Knowledge is (not just) Power

A meditation on what is lost in the ChatGPT era

In Spring 2014, I was enrolled in two history courses at UC Berkeley. Each course culminated in a 10-page final paper. I turned in a final paper for one, on the topic of 18th century British Orientalism in India, and by the time I got to the end realized I had more to say and more sources to incorporate into my argument. I negotiated with the professor of the second course—instead of writing a second 10-page paper, can I turn this 10-page paper into a 20-page paper instead? He obliged. The essay that follows is the product of that exercise. I loved writing it.

I’m posting this essay in full—unedited—primarily because seeing the kind of work that students were producing in the era immediately before the onset of ChatGPT is useful in order to have clarity about what exactly is lost when students no longer write essays like this because of the availability of LLMs and because of the devaluation of writing skills on the job market.

The original title was—”Knowledge is (not just) Power: Early British Orientalism and the Limits of Said.”

Until today, my professor and I were the only ones who had ever read it. Sort of wild, huh? To write like this, for an audience of two. To write, for knowledge’s sake. To write, for the practice of writing. To write like this, because you love it.

Introduction

Never again will a single story be told as if it’s the only one.

—John Berger

Said’s Orientalism shook up the field. In it, Said judges the value of all Orientalism by its reinforcement of “Western” power. For him, all forms of Orientalism necessarily fail because of the power structure that is inextricable from the discourse itself, and he seeks to expose these failures through examples of Orientalist representations of the Arab Middle East. My goal in this paper is to explore the features of Orientalism that are easily overlooked when viewed through Said’s assessment of it which narrowly focuses on Western power alone. In what ways can the work of scholars such as Alexander Dow, John Zephaniah Holwell, and Sir William Jones expose the complexities of Orientalism that would otherwise be ironed out when seen through the lens of Said? I will begin by defining the key points of Said’s argument, then I will consider certain limitations in his thesis through examples in the work of the late eighteenth century British Orientalists. My argument is not that Said’s general thesis is not useful or accurate; the issue that I’d like to raise is that viewing all Orientalism through his lens is only one way to assess and understand these productions.

As he discussed in his pioneering work, Orientalism has many meanings that are all interdependent. The first of his definitions is that “anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient … either in its specific or general aspects … is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.”¹ This includes all academic and government experts who engage in any study of the orient, including historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and philologists. This is the “most readily accepted” of his many definitions of Orientalism because this is the meaning that was originally associated with the term before the publication of his work.² Aside from this definition, Said expanded the meaning of Orientalism to encompass depictions of the Orient outside of the realm of intellectual Orientalism; thus, his second definition is that Orientalism is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’”. Thus, any form of writing, ranging from poetry to imperial administration, is Orientalist if it assumes a distinction between East and West as a premise for “elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on.” Lastly, Orientalism is “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient”; in other words, it is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”³

An overarching meaning that pervades all three of these specific definitions is that Orientalism is, according to Said, an “enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”⁴ At all times, a value judgment is implied in Said’s use of the term, which considers any description of “the Orient” as an instance of domination over it. In the context of this paper, I will be using the term Orientalist to mean anyone who writes about the Orient, and as an adjective to indicate the kind of writing that he produces. My use of the term is merely descriptive; I do not mean to import the negative connotation to the term that Said has cast upon it in his book.

Said’s argument revolves around the fact that colonial power is closely tied to Orientalist knowledge. At the time when Said’s Orientalism was published, this tenet of his argument was relatively inert and inoffensive because academics were already exploring the relations between colonialism and the cultural power structures that enforced it. At the time of its publication, it was widely understood that colonialism was established and sustained not only through military, economic, and political exertions of power, but through cultural might as well.⁵

