!Vn■; from Milton to Macaulay 
 
 Bafadiandra Rajart 
 
UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
 S'® 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/underwesterneyes01raja 
 
UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
 India from Milton to Macaulay 
 
 Balachandra Rajan 
 
 <5X3 
 
 Duke University Press Durham a) London 
 
© 1999 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America on 
 acid-free paper © 
 
 Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Tseng Information 
 Systems, Inc. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear 
 on the last printed page of this book. 
 
This book is dedicated to 
 
 The Shining One 
 Who came out of the first lotus 
 And who still wears its perfume 
 In the waterfall of her hair 
 
Contents 
 
 Acknowledgments ix 
 
 Introduction: Preliminary Navigations i 
 
 1 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 31 
 
 2 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on 
 Milton's India 50 
 
 3 Appropriating India: Dryden's Great Mogul 67 
 
 4 James Mill and the Case of the Hottentot Venus 78 
 
 5 Hegel's India and the Surprise of Sin 100 
 
 6 Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers 
 on India 118 
 
 7 Monstrous Mythologies: Southey and The Curse 
 of Kehama 139 
 
 8 Understanding Asia: Shelley's Prometheus Unbound 157 
 
 9 Macaulay: The Moment and the Minute 174 
 Afterword: From Center to Circumference 198 
 Notes 213 
 
 Index 261 
 

Acknowledgments 
 
 Chapter i of this book was presented at the 1994 ACCUTE confer¬ 
 ence in Calgary and was published in English Studies in Canada 
 23, no. 1 (March 1997). Chapter 2 was presented at the International 
 Milton Symposium in Vancouver in 1991 and was published in Of 
 Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, edited by 
 P. G. Stanwood (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts 
 and Studies, 1994). Chapters 4-6 were presented in an earlier form 
 as the Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 
 1994. Chapter 6 was published in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial 
 Culture, 1780-1834, edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh 
 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Chapter 7 was pre¬ 
 sented at the 1997 conference of the North American Society for the 
 Study of Romanticism and was published in the European Roman¬ 
 tic Review (Summer 1998). All published material has been substan¬ 
 tially revised for this book. I am grateful for the early exposure given 
 to parts of this book and for the opportunities I have had to benefit 
 from this exposure. 
 
 Parts of this book were also read at Queen's University,- Brock 
 University,- the International Association of University Professors 
 of English; the 1995 International Milton Symposium; the Universi¬ 
 ties of Delhi, Jadavpur, Goa, and Kurukshetra,- Sahitya Akademi; the 
 India International Centre; and the Indira Gandhi National Centre. 
 
 Catherine Belsey, Marilyn Butler, David Clark, and Tilottama 
 Rajan read parts of the manuscript and helped me with their com¬ 
 ments. Janel Mueller was unfailingly supportive, particularly on 
 those occasions when I felt my reach exceeded my grasp. 
 
 I am deeply grateful to all those whose interest and hospitality 
 encouraged me to persevere in the arduous task of completing this 
 book late in my life as a scholar. 
 
UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
 03 
 
Introduction: 
 Preliminary Navigations 
 
 This book is in part the narrative of a discourse, tracing its develop¬ 
 ment, its consolidations, and the ways in which it lent itself to its 
 unraveling. Milton can be seen as a central presence in both the ar¬ 
 ticulation and the dismantling of this discourse. When he published 
 Paradise Lost, the East India Company had been in existence for 
 two-thirds of a century. It was a business concern and preferred to re¬ 
 main innocent of the links between profit and empire that Milton's 
 work disturbingly uncovered. Commerce rather than conquest was 
 supposed to distinguish English overseas interests from the Spanish 
 performance. Trade did not follow the flag as in the conventional se¬ 
 quence, but as later events would make evident, the flag inevitably 
 was to follow trade. 
 
 Commerce and conquest could be dissociated in the rhetoric of 
 nationhood, but mercantilist thought, 1 national security, the com¬ 
 petitive advantages of privileged access to raw materials and mar¬ 
 kets, enlarging the elect nation's territorial holdings and protect¬ 
 ing it aggressively from its enemies were powerful stimulants in the 
 other direction. The Dutch were more matter-of-fact in these mat¬ 
 ters than the British, their self-interest less camouflaged by literary 
 confusions. They recognized early and explicitly that commerce and 
 empire were not merely interdependent but almost interconstitu- 
 tive of each other. "We cannot carry on trade without war nor war 
 without trade," wrote Jan P. Coen, the founder of Batavia, in a state¬ 
 ment remarkable for its threatening interchanges. 2 A later governor, 
 Antonio van Diemen, found himself taught not by ripe reflection 
 but by "daily experience" that "the Company's trade in Asia cannot 
 subsist without territorial conquest." 3 
 
 The British were slower to reach this conclusion than the Dutch, 
 but by 1689, we find the East India Company insisting that it 
 
had to become not merely a trading community but a "nation in 
 India." Without the support provided by this expatriate nationhood, 
 the company's employees would remain no more than "interlopers 
 united by his Majesty's royal charter, fit only to trade where nobody 
 of power thinks it their interest to prevent us." The English nation 
 in India is formed here by commercial necessity and perhaps seeks 
 only parity with India's other subnations. No such restrictions mar 
 the robust declaration of Joshua Child, who managed the company's 
 affairs for over two decades. Confident not only of the future but 
 also of its imperial shape, Child wrote in 1687 of "the foundation of 
 a large, well-grounded, secure English dominion in India for all time 
 to come." 4 
 
 At the time of this stentorian prophecy, Britain's dominion in 
 India amounted to little more than a toehold. The narrow strip of 
 land on which Madras was built had been granted to the company 
 by the Vijayanagar Kingdom, then in decline. Its English population 
 was about 300. Before Robert Clive, its most distinguished citizen 
 was Elihu Yale, who arrived from Connecticut in 1672 and rose to be¬ 
 come the governor of Fort St. George fifteen years later. His fortune 
 when he left India was estimated at $5 million. To the university that 
 bears his name, he left the sum of £500, two trunks of textiles, and 
 417 books. 
 
