Akbar's dream: Moghul toleration and English/British orientalism

Modern Philology

Volumn 104, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 379-411

  Stevens, Paul ^a   Sapra, Rahul ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b RYERSON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249430295     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/517938     Document Type: Article

References (153)

1. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 402, 945.
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and, Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993), 18.
3. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 114.
4. For the invention of tradition, see, e.g., Bernard Colin, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165-209.
5. See also David Cannadine, Ornamentalem: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 41-57. For the Victorian interest in rehabilitating older methods of analogy like biblical typology in relation to Tennyson,
6. see David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: Athlone, 1987), 188-230.
7. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Akbar's Dream" [1892], lines 182-84, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969);
8. references hereafter cited in the text, See Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 222-23;
9. and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 8-10.
10. For "transculturation," see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalion (London: Routledge, 1992), 1-11.
11. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000), References hereafter cited in the text.
13. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), esp. 52-54;
14. and Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969).
15. See also David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985; repr., Cambridge University Press, 2003).
16. See, for instance, Said, Orientalism, esp. 31-36, and "Orientalism Reconsidered," Race and Class 27 (1985): 1-15;
17. Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," chap. 6 in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 102-22;
18. Anthony Pagden, "lus et Factum; Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartholome de Las Casas," in New World Encounters, ed, Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 95;
19. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990; repr., London: Routledge, 1993);
20. and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
21. For Enlightenment, historicism, see Collingwood, Idea of History, 86-133;
22. and Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, 74-124.
23. See also Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 4th ed. (1978; repr., Oxford University Press, 1981), 89-116;
24. and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans, Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51-74.
25. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," 10.
26. James Mill, The History of British India (1817; repr., University of Chicago Press, 1975),
27. quoted in Colin Paul Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire (Karachi: Area Study Centre for Europe, 2000), 210.
28. Marx on India is the locus classicus for this view of Enlightenment historicism's acts of oblivion; "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on die passive basis of that, unresisting and unchanging society" ("The Future Results of British Rule in India" [1853], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First Indian War of Independence [Moscow: Progress, 1959], 32).
29. For a telling critique of Said's use of Marx on India, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New Delhi: Verso, 1992), 221-42.
30. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 124.
31. George W. Bush routinely represents the United States as "the greatest force for good in history" (see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004], 103), and Tony Blair just as often dismisses Islamic resistance to Western concepts as "reactionary"
32. (see, for instance, his White House speech, August 2006). Both these politicians subscribe enthusiastically to Bernard Lewis's historicist contention that die "backwardness" of the Muslim world is rooted in its refusal to learn from "the theory and practice of Western freedom" (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 159).
33. Jacques Derrida, Qf Grammatology, trans, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3.
34. See Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991);
35. and Paul Stevens, "Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism," New Literary History 36 (2005): 425-37.
36. By "instrumentalism" we mean "the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost-output ratio, is its measure of success" (Taylor, Malaise, 5).
37. See Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61.
38. See also Paul Stevens, "Pretending to Be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism," New Literary History 33 (2002): 491-519.
39. See Richard Helgerson, "Before National Literary History," Modern Language Quarterly 64 (2003): 169-79.
40. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East (1950; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1984);
41. and Rajan, Under Western Eyes.
42. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), esp. 3-33, 139-60.
43. Both Rajan's analysis of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (Under Western Eyes, 157-73) and Sen's opening account of the influence of the Bhagavad Gita (3-6) emphasize the degree to which the impact of India on Romanticism was not simply a matter of exoticism,
44. Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History," Representations 37 (1992): 1-26.
45. Helgerson, "Before National Literary History," 179.
46. Not even he now takes it seriously-see Francis Fukuyama, America at the Cross-roads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 53-54, for the somewhat sheepish qualification of his original argument in The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992).
47. Ahmad, In Theory, 178. Ahmad's skepticism is anticipated by Dennis Porter: "Are we so positioned by a given historical and geopolitical conjuncture that misrepresentation is a structural necessity or is there a place of truth?" ("Orientalism and Its Problems," in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. Francis Barker et al. [Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983], 179).