The establishment of British rule in India in the late 1700s exemplifies the overt colonial appropriation of knowledge for the purpose of consolidating power.⁶ In 1772, the first governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, proposed a plan to rule India according to local customs; the primary goal was to establish a politically stable position for the British. His plan was for the East India Company to “adapt [its] Regulations to the Manners and Understandings of the People, and the Exigencies of the Country, adhering as closely as [it is] able to their ancient uses and Institutions.”⁷ Though there were elements of genuine scholarly curiosity in the Orientalist tradition of this period, Warren Hastings was only able to fund British scholarship on Indian law, religion, linguistics, and culture because it was useful to the state. In 1784, Hastings made the political utility of Oriental knowledge clear in a letter to Nathaniel Smith:

“Every accumulation of knowledge and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state…it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence.”⁸

Thus, at its core, there is nothing discordant about the foundation of Said’s argument, which took Foucault’s equation that knowledge is irrevocably tied to power and applied it to the colonial project to argue that, specifically, Orientalist knowledge implicates colonial power. As this example has shown, the British in India unabashedly compiled and assessed knowledge of the Orient with the explicit purpose of accumulating power.

What made Said’s argument provocative was the assertion that this was not a thing of the past; he argued that modern scholarship written by “the West” about “the East” was still guilty of this highly, but often insidiously, politicized scholarship.⁹ As one historian has described the consequences of this discourse: “Once his special knowledge enabled the orientalist and his countrymen to gain trade concessions, conquer, colonize, rule, and punish in the East. Now it authorizes the area studies specialist and his colleagues in government and business to aid and advise, develop and modernize, arm and stabilize the countries of the so- called third world.”¹⁰ Drawing from Foucault, Said writes with the conviction that pure scholarship does not exist, that all knowledge is inherently political, and that the act of describing the Orient is inescapably an act of power, even in Orientalist scholarship today.

At the heart of Orientalism, Said poses the necessary question: “Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly distinct cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” Above all else, this is a moral question, and it is a question to which there is still no conclusive or satisfactory answer; Said merely meant to set discussion in motion. Rather than formulating an alternative to Orientalism, his project was “to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system with a new one.” Though Said is correct to draw attention to ways that Orientalism essentializes non-Western cultures, he tends to essentialize Orientalism itself; he makes broad generalizations about Orientalists as he describes the broad generalizations they make and have made about the Orient.¹¹ A Marxist historian tends to looks for class struggles to explain certain historical events, and they’re often there, and a feminist historian might look for gender relations to explain history. Similarly, in Said’s Orientalism, he looks for evidence of unequal power dynamics between the East and the West to make sense of Oriental representations. That isn’t to say that evidence of class struggles, gender disparities, and Western assertions of power are not useful criteria on which to judge historical events, but these are not the only ways to understand the causes and effects of historical happenings.

Said’s thesis flattens the complexity of the Orientalist tradition into a single narrative: a narrative of power. It says, essentially,¹² that no matter what someone says about the Orient, there is a way to understand that proclamation as an instance of power over it, and thus to negate its validity. While this is an important aspect of Orientalism to understand as it has resounding implications, it is not the only measure that we can assess its value by. When we step outside of Said’s prejudices against Orientalism, we can come up with countless ways of understanding what factors contributed to their productions and how they affected the world; the answer does not always have to be “power,” though power may be present. In the remainder of this paper, I will discuss certain limitations when Said’s thesis is applied to the case of British Orientalist studies of India in the late eighteenth century.

I will focus on three particular complexities in the discourse that we might overlook when viewing this case solely through the lens of Said. In the first section, I will discuss the place of Indian agency in Orientalism. My first goal in this section is to show that Indians were not passive objects of study, which Said's analysis often implies. Indian pandits had agency in this discourse, profoundly influencing the direction of Orientalist studies. Additionally, in this section I will show that although the Orientalist tradition carried an embedded power structure in which the British wrote authoritatively about Indian traditions, there was a further embedding of power that Said overlooks: brahman men often spoke on behalf of all other Indian groups in this discourse. Indian elites worked with the British, and both parties gained certain powers and authority from the Orientalist discourse. My goal in this section is to show the dynamism of the power relations between the British representatives of the East India Company and the native Indian intellectuals in the early stages of British rule.