 On the other side of the South Indian peninsula was Bombay. It 
 came as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza to the English 
 king, Charles II, who, not knowing quite what to do with it, leased 
 it to the company for £10 annually and a loan of £50,000 at 6 per¬ 
 cent. 5 The loan was at the prevailing rate, and since Madras was then 
 valued at a mere £6,000 in the company's books, the transaction 
 was less lopsided than it seems. The company dutifully paid the rent 
 until 1730. With an aggressive Mahratta presence in the hinterland 
 and with tropical illnesses rife in Bombay itself, life in that outpost 
 could be brief and unpleasant. 6 Nevertheless, it took three years 
 and the presence of three British men-of-war for the Portuguese to 
 hand over this part of the dowry. Bombay grew in importance, out¬ 
 stripping in the 1680s the trading depot the British had established 
 at Surat in 1612, which was the first footprint of their presence in 
 India. 7 
 
 Although Milton writes of the East India Company's ships as 
 "close sailing from Bengala," Calcutta had not yet been founded. 
 The site was tossed to the British almost negligently by the Mughal 
 regime and survived an inconclusive encounter between Aurang- 
 
 2 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
zeb's army and the company's forces. 8 In an unpromising terrain, the 
 specific location of Calcutta was chosen because Job Charnock fan¬ 
 cied a banyan tree in the neighborhood. 9 A century later, Calcutta 
 was a prosperous city, culturally vigorous, the home of the Bengali 
 Renaissance, described by some as the Paris of the East. 10 The ban¬ 
 yan tree itself flourished in literature from the time that Milton, 
 placing it in "Malabar or Deccan," invoked it as the tree Adam and 
 Eve used to cover up their shame. After the 1857 trauma, Lady Can¬ 
 ning painted it symptomatically in the sepia monochrome of India's 
 alienness. 
 
 The empire may have been acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, 
 but the discourse that justified it does not give that impression. The 
 discourse was formed by its distancing from Spanish cruelty, by a 
 construction of Ireland ill at ease with that distancing, by the femi¬ 
 nization of the Orient that from Virgil onward had been entrenched 
 in Western perceptions, 11 by situating that feminization in Milton's 
 highly hierarchical universe, and by appropriating for imperial pur¬ 
 poses the structures and valuations of that universe. 
 
 In opening up and filling in this highly compressed summary, we 
 become aware of the deep entanglements of English imperialism in 
 the early stages of its self-articulation. The classical relationship in 
 which a dominant self defines a subjected other and then defines 
 itself by the exclusion of that other is only one of several axes of ref¬ 
 erence. We have an imperial other in Spain and a theological other in 
 Rome, linked in a formidable and unholy alliance. Perceptions of the 
 New World are poised on an uneasy discrimination between settle¬ 
 ment and occupation. Perceptions of the Old World are poised on an 
 equally uneasy discrimination between commerce and empire. 
 
 These multiple othernesses and the interplay between them con¬ 
 stitute the uncertain and often invaded space in which English im¬ 
 perialism must articulate itself. It is not surprising that the articu¬ 
 lation is defensive. It is ironic as we move down the trail of history 
 that an articulation originally defensive should have such expansive 
 and dominating consequences. 
 
 The space of self-formation is not simply harassed by multiple 
 othernesses. It is also harassed by an interior imperialism that takes 
 possession of the fallen self and enters into collusive arrangements 
 with the imperial others on the fallen self's horizon. An indepen¬ 
 dence struggle within the self must somehow discover a rhetoric 
 that reconciles its own decolonization with the aims of an empire it 
 seeks beyond itself. 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
A rhetoric that performs these functions will not be seamless. It 
 will be crevassed with equivocations that, as they are forced into 
 explicitness, will result in the reluctant clarification and the pro¬ 
 gressive dismantling of the very ideology that proclaims them. The 
 rhetoric will also be characterized by a self-justifying compulsion 
 that is inherent in its uneasiness: its desire to account for and yet to 
 protect itself. 
 
 These ambivalences are further complicated because the earli¬ 
 est theater for English imperial constructions was Ireland. England 
 could disavow the black legend, but Ireland, as a Catholic country, 
 had to be seen as participating in that legend. Ireland therefore had 
 to be constructed not simply as backward and consequently pre- 
 Christian but also as backward and anti-Christian. 12 As an outpost 
 of demonic imperialism, a papal Cuba in a Renaissance cold war, it 
 could only be dealt with, made safe as well as made new, by resort¬ 
 ing to that root-and-branch propensity endemic to breakaway Prot¬ 
 estant thought. 13 In the process, the line was blurred between com¬ 
 merce and plunder, settling and ravaging began to go together, and 
 Spanish cruelty resurfaced in zeal against a people not only barba¬ 
 rous but also given to a religion that was the antithesis of everything 
 for which the Reformation stood. To fulminate against Spain while 
 doing much of what Spain allegedly did when the problem was Ire¬ 
 land was a rhetorical feat calling for some dexterity or for a compart- 
 mentalization in which the left hand could remain ignorant of what 
 the right hand was doing; it was more common to stumble into the 
 second course, but neither could give comfort to the literary intelli¬ 
 gence. 
 
