IDOLISING THE INDOLOGISTS - Published The Statesman

‘Dialogue of Civilizations – William Jones and the Orientalists’, Mohandas Moses and Achala Moulik
Aryan Books International, 2009

‘Dialogue of Civilizations – William Jones and the Orientalists’ by Mohandas Moses and Achala Moulik documents the development of Indology under the Raj. Moulik / Moses give a well researched account of this fascinating and fertile period of intellectual discovery, touching upon the great paradox that the Indologists, while colonialists at heart, awakened India to its rich cultural heritage. Unfortunately, the authors shy away from in-depth engagement with their subject matter, contenting themselves with a form of biography that limits itself fatally by imposing its own moral framework on the period.

Mohandas Moses, a distinguished civil servant in his time, had laboured on ‘Dialogue of Civilizations…’ for 20 years until his death in 2003 whereupon his wife, Achala Moulik, completed the work. This is not to cast Moulik as the passive spouse, fulfilling her husband’s death wish: far from it. Moulik is in fact the more prolific author, with twenty-one non-fiction works to her name, and had previously aided Mohan in his research for ‘Dialogue of Civilizations…’. Touchingly, in the book’s preface, she describes the hours spent by herself and her husband researching the work as ‘some of the most happiest in our lives’.

It is a shame, then, that there is little to praise in this tribute to the Indology movement – so obviously a labour of love, on more than one count.

Picture an era when the likes of William Jones, Max Muller and Warren Hastings were unlocking what they saw as ‘the secrets of the east’, while at the same time brushing shoulders at opulent parties with Robert Clive and his cronies – men who had come to India only to “wring the natives dry” and return in pomp to Britain. The Indologists are compelling as moral and intellectual trapeze artists: treading the line between their growing knowledge of India as a cultural colossus and their duty to rule and “re-form” the Indian people.

Unfortunately, Moulik / Moses refuse to engage with these unorthodox, idiosyncratic thinkers on their own terms. Given only dry, superficially speculative accounts of the Indologists’ “lives and works”, we are forced to conclude that each man was a baffling hypocrite. We read of the Marquess of Wellesley, for example, who discouraged ‘social or matrimonial relationships with Indians’, while significantly furthering the cause of Indology through the setting up of the College of Fort William for the purpose of educating civil servants in ‘Indian history, law, religions, languages etc.’.

This seeming contradiction is noted by Moses / Moulik, but not explored. Similarly, the authors express little more than bemusement at the apparent clash between Max Muller’s advancements in the cause of Sanskrit, and his staunch dismissal of India’s history as ‘static’ and its people as ‘passive’. Warren Hastings, the Governor-General who arguably sealed Britain’s imperial destiny, is alternately reviled and admired by the authors as an ‘intellectual schizophrenic’.

The colour and fascination of the period is all but lost on Moulik / Moses, along with the realization that Muller, Hastings and their tribe each developed his own intensely personal system of belief through which to view his role within the Raj. In avoiding the complexities and paradoxes of the movement, the authors fall into the deepest trap open to such an historical work: they impose a moral trajectory on the period.

Behind the veil of neutral biography, ‘Dialogue of Civilizations…’ works on the premise that while military conflict is necessarily destructive, cultural exchange is always beneficial. Within this framework, men like Clive and Lord Cornwallis – the latter introduced the infamous Permanent Settlement - are on the side of military power, culpable of enforcing their rule on the Indian people and looting the nation’s treasures. William Jones, meanwhile, (with Warren Hastings as a kind of right-hand man) becomes a symbol for the benevolent, blameless interchange of cultures.

This naïve distinction between destructive ‘hard’ power and benevolent ‘soft’ power explains Moulik / Moses’ reluctance to delve too deeply into the individual perspectives of the Indologists. Where are we to situate the likes of Hastings, Muller and Wellesley in this framework: men who routinely justified acts of force through cultural argument?

No wonder that ‘Dialogue of Civilizations…’ homes in on the founder of the Asiatic Society, William Jones - a man who’s been memorialized in countless historical works as being above the vestiges of power. There is no doubt that Jones was an erudite academic and sincere “Indophile”: his discovery of the common roots between Latin and Sanskrit, and groundbreaking translation of the poet Kalidasa, are momentous tributes to this fact. However, Moulik / Moses conveniently sideline the scholar’s less laudable alter ego: that of Judge Jones of the Supreme Court, a man who had sailed to India in order to “fill his coffers” as a well-oiled cog in the British regime.

‘Dialogue of Civilizations…’ refuses to brave the storms of this heady intellectual movement, avoiding the proposition of military conquest and cultural invigoration as troubled bedfellows. Instead, it attempts, and fails, to place the Indologists neatly into two camps - military aggressor, and cultural ‘ally’ - leaving its prose high, but painfully dry.