Racism, or at the very least uncompromising ethnocentrism, shaped everything. Richard King, an authority on ancient Indian philosophy, says it was Orientalists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘effectively created’ the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.76 What he means is that though complex systems of belief had evolved in the East over many centuries, the peoples who lived there did not have the concept of religion ‘as a monolithic entity which involved a set of coherent beliefs, doctrines and liturgical practices’. He says that the very idea of religion, as an organised belief system, using sacred texts, and with a dedicated clerisy, was a European notion, stemming from the Christians of the third century after they had redefined the Latin word religio. To begin with, that had meant a ‘re-reading’ of the traditional practices of their ancestors, but the early Christians – then under threat from the Romans – had redefined the word so that for them it meant ‘a banding together, in which a “bond of piety” would unite all true believers’.77 It was in this way, says King, that religion came to mean a system that emphasised ‘theistic belief, exclusivity and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendental world of the divine . . . By the time of the Enlightenment, it was taken for granted that all cultures were understandable in this way.’78
In fact, says King, the term ‘Hindoo’ was originally Persian, a version of the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning the Indus river. In other words, the Persians employed the word to single out the tribes inhabiting that region – it did not then have a religious meaning.79 When the British arrived in India, he says, they first described the local inhabitants ‘as either heathens, the children of the devil, Gentoos (from the Portuguese gentio = gentile) or Banians (after the merchant population of Northern India)’. But the early colonialists could just not conceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.80 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.81
And it was much the same with Buddhism. ‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’82 In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson (see here).
In both cases, and this is crucial, says King, the current manifestations of these religions were seen as ‘degenerate’ versions of a classic original, and in great need of reform. This ‘mystification’ achieved three purposes. One, in viewing the East as ‘degenerate and backward,’ imperialism was justified. Two, insofar as the East was ancient, the West was by comparison ‘modern’ and progressive. Three, the ancient religions of the East satisfied Europe’s nostalgia for origins, very prevalent at the time. Friedrich Schlegel had voiced what many thought when he wrote ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origins in India.’83
Warren Hastings, whom we have already encountered, was appointed governor-general of Bengal in 1772. He was firmly of the view that British power in India, if it were to flourish, needed the agreement and support of the Indians themselves. The inherent implausibility of such an approach seems not to have detained or deterred anyone. Instead, he began a series of initiatives on the educational front designed to curry favour with a certain class of Indian. First, he proposed a professorship in Persian at Oxford. Drawing a blank there, his next move, with William Jones and others, was to found the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was discussed in Chapter 29. More practical still was Hastings’ provision for officials of the East India Company to be taught Persian, which was the language of the Mughal court, and for Hindu pandits to be brought to Calcutta to teach these same men Sanskrit and at the same time translate ancient scriptures. One effect of this was to produce several generations of British officials who were familiar with the local languages and sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim culture. Here are some lines from Hastings’ preface to the translation he commissioned of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Every instance which brings [the Indians’] real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings; and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’84
Hastings’ achievements were built on in 1800 when Marquess Wellesley, the new governor-general, created the College of Fort William, which later became known as the ‘university of the East’. Here, language tuition was expanded and, in addition to Persian and Sanskrit, Arabic and six Indian local languages were offered, together with Hindu, Muslim and Indian law, science and mathematics. Wellesley also saw to it that Western teaching techniques were introduced, in particular written examinations and public disputation. ‘For many years the ceremony at which the disputations were conducted was seen as the principal social event of the year.’ The college was an ambitious undertaking, at least in the early days. It had its own printing press which published textbooks, translations of Indian classics, studies of Indian history, culture and law, and a library was begun where a collection of rare manuscripts was formed.85
This enlightened policy didn’t last. The first setback came when the ‘court’ of the East India Company proposed that the college, or at least that part of it which taught European subjects, be transferred to England. And then, in the wake of the massacre of British subjects at Vellore (in south-east India), policy was changed decisively and a decision was taken that British power in the subcontinent could be sustained only if there were a mass conversion of Hindus.86 This was such a fundamental change that it was never going to occur without a fight. In a celebrated pamphlet, entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer, Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stewart argued that any attempt at mass conversion was doomed to failure, one reason being that the Hindu religion was ‘in many respects superior . . . The numerous Hindu gods represented merely “types” of virtue, while the theory of the transmigration of souls was preferable to the Christian notion of heaven and hell.’87
It did no good. After the renewal by Parliament of the charter of the East India Company in 1813, a bishopric of Calcutta was established, the College of Fort William was dismantled and its collection of books and manuscripts dispersed. In January 1854 it was officially dissolved.88 The Asiatic Society of Bengal was left to run down. The fate of the college, and the society, served as a barometer of wider changes. The Orientalist policies pursued by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had at the least helped produce a major extension of Western knowledge about the East. The new attitude, the attempts at mass conversions, merely helped polarise India, into coloniser and colonised.