 Discomfort is evident in book 5 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, widely 
 treated as the Irish book. 14 It draws back significantly from the poli¬ 
 cies advocated in A View of the Present State of Ireland. Of these 
 withdrawals, the most complex is in the Amazonian cantos. Radi- 
 gund, the Amazon Irish queen, bears a name whose derivation has 
 yet to be satisfactorily traced, but much can be gained by treating 
 her as representing the militant tradition in the Celtic feminine. 
 Artegall, sometimes identified with Lord Grey, Queen Elizabeth's 
 deputy in Ireland, 15 is unable to overcome Radigund in battle because 
 of his susceptibility to what Milton's Adam describes as "beauty's 
 powerful glance" (Paradise Lost 8.533). 16 Stripped of the superiority 
 inherent in his manhood, he is reduced to a compliant femininity 
 that mirrors Ireland's status vis-a-vis England in the hierarchy that 
 Radigund has usurped. It remains for Britomart cum England to kill 
 
 4 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Radigund in combat, put her followers to rout, and bring the fallen 
 Artegall back to Englishness. 
 
 We can say that the Amazonian episodes dramatize the patriar¬ 
 chal overwriting of a Celtic culture resistant to patriarchy and repre¬ 
 sented as dangerously subversive both in its militancy and in its be- 
 guilements. That culture, however, is overwritten and not eradicated, 
 as A View's cultural politics brutally recommend. It is significant 
 that Talus, Artegall's companion and a figure for violence unrestrict¬ 
 edly used to settle troublesome problems, is made to desist by Brito- 
 mart from exterminating Radigund's followers (5.7.35-36). Talus is 
 in fact a dubious asset, performing tasks that are unpleasant but 
 necessary as Artegall looks the other way and sometimes acting on 
 his own initiative. Spenser is clearly troubled throughout this book 
 by the difficulties of bringing justice (Artegall's virtue) to bear on in¬ 
 tractable situations without resorting to a degree of force that would 
 take charge of these situations. The mob scenes in book 5, which are 
 strikingly frequent, further concede the inevitability and the inevi¬ 
 table excesses of force in attempting to deal with popular discontent. 
 
 Despite an anti-Catholic fervor that in the 1640s intensified into 
 hysteria, these misgivings are not abandoned in the book's last epi¬ 
 sode. Landing in Ireland, Artegall meets the hostile Papist followers 
 of the Roman Catholic monster, Grantorto. Talus immediately em¬ 
 barks on their wholesale slaughter. Artegall restrains him from 
 proceeding further so that the issue can be settled by single com¬ 
 bat. Single combat can be seen as symbolically destroying the cause 
 rather than the effects and as freeing Irena-Ireland from a captivity 
 we can treat as foreign to her nature (5.12.4-9). 
 
 In charting the uneasy poise between the necessity and the limits 
 of force, the Irish book also suggests that there can be other drag¬ 
 ons besides those threatening maidens in distress. Feminine Ireland 
 here anticipates India in its waylaying of mission-driven knights in 
 imperial armor. There are differences, of course, but the differences 
 merely multiply the betrayals possible within the containment of 
 subversive femininity. 
 
 English constructions of Ireland and India obviously differ, but 
 they are both "children of the same parent" and the characteristics 
 of the elder child are easily transferable to the younger one. 17 Facili¬ 
 tating this transfer are the claimed Oriental origins of the Irish—an 
 ancestry that Spenser and Sir John Temple, among others, invoke 
 for pejorative purposes. 18 Byron's more tolerant view, which also re¬ 
 sponds to the habitual feminization of the Orient, sees "wildness, 
 
 Introduction 5 
 
tenderness and originality" as part of "Ireland's national claim of 
 Oriental descent." 19 Shelley, too, recognizes the connection between 
 Ireland and India in the context of a universal humanism, arguing 
 that "the Celt knew the Indian" before Jupiter made such fraterniza¬ 
 tion difficult. 20 Irish romantic writers play on the connection, using 
 India as a surrogate for Ireland. The praiseworthy aim may be to 
 suggest that the subjection of two peoples distant from each other 
 is spelled out in the same language of dominance. Nevertheless, the 
 consequence is that English constructions of Ireland (influenced, as 
 we have seen, by their Reformation roots) infiltrate the way in which 
 India is perceived and the evangelical devaluations to which it is 
 later subjected. 
 