In the second section, I will outline some of the contributions that the first wave of British Orientalists made, pointing out that much of their work was both grounded in reality and useful enough that scholars consider them valuable even to this day. Said prejudices all Orientalist contributions because they represent the exertion of power over the Orient; this view, however, tends to overlook potential scholarly value in the content of their studies.¹³

In the final section, I will show that many of the early British Orientalists denounced unfair portrayals of the Orient with criticisms that Said would have agreed with. Said tends to downplay any kind of “good” Orientalism that is nonreductive; he often, as one historian has put it, “relapses into the essentializing modes he attacks.”¹⁴ My aim in this section is to discuss the ways that this wave of Orientalists treated the study of India with more nuance than those that came before them; to guide the discussion, I will cite their own writings that criticized the work of their predecessors.

By applying Said’s thesis to the case of early British India, I hope to draw attention to certain weak points in his argument that are not immediately apparent in his examples of Orientalism in relation to the Middle East. My main point is that by fixing our gaze on the power of the Occident over the Orient, we miss out on other features that add to a fuller, richer, and more nuanced view of history.

Indian Voices

Said’s sustained focus on colonial domination in Orientalism downplays Oriental agency in the making of the discourse. He focuses on the power that the Orientalists exert over the Orient in their studies, but this further divides the perceived differences between the East and the West; as an unintended consequence, he leaves us with an image of a victimized and

helpless Orient in the face of the powerful Orientalists. His argument is founded on the premise that “at most, the ‘real’ Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it.” He argues that “despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient,” there is nevertheless a “general internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient.” Said fixes his gaze on this “internal consistency” within Orientalism that transcends these authentic interactions with the “real” Orient; thus, he downplays the contributions that the Orient might have made to Orientalism. This notion of a muted Orient in the making of the Orientalist discourse does not adhere to the reality of early British India, when Indian pandits held significant sway in determining how the British understood Indian culture. The early British Orientalists produced scholarship based on accounts that local informants gave them; it is fallacious to ascribe responsibility for their productions disproportionately to the British.¹⁵

David Lorenzen’s argument in “Who Invented Hinduism?” falls along this line of thinking. In it, he refutes the claim of many modern scholars that Hinduism was, by and large, invented by the British in the nineteenth century. This view, as Lorenzen points out, privileges the agency of the colonists over that of the Indians; even the scholars who knew the Indian languages well relied heavily on native pandits as teachers and informants. Though he argues that Hinduism was not invented in the colonial period, he claims: “If Hinduism was invented, it was invented by European and Indian scholars working in tandem.”¹⁶

To establish the appropriate laws to govern the Hindus, Warren Hastings hired eleven of the pandits in Bengal to compile Hindu legal and ethical codes. When a British administrative disaster in Bengal in 1765 led to a famine that killed a third of its population and left large swathes of farmland in waste, Hastings was appointed as governor-general to develop an administration to reform the assessment and collection of land revenues. He believed that accessing Hindu texts would provide the key to Indian knowledge and experiences, and thus to successful governance in India. As such, he hired a group of British servants of the East India Company to work with the pandits and sort through the texts; the project was driven by both scholarly interest and pragmatism aimed at compiling native knowledge in order to facilitate British control of Indian society.¹⁷

This power dynamic exemplifies Said’s argument that Oriental knowledge was intimately connected to colonial power, but Said’s argument overlooks that power that pandits gained from the exchange. It would be simplistic to view this relationship as nothing but a will- to-power on the part of the British, which would be the most (if not only) relevant feature in light of Said’s Orientalism. My aim in what follows is to illustrate the dynamic assertion of power on both sides of the relationship; I will accomplish this task by presenting evidence from the late eighteenth century Orientalist texts that show the limits of British power in their intellectual conversations with the pandits. My argument is not that both parties shared equal power in the discourse, but that Indians were not passive observers in the making of Orientalism.

