Orientalist Constructions of India

Modern Asian Studies

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 1986, Pages 401-446

  Inden, Ronald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 84974224082     PISSN: 0026749X     EISSN: 14698099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X00007800     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Tr. by H.H. Gerth and D. Martindale (Glencoe, 3., Free Press, 1958). This book has been crucial in setting the agenda for the sociological study of India (and especially of modernization or Westernization) in the last twenty-five years. The last chapter, The General Character of Asiatic Religion, p. 340, makes it quite clear that Asia excludes the Middle East.
2. His global treatment is divided into three volumes. One is entitled Primitive Mythology. The other two deal with civilization. One is entitled Occidental Mythology; the volume on the Orient does include a treatment of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, but takes great pains to show that, very early on, this part of Asia was culturally continuous with the West. It then turns to the true cultural Others of Asia, India and China. First published in 1962 (New York, Viking), it has been reprinted many times, most notably by Penguin.
3. G. W. F, Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956).
4. Cast into outer darkness by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), the logical positivists, and Karl Popper (b. 1902), Hegel, a rationalist and idealist, has had a very bad reputation among the mostly empiricist and realist scholars of Britain and the U.S. in this century. It is, therefore, not implausible to suggest that most Indologists in those countries have probably not read his seminal Philosophy of History. A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove), p. 487, mentions Hegel only in connection with the part his reading of Indian texts may have had in the development of his monism. He does not, however, refer to him in his discussion of Indology (pp. 4–8). For a brief review of Hegel's views and his treatment earlier in this century, see John Cottingham, Rationalism (London: Granada, 1984), pp. 91–108. More extensive is the reading of Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), especially pp. 389–427. On Hegel and Indian philosophy, consult Wilhelm Halbfass, Indien und Europe: Perspektiven ihrer geistigen Begegnung (Basel: Schwabe, 1981), pp. 104—121.
5. American Council of Learned Societies; in Britain one would also want to mention the University Grants Committee.
6. Social Sciences Research Council; its British counterpart is the recently renamed Economic and Social Science Research Council.
7. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 122–8.
8. Jawaharlal Nehru's comments on this topic in his, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Books, 1951), pp. 59, 89–90, 428–9, are most interesting.
9. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
10. Informative from a Marxian perspective is the review by Robert Irwin, Writing about Islam and the Arabs, Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (Winter, 1981-82), 103–12.
11. Louis Renou, Religions of Ancient India (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). For a brief biography and a bibliography of his works, see Mélanges d'Indianisme à la Mémoire de Louis Renou (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1968), pp. ix-xxix, 1–5.
12. I refer here to the crisis precipitated by the historical enquiries of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, among others, into how scientists actually worked. See Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–17, 65–74.
13. Sigmund Freud, On Dreams, tr. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1952), pp. 93-—6.
14. Sigmund Freud, On Dreams, pp. 40–59; his The Inierpretation of Dreams, tr. J. Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), pp. 312–44.
15. Freud, On Dreams, pp. 73–82; his Interpretation, pp. 526–46.
16. Consult, regarding the utilitarians, Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 47–80. On Mill's evolutionism, see J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 27–9, 42–9.
17. On Jones and the establishment of the Society, see the excellent study of S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 80–90.
18. Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci, in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, ed. C. Mouffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 168–204, esp. 193–4-
19. (London: J. Madden; Piper, Stephenson and Spence, 1858).
20. A. L. Basham, James Mill, Mountstuart Elphinstone and the History of India, in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), ed., C. H. Philips, pp. 217–29; and his, Modern Historians of Ancient India, in the same volume, pp. 266–74.
21. Burrow, Evolution and Society, p. 2.
22. Renou, Religions, pp. 19–20, 47–8.
23. Ibid., pp. 52–3, 109.
24. D. Lorenzen, Imperialism and the Historiography of Ancient India, in India—History and Thought: Essays in Honour of A. L. Basham, ed. S. N. Mukherjee (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1982), p. 86.
25. Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon, in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 197.
26. Heimo Rau, The Image of India in European Antiquity and the Middle Ages, India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, ed. Joachim Deppert (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 205–6.
27. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 82.
28. I have consulted the English translation of Thomas Nugent, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: Haffner, 1949).
29. For a collection of Marx's writings on the subject, see Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri (New York: Doubleday, 1968), but beware the misleading introduction.
30. The most accessible introduction to both ideas is to be found, with references, in Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979; 1 st published in 1974), PP. 462–549. On India itself, see the rather disappointing essays in Contributions to Indian Sociology, IX (Dec., 1966), by Daniel Thorner, Marx on India and the Asiatic Mode of Production, pp. 33–66, and Louis Dumont, The “Village Community” From Munro to Maine, pp. 67–89.
31. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 178–220.
32. Well worthwhile (and a complement to Said) is the critique, following Hindess and Hirst, of the Asiatic mode in relation to Islam and developmental sociology of Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978).
33. Talal Asad, Two European Images of Non-European Rule, in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by him (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), pp. 103–118, shows how colonialist images of the Islamic states (which they did not rule) emphasized repression, while those of the tribal African states (over which they did rule) emphasized consent as the essence of those states.
34. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other—How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 31.
35. Consult, for example, the multi-authored, China, History of, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 4, 297–358.