 The reverse strategy of using Ireland as a surrogate for India was 
 not practiced, probably because Indian writing in English did not 
 begin to put itself together until the approach of India's indepen¬ 
 dence. But India as wayward, treacherous, obstinate, and dangerous, 
 as unfit to be educated and fit only to be governed, is a familiar char¬ 
 acterization after 1857, reviving memories of Spenser's and Milton's 
 Ireland. The feminization of the Orient softens the accusations into 
 the stuff of which fantasies are bred, which, as might be expected, 
 remains extraordinarily durable. A century after 1857 and ten years 
 after India's independence, M. M. Kaye in The Shadow of the Moon 
 continued to speak of India as "a vast glittering, cruel, mysterious 
 land, teeming with violence and beauty" and as hiding "undreamed 
 of depths of cruelty and terror" beneath its "glamour and beauty." 21 
 Two centuries earlier, the more urbane Oliver Goldsmith, as if in 
 anticipation of later rhetoric, had described the Bengal tiger as the 
 most beautiful but also the most evil of animals. Nature with admi¬ 
 rable evenhandedness had been obliged to compensate for what it 
 bestowed in excess. 22 
 
 Imperial discourse in the last quarter of the seventeenth century 
 had acquired some of its distinctive characteristics, including a ca¬ 
 pacity for self-deception that came out of its self-troubling Reforma¬ 
 tion origins. It could still avoid confronting itself fully by arguing 
 that it had been primarily concerned with fresh religious beginnings 
 in the allegedly empty areas of the New World and that its rela¬ 
 tionship with the populous Orient would be assertively commercial 
 rather than territorially rapacious. It had yet to come to terms with 
 the acquisition of huge territories, densely inhabited, highly civi¬ 
 lized, and, until the Mughal decline, effectively governed. 
 
 Possession was soon to change perception. One hundred and fifty 
 
 6 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
years after Milton wrote his poem, the British were in undisputed 
 control of half a million square miles of the Indian subcontinent. 23 
 The French threat had ceased to exist. The Mahratta challenge had 
 been extinguished. The Mughal monarch was now the company's 
 pensioner. Forty years later, the last of a legendary line would pro¬ 
 ceed into exile, to be erased in the oblivion that was Burma. 
 
 Imperial discourse on India responded swiftly and supportively to 
 these changes in the extent and character of imperial power. This 
 book traces the presence and consolidation of that discourse through 
 a series of literary sites that exhibit the collusions of gender, com¬ 
 merce, and empire. Although several of these sites have been previ¬ 
 ously examined, sometimes extensively, they have been examined 
 little, if at all, in relation to their representation of India. Our percep¬ 
 tion of them is changed by the collusions we find in them, resulting 
 in readings of canonical and near-canonical works that differ from 
 those to which we are accustomed. These readings are not offered 
 as decisive. They are offered as necessary and as calling for future 
 readings of works of literature to take proper account of the imperial 
 presence in them. 
 
 Luis Vaz de Camoes, studied in the first chapter, is not an English 
 writer but can be considered crucial in the genealogy of English im¬ 
 perial discourse. The Lusiads, his poem celebrating Vasco da Gama's 
 passage to India, becomes, in the words of an eighteenth-century 
 English translator, the epic of those who hold possession of India. It 
 opens the gateway into an imperial terrain by making the gateway 
 itself (a sign of the submissive feminine as opposed to the shield and 
 spear of the conquering masculine) the artwork of a people request¬ 
 ing conquest. The commercial insistences of the last two books also 
 make The Lusiads an important event in a continuing commodi¬ 
 fication of the feminine that is wittily displayed both in Donne's 
 nineteenth elegy and in the metaphors through which Dryden's In- 
 damora is courted by her suitors. 
 
 Sir Richard Fanshawe was the first English translator of Camoes. 
 His translation, printed in 1655, places the poem in interesting prox¬ 
 imity to Paradise Lost (which offers among its many realignments 
 a revisionary reading of The Lusiads ) and to Dryden's Aureng-Zebe, 
 the first English literary work on an Indian subject. It is at this point 
 that the discourse of English imperialism begins to gather itself in 
 relation to India. It is also at this point that England begins to secure 
 its footholds on a subcontinent that will later pass into its undis¬ 
 puted possession. 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
By making his fictional Aurangzeb everything that the real Au- 
 rangzeb was not, Dryden elegantly defines India as the site of the 
 utterly other. After the fictional Aurangzeb is transformed by in¬ 
 version into the ideal English monarch, his marriage to Indamora 
 can then represent England's marriage to India's desirability, with 
 Nourmahal as the emblem of the Indian wildness that the husband- 
 monarch is able to control and to marginalize. 
 
 Milton tries to reconcile dissent with obedience (a paradox native 
 to forms of nationhood that were both theologically secessionist and 
 secularly imperial) by postulating a divine imperialism that must 
 prevail unconditionally over the demands of earthly monarchies. His 
 purpose in transcendentalizing imperialism is to sweep the world 
 clean of secular imitations. Instead, the omnipotence of the sacred 
 and its total command over a total containment become the para¬ 
 digms of imperial power. 
 
 By the end of the seventeenth century, it can almost be said that 
 the preliminary draft of a discourse that would govern English con¬ 
 structions of India is lying in wait for India's acquisition. The swift 
 expansion of British control over India from 1760 to 1820 is the 
 stimulus needed to activate and articulate a pre-text that, like the 
 territorial acquisition to which it can be correlated, remained dor¬ 
 mant during the first half of the eighteenth century. The conclusive 
 voice in that articulation is James Mill's. Mill and Hegel standard¬ 
 ize and harden imperial discourse, putting the other into the lumber 
 room of history as well as at the outskirts of civilization. 
 