At the outset of the Orientalist project, much of Hastings’ political and intellectual agenda was geared towards appeasing powerful Hindu elites, who constituted the majority of the established landholding class in Bengal. Both parties agreed that the previous Muslim rulers had neglected the rights of the Hindus. Thus, by offering to restore their rights, Hastings won favor among this demographic. In Hastings’ overtly self-congratulatory view:

Very natural causes may be ascribed for their reluctance to communicate the mysteries of their learning to strangers, as those to whom they have been for some centuries in subjection, never enquired into them, but to turn their religion into derision, or deduce from them arguments to support fine intolerant principles of their own. From our nation they have received a different treatment, and are no less eager to impart their knowledge than we are to receive it.¹⁸

This policy of Hindu empowerment assured cooperation in Hastings’ efforts to consolidate colonial power. The British gained power by giving power to upper class Hindus; both groups gained certain favors in the exchange.¹⁹

Bengali pandits played critical roles as informants and teachers to the British Orientalists, shaping the discourse in this way as well. Even scholars with considerable linguistic skills regularly sought the assistance of pandits to help them determine which texts were important, how to decipher the language properly, and how to make sense of the meaning of the texts. As Sir William Jones, a scholar hired by the East India Company, put it: when dealing with Hindu literature, “the notion of infinity presents itself.”²⁰ Though Jones and his cohorts actively worked to simplify the complex histories of their subjects and to publish their findings via the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the pandits were entrusted to do a large part of the work. The Indian intellectuals played a major part in the Asiatic Society, especially when they could join the society as full members in 1829.²¹

Thus, the eleven pandits working for the East India Company had profound control in determining what the British would consider to be the critical Hindu texts and how these texts would be understood. Hastings included a short introductory letter in Halhed’s “A Code of Gentoo Laws,” published in 1776. He admitted:

“I could have wished to have obtained an omission or amendment of some passages, to have rendered them more fit for the public eye; but the Pundits, when desired to revise them, could not be prevailed upon to make any alterations, as they declared, they had the sanction of their Shaster, and were therefore incapable of amendment.”²²

Even the most powerful British man in the Indian subcontinent couldn’t persuade the eleven pandits that he hired to acquiesce to his wishes. The pandits had the power to determine which texts would represent Indian traditions and how the Europeans would understand them; the British did not have complete control over this discourse.

In fact, a conspiracy theory brewed among the British because the Indian intellectuals had a monopoly over local knowledge. The British were constantly suspicious that the pandits were lying, mistranslating, and manipulating knowledge in order to meet their own ends. This lop-sided control over Indian knowledge was a major impetus for the British to develop grammar guides and dictionaries in order to by-pass the middlemen. In a letter that Sir William Jones wrote in 1785, he wrote,

“I am proceeding slowly, but surely, in this retired place, in the study of Sanscrit; for I can no longer bear to be at the mercy of our pundits, who deal out Hindoo law as they please, and make it at reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made.”²³

He wrote about his distrust on another occasion, too:

“Pure Integrity is hardly to be found among the Pandits, few of whom give opinions about a culpable bias, if the parties can have access to them.”²⁴

Thus, Orientalism was not only manipulated to meet the Orientalists’ ends, but to meet the pandits’ ends as well. Furthermore, this last example provides additional evidence of the frustration that the British felt towards the pandits for their monopoly over Indian knowledge.

Said focuses his attention on how Oriental knowledge allowed the Occident to define and thereby control the Orient; in doing so, he makes the relative power of the Occident over the Orient the center of focus. However, in eighteenth century British India, it seems equally relevant to discuss how Orientalism was used by both the British and the Bengali brahmans to consolidate their power over other communities. Through the joint effort of the pandits and the British Orientalists, the history of the brahman male’s culture and texts came to represent the history of India as a whole. The voices of all other Indian groups – the Muslims, the women, the “tribals,” the lower castes, and those of other less-privileged Indian communities – were wholly unrepresented, disregarded, and overlooked in the discourse.

