaliputra (the site of modern Patna), the capital city of the Mauryan empire. But his superlatively admiring book is also so full of accounts of fantastic objects and achievements in India that it is hard to be sure what is imagined and what is really being observed.
There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient Greeks. The biography of Apollonius of Tyana by Flavius Philostratus in the third century CE is a good example. In his search for what was out of the ordinary, Apollonius was, we are assured, richly rewarded in India: ‘I have seen men living upon the earth and not upon it; defended without walls, having nothing, and yet possessing all things.’25 How such contradictory things can be seen by the same person from the same observational position may not be obvious, but the bewitching charm of all this for the seeker of the exotic can hardly be doubted.
Exotic interests in India can be seen again and again, from its early history to the present day. From Alexander listening to the gymnosophists’ lectures to contemporary devotees hearing the sermons of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Shri Rajneesh, there is a crowded lineage. Perhaps the most important example of intellectual exoticism related to India can be seen in the European philosophical discussions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, among the Romantics in particular.
Important figures in the Romantic movement, including the Schlegel brothers, Schelling and others, were profoundly influenced by rather magnified readings of Indian culture. From Herder, the German philosopher and a critic of the rationalism of the European Enlightenment, we get the magnificent news that ‘the Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity’ and that ‘moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts’.26 Friedrich Schlegel not only pioneered studies of Indo-European linguistics (later pursued particularly by Max Müller) but also brought India fully into his critique of the contemporary West. While in the West ‘man himself has almost become a machine’ and ‘cannot sink any deeper’, Schlegel recommended learning from the Orient, especially India. He also guaranteed that ‘the Persian and German languages and cultures, as well as the Greek and the old Roman, may all be traced back to the Indian’.27 To this list, Schopenhauer added the New Testament, informing us that, in contrast with the Old, the New Testament ‘must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism, and its avatar (i.e., the person of Christ)’.28
Not surprisingly, many of the early enthusiasts were soon disappointed in not finding in Indian thought what they had themselves put there, and many of them went into a phase of withdrawal and criticism. Some of the stalwarts, Schlegel in particular, recanted vigorously. Others, including Hegel, outlined fairly negative views of Indian traditions and presented loud denials of the claim of pre-eminence of Indian culture – a claim that was of distinctly European origin. When Coleridge asked: ‘What are / These potentates of inmost Ind?’29 he was really asking a question about Europe, rather than about India.30
In addition to veridical weakness, the exoticist approach to India has an inescapable fragility and transience that can be seen again and again. A wonderful thing is imagined about India and sent into a high orbit, and then it is brought crashing down. All this need not be such a tragedy when the act of launching is done by (or with the active cooperation of) the putative star. Not many would weep, for example, for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles stopped lionizing him and left suddenly; in answer to the Maharishi’s question of why they were leaving, John Lennon said: ‘You are the cosmic one; you ought to know.’31
But it is a different matter altogether when both the boom and the bust are thrust upon the victim. One of the most discouraging episodes in literary reception occurred early in this century, when Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats and others led a chorus of adoration at the lyrical spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry but followed it soon afterwards with a thorough disregard and firm denunciation. Tagore was a Bengali poet of tremendous creativity and range (even though his poetry does not translate easily – not even the spiritual ones that were so applauded) and also a great storyteller, novelist and essayist; he remains a dominant literary figure in Bangladesh and India. The versatile and innovative writer that the Bengalis know well is not the sermonizing spiritual guru put together in London; nor did he fit any better the caricature of ‘Stupendranath Begorr’ to be found in Bernard Shaw’s ‘A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklyn Barnabas’.
Interactions and Reinforcements
These different approaches have had very diverse impacts on the understanding of Indian intellectual traditions in the West. The exoticist and magisterial approaches have bemused and befuddled that understanding even as they have drawn attention to India in the West. The curatorial approaches have been less guilty of this, and indeed historically have played a major part in bringing out and drawing attention to the different aspects of Indian culture, including its non-mystical and nonexotic features. Nevertheless, given the nature of the curatorial enterprise, the focus inevitably leans towards that which is different in India, rather than what is similar to the West. In emphasizing the distinctiveness of India, even the curatorial approaches have sometimes contributed to the accentuation of contrasts rather than commonalities with Western traditions, though not in the rather extreme form found in the exoticist and magisterial approaches.
The magisterial approaches played quite a vigorous role in the running of the British Empire. Even though the Raj is dead and gone, the impact of the associated images survives, not least in the United States (as discussed earlier). To some extent, the magisterial authors also reacted against the admiration of India that can be seen in the writings of curatorial observers of India. For example, both Mill and Macaulay were vigorously critical of the writings of authors such as William Jones, and there are some important dialectics here. The respectful curatorial approaches painted a picture of Indian intellectual traditions that was much too favourable for the imperial culture of the nineteenth century, and contributed to the vehemence of the magisterial denunciations of those traditions. By the time Mill and Macaulay were writing, the British Indian empire was well established as a lasting and extensive enterprise, and the ‘irresponsibility’ of admiring the native intellectual traditions – permissible in the previous century for early servants of the East India Company – was hard to sustain as the favoured reading of India in the consolidated empire.
The outbursts of fascinated wonder in the exoticist approaches bring India into Western awareness in big tides of bewildering attention. But then they ebb, leaving only a trickle of hardened exoticists holding forth. There may well be, after a while, another tide. In describing the rise and decline of Rabindranath Tagore in London’s literary circles, E. M. Forster remarked that London was a city of ‘boom and bust’, but that description applies more generally (that is, not confined only to literary circles in London) to the Western appreciation of exotic aspects of Eastern cultures.
The tides, while they last, can be hard work, though. I remember feeling quite sad for a dejected racist whom I saw, some years ago, near the Aldwych station in London, viewing with disgust a thousand posters pasted everywhere carrying pictures of the obese – and holy – physique of Guru Maharajji (then a great rage in London). Our dedicated racist was busy writing ‘fat wog’ diligently under each of the pictures. In a short while that particular wog would be gone, but I do not doubt that the ‘disgusted of Aldwych’ would scribble ‘lean wog’ or ‘medium-sized wog’ under other posters now.
It might be thought that since the exoticist approaches give credit where it may not be due and the magisterial approaches withhold credit where it may well be due, the two might neutralize each other nicely. But they work in very asymmetrical ways. Magisterial critiques tend to blast the rationalist and humanist aspects of India with the greatest force (this is as true of James Mill as of Katharine Mayo), whereas exoticist admirations tend to build up the mystical and extrarational aspects with particular care (this has been so from Apollonius of Tyana down to the Hare Krishna activists of today). The result of the two taken together is to wrest the understanding of Indian culture forcefully away from its rationalist aspects. Indian traditions in mathematics, logic, science, medicine, linguistics or epistemology may be well known to the Western specialist, but they play little part in the general Western understanding of India.32 Mysticism and exoticism, in contrast, have a more hallowed position in that understanding.
The Dialectics of Internal and External Identity
Western perceptions and characterizations of India have had considerable influence on the self-perception of Indians themselves. This is clearly connected to India’s colonial past and continued deference to what is valued in the West.33 However, the relationship need not take the form of simple acceptance – it sometimes includes strategic responses to the variety of Western perceptions of India that suit the interests of internal imaging. We have to distinguish between some distinct aspects of the influence that Western images have had on Indian internal identities.