 The immediate aim of Hegel's German agenda, as distinct from 
 the world agenda that his totalization of the realm of knowledge im¬ 
 plies, is to deal with the Indie infatuation of his compatriots, the 
 openness to otherness of thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel. 24 Seal¬ 
 ing off that otherness and reducing it to irrelevance by the march of 
 history are measures that respond decisively to a local malady, but in 
 Hegel's compendious frames of thought, they also provide that philo¬ 
 sophical sustenance that the rhetoric of English imperialism has so 
 far lacked. Germany when Hegel wrote was apart from Prussia, little 
 more than a collection of baronies, but England, as a nation-state 
 with a swiftly expanding empire, could be both the current vehicle 
 of the idea and the prophetic statement of what Germany might be¬ 
 come. The Hegel-Mill conjunction and the devaluing force of its ap¬ 
 plication to India mark a move in English imperial ideology that is 
 only superficially exotic. Englishing Hegel does not merely acknowl¬ 
 edge the international nature of imperialism and Hegel's primacy as 
 
 8 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
an imperialist thinker; it also builds on a root-and-branch disposi¬ 
 tion toward otherness that is entrenched in English anti-Catholicism 
 and in the construction of Ireland as a subjected people. 
 
 The Mill-Hegel consolidation becomes dominant in imperial 
 thought and rhetoric but falls short of hegemonic status. It cannot 
 fully insulate itself from its previous dispersions, dispersions mark¬ 
 ing a period of contestation that in effect extends over the romantic 
 era. Romantic literature is troubled not simply by the forces of insta¬ 
 bility, textual and thematic, that reside in any discourse but also by 
 the competitive presence and final overwriting of another discourse 
 (for which William Jones provides a scholarly substantiation) more 
 hospitable to literary undertakings than the view that eventually 
 prevailed. Much of romantic literature acquires its richness by being 
 written on the fault line between these two discourses, by being 
 forced into contention with itself, by being required to comply and 
 called on to protest. Sydney Owenson's effort to question a discourse 
 that she enters by a dramatic act of cooperation with it, Southey's 
 war between his Indian poem and its prefaces, and Shelley's dissocia¬ 
 tion of India as a country of the mind from an actual India surren¬ 
 dered to Mill-Hegel characterizations are all expressive of an over¬ 
 determination that may run persistently through romantic works, 
 even through those to which the empire seems peripheral. 
 
 Overdetermination is a concept that tends to substitute the en¬ 
 tangled site for the uncertain author. The examples charted above — 
 sharply different in their responses to similar pressures—indicate 
 that the author is not only not in hiding but also obstinately active 
 on the site. More important, they suggest the power of literature 
 to flow around ideologies, to acknowledge and even propitiate their 
 powerful presences but to interrogate them through circumvention 
 rather than through the simpler forms of protest. 
 
 When Macaulay's minute eventually puts the seal of approval on 
 Englishing India rather than on reforming India's institutions, it es¬ 
 tablishes an important prevarication supporting both the perma¬ 
 nence and the withering away of empire. India's otherness can be 
 collapsed into likeness, and the effort to do so can sustain the no¬ 
 bility of the imperial project as a self-consuming artifact. But India's 
 otherness can also remain obdurately resistant to transformation. 
 The project will then be frustrated, but the frustration will felici¬ 
 tously prolong an imperial rule to which there is no alternative. 
 
 The afterword permits itself some expansion of contexts. It con¬ 
 siders contestations between center and margin, unity and diver- 
 
 Introduction 9 
 
sity, closure and openness, and related polarities and pairings laid 
 down in imperial discourse but also defensively present in national¬ 
 ist counterdiscourse. It endeavors to clear a space for understanding 
 in which a contemporary India might imagine itself and seeks to re¬ 
 claim this vocabulary for that space in a manner not controlled by 
 the pressures of either discourse. 
 
 This book can be characterized as a historical study with its cen¬ 
 ter of gravity in the romantic era, carried out from a postcolonial 
 vantage point. It might be argued that postcolonialism is at this 
 moment in a state too formative and too involved with its own 
 self-definitions to be able to offer us a vantage point. But postcolo¬ 
 nialism's emancipatory difficulties are concerned less with how to 
 read literary history than with how to reduce from presence to ir¬ 
 relevance discourses it has disowned but with which it remains 
 entangled. Eradicating these discourses or seeking recourse to an 
 imagined authenticity behind them are attractive but not effective 
 strategies. Imperial discourse on India in particular makes use of 
 Indian history and thought, appropriating it and resituating it so that 
 a total rejection of it would also reject much that is important in 
 India's understanding of itself. Bypassing these troubles by invoking 
 a prelapsarian, classical India refers us to a location in and out of 
 history. Such a paradigmatic construction has its uses. Distillations 
 of history appeal to the proposition that history should be read as 
 the poem of the possible. But history is also the stubborn story of 
 how the possible has been betrayed. Two kinds of literature must be 
 read in their complex conjunction. Amid the anxieties of liberation, 
 the second story may have more to tell us. 
 
 Contemporary difficulties in arriving at a discourse fully emanci¬ 
 pated from imperialism's residues are anticipated notably by Shelley. 
 When the Spirit of the Hour in Prometheus Unbound describes the 
 "tools and emblems" of humankind's "last captivity" as "not o'er 
 thrown but unregarded," 25 he is indicating a purgatory we may not 
 yet have entered. The tools and emblems are still anxiously regarded, 
 and their subversive possibilities are by no means a thing of the past. 
 