Of course, this could be seen as ammunition for a Saidian reading. Coming from a Protestant background, the Orientalists privileged the written Hindu texts over lived experiences; in their view, a true understanding of India’s essence could “only be obtained in their writings.”²⁵ In the Orientalists’ effort to describe and define Indian traditions, they privileged pandits as the sole bearers of Indian wisdom. Thus, the British crystallized the brahman privilege to speak on behalf of all of India and its culture. There is nothing wrong with this Saidian narrative, but my point is that there was a more complex power dynamic involved in the creation of Orientalism than just the power of the British over the Indians. In Said’s reading, the British exerted power over India with the help of the pandits, but in an equally accurate alternate reading, the pandits exerted power over other Indian groups with the help of the British. My point is that there are multiple ways of framing this discourse, and Said’s view should not be mistaken as the only one. The native intellectuals had stakes in this discourse, and they shaped its outcomes in real and profound ways.

Orientalist Accomplishments

“Orientalist accomplishments” is not oxymoronic. By focusing his attention on the power of the European scholars, Said not only detracts attention from the power of the Indian pandits in Orientalism, but also from the potential value in the contents of this discourse. Said asserts that “Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be).”²⁶ Rather than considering potential accuracy in Orientalist scholarship, he dismisses it with blatant prejudice and contempt. I will demonstrate in this section how Orientalist knowledge is not shaped exclusively by power, but that it can have a basis in reality irrespective of the power relations involved. Said disregards the potential value of Orientalist productions because he is intent on their culturally domineering qualities. However, some of the findings of early British Orientalism remain both accurate and useful to this day.

In the case of early British India, the clearest example of valuable scholarship in Orientalist findings is Jones’ postulation of the Indo-European language family. Sir William Jones was considered as the foremost Orientalist at the time of his arrival in India in 1783, with extensive knowledge of over twenty languages including Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic.²⁷ In 1807, Jones published his hypothesis that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian must have “sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”²⁸ He based this theory on the similarities in the grammars and vocabularies of each language, and he concluded that they should all be understood as part of one language family. Jones’ grouping of these languages is considered to be the beginning of the field of linguistic science, as it marks an astoundingly modern understanding of the connections between languages. As one historian has written, “Given what we do know about phonology, morphology, and lexicography at present, no sensible person would contest that a strong, systematic relation exists among the languages of the Indo-European family. The question is how to account for that relation and how to connect this with the lived experience of human speakers.”²⁹ Although postulations about the speakers of Proto-Indo-European and about the “Aryans” are considered classic examples Orientalism at its worst, the connection between the languages is uncontested, which is also, in itself, a product of Orientalism. Some Orientalist productions were grounded more in reality and sound scholarly techniques than others were.

Jones’ theory of languages suffices as a clear example that Orientalist productions can be valuable even if they may be deemed otherwise in Said’s moral assessment of them. Said suggests that Orientalism is “bad” because it represents Occidental power, but all Orientalist productions ought to be seen as exertions of power in varying degrees; thus, they are not equally “bad”. Many Orientalists worked fervently to accurately and fairly understand non- Western cultures.

Evolving Standards in Scholarly Work

Said’s study hones in on Orientalism as “an enormously systematic discipline,” but by focusing on this common thread throughout all Orientalism, he tends to represent all Orientalists as equally reductive in their studies. However, scholarly trends and techniques evolve within Orientalism, which is a feature that Said’s work minimizes. Many of the British Orientalists of the late 1700s criticized the inaccurate and unfair portrayals of Indian culture that circulated around Europe; Said’s critique often downplays these sentiments in the discourse.³⁰ Many of these Orientalists rejected the work of their colleagues and predecessors with many of the criticisms that he sets forth. In this final section, I will discuss these Orientalists’ opinions on what constituted sound scholarship, in order to show a sympathetic and non-reductive strand of Orientalism in India; this strand, characterized by a genuine effort to understand Indian traditions and engage deeply with it, was stamped out within a only a few decades. My main point in this section is that all Orientalist productions are not equally reductive, which is evidenced by the changing standards in the discourse.

