Orientalism - autonomous learning

78 ORIENTALISM
The Scope of Orientalism
79
began the course of personal study that was to gather in, to rope off,
to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of
European learning. For his personal work, entitled "Objects of
Enquiry During My Residence in Asia" he enumerated among the
topics of his investigation "the Laws of the Hindus and Mohammedans,
Modem Politics and Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode
of Governing Bengal, Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed
Sciences of the Asiaticks, Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and
Anatomy of the Indians, Natural Productions of India, Poetry,
Rhetoric and Morality of Asia, Music of the Eastern Nations,
Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and Commerce of India," and
so forth. On August 17, 1787, he wrote unassumingly to Lord
Althorp that "it is my ambition to know India better than any other
European ever knew it." Here is where Balfour in 1910 could find
the first adumbration of his claim as an Englishman to know the
Orient more and better than anyone else.
Jones's official work was the law, an occupation with symbolic
significance for the history of Orientalism. Seven years before Jones
arrived in India, Warren Hastings had decided that Indians were to
be ruled by their own laws, a more enterprising project than it
appears at first glance since the Sanskrit code of laws existed then
for practical use only in a Persian translation, and no Englishman
at the time knew Sanskrit well enough to consult the original texts.
A company official, Charles Wilkins, first mastered Sanskrit, then
began to translate the .Institutes of Manu; in this labor he was soon
to be assisted by Jones. (Wilkins, incidentally, was the first translator
of the Bhagavad-Gita.) In January 1784 Jones convened the
inaugural meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was to
be for India what the Royal Society was for England, As first
oresident of the society and as magistrate, Jones acquired the effecknowledge
of the Orient and of Orientals that was later to
make him the undisputed founder (the phrase is A. J, Arberry's)
of Orientalism, To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with
Occident: these were Jones's goals, which, with an irresistibleimpulse
always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient
to "a complete digest" of laws, figures, customs, and works,he is
believed to have achieved. His most famous pronouncement indicates
the extent to which modem Orientalism, even in its _
sophical beginnings, was a comparative discipline having for its
principal goal the grounding of the European languages in a distant,
and harmless, Oriental source:
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the
Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to
both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in
the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by
accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them
all three without believing them to have sprung from some common
source,60
Many of the early English Orientalists in India were, like Jones,
legal scholars, or else, interestingly enough, they were medical men
with strong missionary leanings. So far as one can tell, mostof them
were imbued with the dual purpose of investigating "the sciences
and the arts of Asia, with the hope of facilitating ameliorations there
and of advancing knowledge and improving the arts at home":61
so the common Orienta list goal was stated in the Centenary Volume
of the Royal Asiatic Society founded in 1823 by Henry Thomas
Colebrooke, In their dealings with the modem Orientals, the early
professional Orientalists like Jones had only two roles to fulfill, yet
we cannot today fault them for strictures placed on their humanity
by the official Occidental character of their presence in the Orient.
They were either judges or they were doctors, Even Edgar Quinet,
writing more metaphysically than realistically, was dimly aware of
this therapeutic relationship. "L'Asie ales prophetes," he said in
Le Genie des religions; "L'Europe ales docteurs."62 Proper knowledge
of the Orient proceeded from a thorough study of the classical
texts, and only after that to an application of those texts to the
modem Orient. Faced with the obvious decrepitude and political
impotence of the modem Oriental, the European Orientalist found
it his duty to rescue !lome portion of a lost, past classical Oriental
grandeur in order to "facilitate ameliorations" in the present Orient.
What the European took from the classical Oriental past was a
vision (and thousands of facts and artifacts) which only he could
employ to the best advantage; to the modern Oriental he gave
facilitation and amelioration-and, too, the benefit of his judgment
as to what was best for the modern Orient.
It was characteristic of all Orientalist projects before Napoleon's
that very little could be done in advance of the project to prepare
for its success. Anquetil and Jones, for example, learned what they
did about the Orient only after they got there. They were confronting,
as it were, the whole Orient, and only after a while and after
considerable improvising could they whittle it down to a smaller