 Reclamation rather than eradication may seem the appropriate 
 route to take. In the final stanzas of Shelley's poem, Demogorgon 
 uses imperial language to articulate not a resurgent imperialism but 
 the way in which that resurgence is to be overcome. His reappropria¬ 
 tion can be considered audacious, but the lines remain vulnerable 
 in their self-conscious persuasion by excess, their dependence on a 
 vocabulary that must be both invoked and avoided: "This is alone 
 great, joyous, noble, free / This is alone empire, life, victory." 26 
 
 IO UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
With India, the problems of disentanglement are compounded be¬ 
 cause the emancipatory effort may have to be directed not to an im¬ 
 perial discourse but to a nationalist counterstatement that was de¬ 
 veloped in response to it. The counterstatement was extraordinarily 
 articulate, although it is not, as establishment historians tend to sug¬ 
 gest, a paradigm for all resistance movements. Its articulacy makes 
 revisionary treatment of it difficult, and the difficulties are increased 
 since the counterstatement offers itself as an essentialist declara¬ 
 tion, so that to accept its validity may be to concede its permanence. 
 We have to treat it historically as a construction appropriate to a time 
 of resistance calling for reconsideration in an India that has assumed 
 control of itself. In reconsidering it, the trope of India's femininity 
 that was retrieved from imperial-hierarchical devaluations of the 
 feminine may have to be relocated so as to emphasize its accommo¬ 
 dative strength rather than its essential inviolability. That accommo¬ 
 dative strength has deep roots in the Indian past. Unity in diversity, 
 a concept that countered accusations of India's predilection to "wild¬ 
 ness" (an observation we find first in Dryden that is raised to meta¬ 
 physical dignity by Hegel), is also an understanding that may have to 
 be reworked in an India where the fear of fragmentation, reinforced 
 by the partition trauma, has to contend with a respect for diver¬ 
 sity that has run creatively through India's history. Hybridity, once 
 a routine charge in imperial invective against India, drawing angry 
 attention to India's wild proliferativeness and wanton confusion of 
 forms, has now become almost a sign of cosmopolitan richness as 
 opposed to the poverty-stricken purity of the provincial. Literature 
 has long recognized the merits of hybridity as one way of escaping 
 the tyranny of genres. But the genres are not lost sight of in the liter¬ 
 ary blending. There is a distinctiveness in any significant hybridity 
 that can become submerged in the current proposition that all of us 
 are hybrid. With the odium of the word now spent, India needs to 
 rearticulate that distinctiveness in relation to a history that we treat 
 as beginning in an extreme act of hybridity: the union of the Aryan 
 with the Dravidian and with the civilization of the Indus Valley. 
 
 Partha Chatterjee has recently argued that an Indian nationalist, 
 postcolonial statement, made predominantly in the cultural realm, 
 was in place well before India's independence. 27 Indeed, the cultural 
 space necessary for this statement had been tacitly conceded by 
 the imperial power. Within it, an imagined community was located, 
 based not on the range of Western options to which Chatterjee finds 
 Benedict Anderson's influential book 28 restricted but on a model dif¬ 
 ferentiated from Western forms of nationhood. 
 
 Introduction n 
 
It is not possible in a restricted introduction to do justice to a 
 position as thoughtfully worked out as Chatterjee's, but difficulties 
 attend (and encumber) his claim, some of which he does recognize. 
 First, the nationalist construction has to be freed from the exigen¬ 
 cies of having to be put forward as a counterstatement to the domi¬ 
 nant imperial statement. Then, as an imagined community comes 
 into engagement with the actualities of power, it must reshape itself 
 within the dynamics of that engagement not by modifying but by 
 reinvigorating its principles, drawing responsively on the depths of 
 what it has imagined. The politics of the fragment, conspicuous in 
 Chatterjee's epigraph, must be placed in a contestational rather than 
 adversarial relationship, necessarily shifting in its settlements, with 
 the politics of a whole that can no longer be imagined as imperial. 
 The aesthetics of the unfinished poem, particularly in the romantic 
 era, are not without bearing on this engagement. 
 
 Most important of all, an imagined community conceived almost 
 exclusively within a cultural space is likely to treat economic de¬ 
 terminants as indifferent to events within that space. Culture and 
 economics can be thought of as proceeding along independent tra¬ 
 jectories, and the extent to which economic universalism is culture 
 generating in a manner that may threaten all forms of distinctive¬ 
 ness is minimized by a dissociation made in the first place because 
 cultural space was treated as not crucial, and therefore as retrievable, 
 within the realities of imperial power. 
 
 Economic universalism suggests bleakly that this estimate was 
 correct. It now challenges us to develop a cultural poetics that is not 
 protectively identitarian and defensively essentialist in the face of a 
 powerful movement toward homogenization, all too often portrayed 
 as an irresistible consensus. The challenge is by no means restricted 
 to India, and India is by no means uniquely fitted to respond to it. 
 All it can do is to make a distinctive contribution to the defense 
 of distinctiveness, one that the current discourse of distinctiveness 
 flows into but does not entirely dictate. 
 
 To achieve distinctiveness without resorting to fundamentalism 
 is not the easiest of tasks. Multiculturalism by itself is not a suffi¬ 
 ciently emphatic marker. Principles of togetherness are necessary to 
 discriminate one multivocality from another. A place in a conversa¬ 
 tion is not quite enough; there has to be a location, a voice set apart 
 from and yet involved with others that is responsive to what the 
 conversation says because the conversation does not entirely articu¬ 
 late the voice. Distinctiveness has to be a matter of positioning, and 
 
 12 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the positioning has to be historically acquired rather than adopted 
 as a conversational role. Moreover, the position formed, despite the 
 strength of the convictions that may have formed it, must be open 
 to change in the exchanges of understanding. It must not remain a 
 statement of principles from which there can be no deviance and 
 that the conversation is entered into only to document. 
 