Prior to Britain’s entrance into the subcontinent in the 1750s, there were two major sources of European knowledge of India: travel writing and missionary writing, both of which were problematic. European travellers in India wrote mostly either about the strangeness of Indian customs, or about a romanticized Oriental world that they contrasted to oppressive European institutions. Thus, travelers’ accounts were largely superficial in their dealings with India, as they did not engage deeply with the local communities. Missionary literature, on the other hand, was problematic because of its overt religious bias; the goal in studying Indian traditions and languages was largely for the sake of figuring out how to convert the indigenous people.³¹ In opposition, many people in the new wave of Orientalists criticized what they believed were superficial portrayals of Indian culture that were spreading among Europeans.³²

By directly denouncing the partiality of his predecessors, John Zephaniah Holwell’s writing exemplified this oppositional sentiment: “These authors have (either from their own fertile inventions, or from mis-information, or rather from want of a competent knowledge in the language of the nation) mis-represented, or to speak more favorably, mis-conceived [India’s] religious tenets as much as they have the genius and state of their government.” By publishing papers about Indian customs, Holwell “endeavor[ed] to extricate them in some degree from the gross absurdities we have conceived of them,” claiming that “ignorance, superstition and partiality to ourselves, are too commonly the cause of presumption and contempt of others.” Holwell showed a remarkable sensitivity to the unfair treatment of the Orient as depicted in the Orientalism of his times.³³

Alexander Dow, a contemporary of Holwell, expressed a similar sentiment. He claimed that the circumstances of travel writing provided “an ample field for fiction,” and that these writers “have prejudiced Europe against the Brahmins, and by a very unfair account, have thrown disgrace upon a system of religion and philosophy, which they did by no means investigate.”³⁴ Holwell and Dow, among others such as Jones and Hastings, emphasized the importance of studying Indian languages, interacting extensively with native intellectuals, and approaching these studies with a nascent form of cultural relativism.

These Orientalists were, indeed, guilty of many of the trappings of Orientalism that Said explains in his book. For example, they were limited in their capacity to understand India outside of Western terms and outside of contemporaneous religious debates. However, these men emphasized a deep engagement with Oriental sources that was rarely seen in the Orientalist tradition in India until this point. The Orientalists of the late 1700s recognized many of the shortcomings in previous approaches to studying the Orient, and they castigated other scholars for their superficial studies of Indian culture; in short, this new wave of scholars demonstrated an awareness of certain pitfalls in the Orientalist tradition that Said points out. Viewing their work with an exclusionary focus on the politics of knowledge, as Said does, tends to paint all Orientalists with the same brush and to overlook the fact that many of them worked earnestly to engage with Indian traditions in a thoughtful manner.

Conclusion

Focusing our lens on the power dynamic tends to blur out all of the other features that make a picture whole; it tends to cut out many of the relevant features of Orientalism that allow our understanding of the world to be rich and complex. In Orientalism, Said’s main priority is to expose the oppressive qualities that are inextricable from the discourse. His argument makes sense generally and theoretically, but as we have seen in the case of early British Orientalism, it lacks nuance when applied specifically. Said claims,

“Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience;”³⁵ but as one historian has written, in Said’s discussion of Orientalism, he himself flattens the “human experience, whether that of the individual Orientalist or of his or her objects of study…into an asserted authority on one side and generalization on the other.”³⁶

Thus, his work serves as a warning against the pitfalls of overgeneralization, both proven through its content and the example of Said himself. Even so, Said’s general criticisms are valid and necessary; he is right to problematize all representations of the Orient and to point out that it is necessary to understand them as representations rather than as objective scholarship. Though I have elaborated on certain difficulties in Said’s argument, the success of his work lies in the primary issue that he raises: “how [can one] study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective,” which necessarily characterizes all Orientalism.³⁷ This central question remains relevant, in spite of Said’s limitations, which primarily spring from a lack of nuance. Said is right: Oriental knowledge is colonial power. It just happens to be other things, too.

Bibliography

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Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Dow, Alexander. “A Dissertation Concerning the Hindoos.” In The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Hastings, Warren. “A Code of Gentoo Laws.” In The Monthly Review, edited by Ralph Griffiths and George Edward Griffiths, Vol. 56. R. Griffiths, 1777.