48. Sen is not unusual in wanting to question Said's emphasis on the Foucauldian relation between knowledge and power: "the process of learning can accommodate considerable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some grosser kind. ... We are now in some danger of ignoring other motivations altogether that may not link directly with the seeking of power" (Argumentative Indian, 143).
49. See also the powerful critiques of C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 370-72;
50. and Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British. India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. 19-27.
51. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.
52. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. John Chamberlain et al. (1925; repr., New York: Reynal Bc Hitchcock, 1939), 956, 938. References hereafter cited in the text.
53. Rudyard Kipling, commendatory letter, in Sir William Lawrence, The India We Served (London: Cassell, 1928), vii.
54. Colin, "Representing Authority," 166.
55. Royal Proclamation, November 1, 1858, in The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947, ed. C. H. Philips et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 10-11.
56. For a cogent account of how this fundamental contradiction regularly produced vacillation in imperial policy over the period 1858-1914, see Robin J. Moore, "Imperial India, 1858-1914," in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford University Press, 1999), 422-46.
57. Jowett's brothers, William and Alfred, both officers in the East India Company's army, died of disease in 1850 and 1858, respectively. Tennyson's son, Lionel, a civil servant in the India Office, died in 1886 on his way home from India. As Jowett advised another relative, "I hope you know how to live and not die in India, which I believe greatly to be an art" (The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, ed, Evelyn Abbott, 2 vols. [London, 1897], 1:19).
58. Lytton, quoted in Cohn, "Representing Authority," 187. See, for instance, Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964),
59. and An Intellectual History of Islam in India (Edinburgh University Press, 1969);
60. and John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 34-40.
61. For the similar use of Christian solar imagery - the political use of Sol Iustitiae, the "Sun of Righteousness" (Mal. 4:2)-to identify Christ the Son of God with the solar deities of the late Roman Empire,
62. see Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 258-65.
63. Sir Philip Rose to Disraeli, August. 12, 1858, in Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J. A. W. Gunn and M. G. Wiebe, 7 vols. (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 7:23 In. We are indebted to Mel Wiebe for this reference. Although Disraeli was at this time chancellor of the exchequer, he played a major role in formulating and passing the 1858 India Act.
64. See Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York University Press, 1966), 386.
65. Akbar allows Miss Quested to believe in her future as an Anglo-Indian: as she explains to Aziz, "Some women are so-well, ungenerous and snobby about. Indians, and I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like diem.... That's why I want Akbar's 'universal religion' or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible. Do you see what I mean?" (E, M, Forster, A. Passage to India [1924;
66. repr., Harmondsworth; Penguin, 2000], 157).
67. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.
68. See Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192. We are grateful to Adam Hammond for this reference.
69. See Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," 102-22.
70. In this Tennyson inadvertently recovers something of the decentering medieval tradition of travelers' stories from the East; see, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt's chapter on Mandeville in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26-51.
71. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249.
72. The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 2:720 (October 24, 1786).
73. Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 361.
74. Said, Orientalism, 78.
75. See Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 23-24.
76. Jones, Letters, 2:712-13 (October 1, 1786).
77. Ibid., 2:694 (February 27, 1786).
78. Ibid., 2:648 (April 26, 1784).
79. Ibid., 2:649 (June 22, 1784).
80. Ibid., 2:652.
81. William Jones, "Hymn to Lacshmi," in Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), lines 199-214.
82. M. L. Roy Choudhary, The Din-i-Lahi, or the Religion ofAkbar (Calcutta: Das Gupta, 1952), 6.
83. Jones, Selected, Poetical and Prose Works, 154,
84. Jones, Letters, 2:813 (September 19, 1788).
85. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 47-48.
86. Jones, Selected Poetical, and Prose Works, 154.
87. Jones, Letters, 2:766 (September 4, 1787).
88. Quoted in Dalrymple, White Mughals, 40.
89. For a rejection of the idea that Jones's imagination is ever fully engaged with India, see Jenny Sharpe, "The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; or How Sir William Jones Discovered India," boundary 2 20 (1993): 26-45. Needless to say, we disagree with her conclusions.
90. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3. References hereafter cited in the text,
91. See Sen, Argumentative Indian, esp. 41-42.
92. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 1576-1626 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
93. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, esp. 93-113;
94. and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 1991).
95. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive,
96. quoted in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 103.
97. Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law (Cambridge University Press, 1957), 140.
98. See Liali Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 14-17, 29-87. Greenfeld's thesis is now hotly disputed. See, for instance, Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999);
99. and Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
100. See also Paul Stevens, "Milton's Janus-Faced Nationalism," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 247-68.
101. See, for instance, John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 290-308;
102. and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 565-93.
103. Abu'l Fazl, Akbarnama, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (1902; repr, New Delhi: Atlantic, 1989), 2:240-43.
104. For the life and beliefs of Akbar, see Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi; A. L. Srivastava, Akbar the Great: Political, History, 1542-1605, 2 vols. (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1962), 1:61-63;
105. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar and Religion (Delhi: Idarah-iAdabiyat-i-Delli, 1989);
106. Shirin Moosvi, ed., Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and, Reminiscences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994);
107. and Irfan Habib, ed., Akbar and, His India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
108. Zahir al-Din Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 350.
109. Ibid., 332.
110. Quoted in Wheeler M. Thackston, "Literature," in The Magnificent Mughals, ed. Zeenut Ziad (Oxford University Press, 2002), 105.
111. Abdul Qadir Badauni, quoted in Thackston, "Literature," 104.
112. Richards, Mughal Empire, 34.
113. See also Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi; Nizami, Akbar and Religion, 28-77;
114. and Ahmad, Intellectual History, esp. 29-30.
115. Abu'l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:316.
116. Ibid., 2:295.
117. Abu'l Fazl's Akbar sounds strikingly like Thomas More's King Utopus: as soon as Utopus had conquered the island, "he decreed that every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and proselytize for it too, provided he did so quietly, modestly, rationally, and without bitterness to others." Utopus did this "not simply for the sake of peace, which he saw was being destroyed by constant quarrels and implacable hatreds, but also for the sake of religion itself" (Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams [Cambridge University Press, 1989], 97).
118. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619, ed. Sir William Foster, 2 vols. (1899; repr., Liechtenstein; Kraus Reprint, 1967), 1:103. For various Orientalist accounts of these travelers,
119. see Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: English, and British. Writing on India, 1600-1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995);
120. Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives !Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism, (London: Routledge, 1996);
121. John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford University Press, 2001);
122. Richmond Barbour, "Power and Distant Display: Early English Ambassadors in Moghul India," Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1999): 343-68,
123. and Before Orientalism. For a different perspective,
124. see Rahul Sapra, "A Peaceable Kingdom in the East: Favourable Early Seventeenth-Century Representations of the Moghul Empire," Renaissance and Reformation 27 (2003 [pub. 2006]): 5-36.
125. Roe's deep-rooted sense of cultural superiority is evident throughout his letters, but this passage imagining a new history of India is especially striking. The new history would culminate, he says to his friend, George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in "the arrival of our Nation on this coast, [with] their fortunate or blessed victoryes ouer their enemyes [the Portuguese] that not only sought to possesse diese quarters by themselves, and to forbid all others that Nature had left, free . .. but alsoe to abuse this people" (Roe, Embassy, 1:309).
126. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 167-85.
127. Roe, Embassy, 1:107-8.
128. Ibid., 1:110.
129. Monarchy unrestrained by written law is not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but in seventeenth-century England, dirough die influence of theories like the "Norman Yoke," it became a defining characteristic. In 1598, for instance, the future James I provided his future adversaries with ammunition by insisting that England after the Norman Conquest had been an absolute monarchy and what law there was was largely a matter of royal condescension (see The True Law of Free Monarchies, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996], 70-72). In his 1654 Second Defence of the English People, Milton sees the sources of this "medieval" absolutism as analogous to those of Indian idolatry: while Hindus "worship as gods the malevolent demons whom they cannot exorcize," the common people of England had, in "blind superstition," accepted the Norman Yoke, established "as gods ... the most impotent of mortals," and made a "sacred institution" of monarchy (Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953-82], 4:551).
130. Roe, Embassy, 1:312.
131. Terry, quoted in William Foster, ed, Early Travels in India, 1583-1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 325, 331.
132. Fitch, quoted in ibid., 16-18. There may be a memory here of Marco Polo's response to the capital of the Great Khan. From Marco Polo through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, there is a recurrent tendency to idealize China. Milton's elderly adversary, Joseph Hall, for instance, puts it this way in his youth: "who ever expected such wit, such government in China? Such arts, such practice of all cunning? We thought learning had dwelt in our part of the world; they laugh at us for it, and well may" (The Discovery of a New World [London, 1608], 13). Roe himself expresses disappointment that India, certainly in terms of commodities or "rarietyes," turns out to be something less than China
133. (see Roe, Embassy, 1:134).
134. Terry, quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 323.
135. Ibid. 315.
136. For a fine analysis of Donne's Satyre III and its relation to the powerful humanist tradition of religious toleration,
137. see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118-64.
138. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 28.
139. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Punhas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; repr., Glasgow: MacLehose and Sons, 1905-7).
140. See ibid., 4:386-87;
141. and Roe, Embassy, 1:364-67.
142. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 27.
143. The phrase "submerged challenge" is Teltscher's (ibid.);
144. Roe's denunciation can be found in Embassy, 1:367.
145. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:386.
146. On early modern "unmooring," see Benedict Anderson, "Exodus," Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 314-27.
147. Coryat is quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 269, References hereafter cited in the text.
148. The letters were first published as pamphlets in 1616/17 and 1618 and the "Observations" in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.
149. Quoted in Roe, Embassy, xlv.
150. See W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (1932-40;
151. repr., Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1965), 2:364-65.
152. Abu'l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:317.
153. Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration, 4:344.