 It is not inappropriate here to consider Milton's Samson Agonistes, 
 a liberation text that is also disturbingly fundamentalist. As the 
 drama of a people in bondage, it speaks to all peoples who have 
 fallen into bondage because they have not imagined their communi¬ 
 ties with sufficient conviction and cohesiveness. They have broken 
 their covenants with their identities. Like the animals in Kipling's 
 Jungle Book, they have given up their authority by losing possession 
 of their secret names. As a liberation text, Samson speaks sternly 
 to subject peoples, pointing out how they have contributed to their 
 own fate. But it also proposes a fundamentalist deliverance, God ver¬ 
 sus Dagon, integrity versus otherness, and purity versus a hybridity 
 expressed both in Dagon's idolized embodiment and in the mixed 
 marriage with Delilah that was also Samson's betrayal. It is no acci¬ 
 dent that the first hybrid was Sin. 
 
 Samson represents the defensive segregation, the deep fear of being 
 lost in the other, that has been pervasive in imperial discourse. Its 
 threatening irony is that it does so in the name of a subjected people, 
 offering us a deliverance we must learn to avoid. Its challenge is 
 to ask us how we can engineer the avoidance without falling into 
 today's Philistinism, the economic universalism by which we are 
 enveloped. 
 
 Evolving a discourse for the future, particularly one that will ad¬ 
 dress an economic imperialism that is evasively transnational, is a 
 responsibility fraught with uncertainty, but viewing the past from 
 the standpoint of a settled agenda (the uncertainty can be said to lie 
 in its implementation) is an undertaking that may seem largely free 
 of problems. It can be argued that all we need to do is detect the im¬ 
 perial presence in a work and then devalue it according to the promi¬ 
 nence of that presence. We complicate this straightforwardness by 
 pointing out that works of literature are often ill at ease with the 
 imperial coercions to which they are obliged to be responsive. We 
 complicate it further by adding that the character of that uneasiness 
 varies widely from one work to another. Finding and delineating the 
 individualities of uneasiness are important concerns of the literary 
 historian. Moreover, it is not simply individual works that we should 
 
 Introduction 13 
 
read as troubled by the stresses within themselves. The narrative 
 that flows through these readings and that the readings help sustain 
 and even compose must itself be read as not internally unified; it is 
 hegemonic to the world but not to itself. Its ambivalent origins are 
 never written successfully out of it. The Renaissance preliminaries 
 to the decisive articulation of an imperial discourse on India are not 
 merely preliminaries; they also carry into that discourse the struc¬ 
 tures, perplexities, and self-examinations of Reformation religious 
 thought. 
 
 Apart from our changing views of sites and the delineation of the 
 narrative those changing views establish, we can hope that the read¬ 
 ing experience of passing through the sites will change the character 
 of the reading conventions. This book does not make this quite con¬ 
 siderable claim. It seeks to refine rather than to redefine or realign 
 the forces that constitute the current reading protocol. But refine¬ 
 ments that take proper account of contestations between and within 
 discourses must make our perception of literary sites more complex. 
 They will do so despite the initial simplification of treating those 
 sites as events within imperial history or assessing (as with Milton) 
 their continuing appropriation by that history. 
 
 Participation in discourses of dominance is not deficient in nu¬ 
 ances, but the dominance should not be submerged in studying the 
 nuances. Nuances presume a standard expectation. They depart from 
 it in order to play against it, to disclose what is not on the expec¬ 
 tation's surface, to offer interrogation in acceptance. They can as¬ 
 semble themselves under an overall trope such as the feminization 
 of the Orient, but they also need to be considered in the sheer range 
 of their cultural substantiations if the trope is to be a guide to per¬ 
 ception rather than a way of avoiding it. 
 
 A tale as neatly told as the one recounted is likely to arouse some 
 skepticism. Narratives are suspect today, and a metanarrative such 
 as the one being offered, emplotted to display the coming to power of 
 a discourse, may be additionally suspect, even though the historian 
 cannot avoid narration and even though any adequately organized 
 argument has to be marshaled as a narrative movement. Narratives 
 are now taken as indicative of the passion for totalization, the lust 
 for closure that bars the door to multivocality and the enrichments 
 of openness. David Quint's carefully worked out identification of 
 epic narrative as the vehicle of the imperial makes the cloud of dis¬ 
 approval looming over the form even larger. 29 
 
 The narrative being put forward is open to yet further erosions 
 
 r4 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
since it is not averse to Edward Said's almost notorious proposition 
 that the Occident has been constructed as the other of the Orient. 30 
 To accommodate these concerns, one can only do what the scholar 
 normally does: the narrative must be exposed to questioning or situ¬ 
 ated among possibilities for questioning. It must endeavor not to be 
 imperious in its detection and pursuit of the imperial. 
 
 It seems undesirable to retreat beyond this point. Thought defines 
 itself by exclusion but must then come to terms with what it has ex¬ 
 cluded. This is a Hegelian proposition that Hegel fails to observe in 
 The Philosophy of History. His failure is evidence of how powerfully 
 imperial pressures bear on the formations of thought and is among 
 the justifications for a scrutiny that seeks to chart the growth and 
 characterize the nature of these pressures. 
 