36. Mill, History of India, 2, 165.
37. Nehru, The Discovery of India, p. 71.
38. The latest and most sophisticated is that of Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980).
39. On the important idea of substantialized agency (to be distinguished from the notion ofcode and substance in my own earlier work), see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 34, 42–5, 47–8, 81–5. On essentialism in Southeast Asian studies, see Mark Hobart, The Art of Measuring Mirages, or Is There Kinship in Bali? in Cognation and Social Organization in Southeast Asia, ed. by F. Huesken and J. Kemp (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984), in press.
40. T. G. Percival Spear, India, Pakistan and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), PP. 57. 59–60.
41. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), p. 25.
42. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, pp. 42–4.
43. Peter Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 43–4.
44. On the earlier French scholars, whom I have neglected here, see Raymond Schwab (1884–1956), The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; 1 st pub., 1950). More recent is Jean Bies, Littérature française et pensée hindoue dès origines à 1950 (Strasbourg: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1973). For a (philosophically) critical review of the various American, mostly idealist, appropriations of Indian philosophy, see Dale Riepe, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought (Springfield, II.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970).
45. Consult, for Herder and the early German romantics, Helmuth von Glasenapp, Das Indienbild deutscher Denker (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1960), pp. 14–32; and Wilhelm Halbfass, Indien und Europa, pp. 86–103 and references.
46. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 202–207. The title of Creuzer's work is, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker.
47. Mitter, Much Maligned, pp. 208–20.
48. Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 123–31.
49. For Creuzer's treatment of myth and religion, see Fritz Kramer, Verkehrte Welten. Zur imaginaeren Ethnographie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977), pp. 15–38. On his relationship to the other romantic theorists of the symbol, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, tr. C. Porter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), especially pp. 216–18.
50. Halbfass, Indien und Europa, pp. 151–3.
51. Consult Roger Lipsey's Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), III (His Life and Work). A good example of his views is The Philosophy of Mediaeval and Oriental Art, (reprinted in Coomaraswamy, I, 43–70), where he opposes traditional to modern instead ofOrientalf to Christian.
52. Barbara Stoler Miller's biographical essay in the book edited by her, Exploring India's Sacred Art: Selected Writings of Stella Kramrisch (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1983), pp. 3–29.
53. Vincent Brome, Jung: Man and Myth (London: Granada, 1980; first published by Macmillan in 1978), pp. 120 and 290 on Creuzer, and for other useful details.
54. Crome, Jung, p. 236. For an excellent brief discussion of Campbell, see Riepe, The Philosophy of India and Its Impact on American Thought, pp. 227–8. Riepe criticizes him for only talking about the naturalist, realist, and materialist traditions of India.
55. For some of the connections of Jung and of Goetz, Zimmer, and Eliade with Coomaraswamy, see Lipsey, Coomaraswamy, III, 203—4, 210–13. A brief account of Goetz's career by Kulke, is to be found in India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, edited by Joachim Deppert (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), pp. 13–23. For the work of Kulke and his associates, see The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa, edited by A. Eschmann, H. Kulke, and G. C. Tripathi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978).
56. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, p. 5.
57. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 25–6.
58. Arthur Maurice Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 17–19. J. H. Hutton in his hegemonic work, Caste in India (pp. 176–7), reduces Hocart's views to one theory oforigin to be mentioned among the many and then passed over. Louis Dumont and David Pocock wrongly, in my view, reject Hocart's focus on the king in their detailed review, A. M. Hocart on Caste, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Number 2 (1958), 45–63. The thoughtful discussion of Hocart's views by Rodney Needham in his new edition of Hocart's Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) effectively rehabilitates his work.
59. Said, Orientalism, pp. 284–328.
60. Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973), Table 9.3.
61. For a general survey of Russian Indology, see G. Bongard-Levin and A. Vigasin, The Image of India: The Study of Ancient Indian Civilization in the USSR (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984).
62. Crucial for this shift with respect to India is The United States and India and Pakistan, authored by the doyen of American Indologists, W. Norman Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) and successively updated.
63. Carl Pletsch, The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1990 Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23. 4 (Oct. 1981), 565–90.
64. Cedric Robinson, Indiana Jones, The Third World and American Foreign policy: a review article, Race and Class, 24. 2 (Autumn 1984), 87.
65. Barrington, Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1967).
66. Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: Le systeme des castes et ses implications, first published in 1966. See the revised English translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 33–49, 65–72, 152–8, and especially, 287–313.
67. McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden, Caste Systems, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 3, 989.
68. Ronald Inden, Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in Middle Period Bengal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 73–82.
69. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 13, 132–58.
70. A critique of evolutionism is Robert A. Nisbet's Social Change and History (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). On the anti-democratic implications of evolutionism, see Paul Q. Hirst, Social Evolution and Sociological Categories (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976). For a critique of functionalism see Anthony Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 96–129. A concise treatment of behaviorism is available in Edmund Ions, Against Behaviouralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).
71. See the discussion of Hacking, Representing and Intervening, Part B, especially pp. 220.
72. Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially Guha's Introduction, pp. 1–8.
73. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972—1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78–108.