———. “Letter to Nathaniel Smith, from the Bhagavat-Geeta.” In The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Holwell, John Zephaniah. “Religious Tenets of the Gentoos.” In The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Inden, Ronald B. Imagining India. Cambridge, MA: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Jones, William. The Works of Sir William Jones: With the Life of the Author. Edited by John Shore

Teignmouth. Vol. 4. 13 vols. London, 1807.
———. The Works of Sir William Jones: With the Life of the Author. Edited by John Shore

Teignmouth. Vol. 2. 13 vols. London, 1807.
Kejariwal, O. P. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1784-1838. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Lorenzen, David N. “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1, 1999): 630–59.

Marshall, P. J. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Mukherjee, S. N. Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Ray, Amit. Negotiating the Modern: Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, Inc., 1979.

Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. London: University of California Press, 1997.

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, Inc., 1979), p. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 2; Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 20.

3. Said, Orientalism., pp. 2-3. For discussion on the implications of Said’s redefinition of Orientalism, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 23-4.

4. Ibid.

5. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 19.

6. Ibid., p. 22.

7. Letter from the Governor-General and Council to Court of Directors, Fort William, 3 November 1772, printed in Great Britain, House of Commons, Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 4: East Indies, 1772-3 (reprinted London, 1841), 1:400; quoted in Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 26.

8. Warren Hastings, “Letter to Nathaniel Smith, from the Bhagavat-Geeta,” in The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 189.

9. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 19.

10. Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 38.

11. Said, Orientalism, pp. 45, 325.

12. My use of the word is intentionally ironic.

13. I have kept my discussion of this topic brief because the topic has been adequately addressed in Thomas R. Tratumann’s Aryans and British India, p. 225-8, from which my discussion is primarily drawn.

14. James Clifford, On Orientalism (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/orientalism-spring2011/files/On-Orientalism_Clifford0001.pdf, p. 33.

15. Said, Orientalism, pp. 22, 5.

16. David N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (October 1, 1999): p. 639.

17. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 27, 59–61.

18. Hastings, “Letter to Nathaniel Smith, from the Bhagavat-Geeta”; quoted in P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 191.

19. Amit Ray, Negotiating the Modern: Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World, Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 38-9.

20. William Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones: With the Life of the Author, ed. John Shore Teignmouth, vol. 4, 13 vols. (London, 1807), p. 112; cited in P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 20.

21. S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 121.

22. Warren Hastings, “A Code of Gentoo Laws,” in The Monthly Review, ed. Ralph Griffiths and George Edward Griffiths, vol. 56 (R. Griffiths, 1777), p. 369; quoted in Ray, Negotiating the Modern, p. 39.

23. Jones, Works of Sir William Jones: With the Life of the Author, ed. John Shore Teignmouth, vol. 2, 13 vols. (London, 1807), p. 67; quoted in Ray, Negotiating the Modern, p. 44; also, in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 69.

24. Quoted in Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 192.

25. Hastings, “Letter to Nathaniel Smith, from the Bhagavat-Geeta,” p. 189.

26. Said, Orientalism, p. 6.

27. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, p. 192.

28. Jones, Works, ii, p. 268; quoted in Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 38.

29. Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, p. 212.

30. In this section, I draw from Clifford’s general criticism that Said’s study tends to downplay sympathetic and nonreductive strands of the Orientalist tradition, and apply it specifically to the case of early British India; see Clifford, On Orientalism, p. 25.

31. O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1784-1838 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 9–16.

32. For further discussion on the ways that this new wave of Orientalists distinguished themselves from the previous, see Trautmann, Aryans and British India, pp. 30–37.

33. John Zephaniah Holwell, “Religious Tenets of the Gentoos,” in The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 53, 50, 48.

34. Dow, “A Dissertation Concerning the Hindoos,” pp. 108–9; Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 35.

35. Said, Orientalism, p. 328.

36. Clifford, On Orientalism, pp. 26–7.

37. Said, Orientalism, p. 24.