 Said's generalization can be defended as historically necessary, as 
 constituting the kind of beginning that his first book defines, 31 and 
 as opening the door to an extensive critical terrain, the mapping of 
 which is still contoured by what he said in the first place. But Said's 
 statement is important even in the simplifications that we now wish 
 to diversify because imperial energy is simplistic, given to obliterat¬ 
 ing nuances and to making its ideological and rhetorical investments 
 in discourses that are powerfully polarized. 
 
 The innovative force of Said's initial generalizations has been ap¬ 
 parent in the entire field of postcolonial studies, but resistance to 
 their strongly sculptured character has grown. Said has responded to 
 this resistance in the evolution of his own thought. A crucial essay 
 in 1989 advises us that terms such as "representation," "the colo¬ 
 nized," "interlocutors," and even "anthropology" cannot be assigned 
 "any very fixed or essential meaning." The words, Said continues, 
 "seem ... to vacillate between various possibilities of meaning." In 
 some instances, they even "divide in half." 32 
 
 Said's uneasiness with the "fixed or essential" meanings around 
 which his own discourse seems to be constellating is apparent in 
 his current emphasis on the hybrid and on contrapuntal statements 
 within imperial discourse. These modifications seek to offer a vo¬ 
 cabulary for questioning that discourse while continuing to testify 
 to a coercive strength to which the resistance to Said's work is in 
 danger of not doing justice. 
 
 Yet the term "contrapuntal" is curiously evasive. A countervoice 
 heard within the imperial music is in the end a contribution to that 
 music, a contained interrogation rather than a dismantling force. 
 The orchestration of protest here makes insufficient provision for an 
 
 Introduction 15 
 
improvisatory space. It is too close to being part of the written score 
 and the compositional requirement. 
 
 Exclusionary statements are exercises in purity, and the hybrid 
 that Said now increasingly invokes may seem by definition a contes¬ 
 tation of such statements. We can say that hybridity is the intertext 
 brought about by two polarities unable to fully disavow each other 
 because each needs the other to constitute itself. The intertext is not 
 intermediate. It is the alternative established by a mutual rejection, 
 a space that neither antagonist is able to avoid or preempt. As an 
 area of spillages and reabsorptions, it has a life of its own as well as 
 a life uncomfortably shared with its parents. This is one possibility 
 within the term "hybrid," a term that in its nature can be composed 
 in different ways. Said's use of the term is once again evasive or, to 
 put it more understandingly, flexible in a way that responds to the 
 diverse and even divergent strains in the world's principal cultures, 
 including those that make much of their purity. 
 
 Said's accommodative response to his critics can be questioned in 
 the realm of theory. The determinist view of discourse that Oriental¬ 
 ism puts forward allows little space for agency or for voices of protest 
 that are not allotted, even when they seem autonomous to those 
 who take up the voices. Said's musical metaphor shows his interest 
 in enlarging this space but also shows his continuing involvement 
 with the determinist perceptions that made his inaugurating state¬ 
 ment so powerful. We can make these observations, but we also need 
 to admit that methodological purity may matter less than making 
 common cause on matters of deeper conviction. 
 
 Occident and Orient are simplifications that Said takes over from 
 a self-styled West that has embossed them on history. The self and 
 the other to which these entities are equated are, on the other hand, 
 inventions of critical theory that can now be criticized as question¬ 
 able in their usefulness. The other, as the site of everything that the 
 self has decided not to be and as the proliferation of all that it must 
 avoid, takes part, we can argue, in a heavily simplified oppositional 
 construction that cannot accurately mirror the complex relation¬ 
 ships between subject peoples and imperial nations. 
 
 This is an objection that too easily restricts itself to the formal 
 architecture of the imperial statement. The purpose of the self-and- 
 other distinction is to have this architecture put in place not merely 
 so that we can respectfully receive its proclamation but also so that 
 we can examine the ways in which that proclamation has been cir¬ 
 cumvented, discomfited, or eroded. That power is constitutive of 
 
 16 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
understanding is a fact important enough for us to welcome a dis¬ 
 tinction that keeps the fact steadily before us, but the contrast is 
 also designed to make us aware of forces which will ensure that the 
 hegemonic claim is not the last word. 
 
 Freudian-influenced views of the self-other relationship always 
 stress the complicity (or, even more telling, the fear of complicity) 
 that underlies the oppositional staging and that can be a root cause 
 of imperial anxiety. That anxiety is typically allayed by an intensi¬ 
 fied energy of repudiation, through which the self is reassured of its 
 stability and of the protection of its identity from the purged ele¬ 
 ments it has made marginal or monstrous. If power relationships are 
 often marked by a vituperative energy much in excess of operational 
 necessities, the reasons are usually psychological. Because of these 
 undertows that attend the oppositional statement, neither Stephen 
 Greenblatt nor Michel de Certeau confine themselves to a barrenly 
 binary account of the relationship between the self and the other. 33 
 
 Tzvetan Todorov's Conquest of America 3 * presents a somewhat 
 different picture. The chapter and section headings indicate a wide 
 variety of relationships with the other, including that hybridity once 
 used routinely in invective against India and now seen as a means 
 of deliverance from the monolithic claims of nationalism, funda¬ 
 mentalism, and walled-in ethnic purities. Todorov's discussion of 
 this range of relationships would be more persuasive if it were less 
 dominated by what he sees as Europe's distinctive capacity to under¬ 
 stand and assimilate the other 35 —a capacity that throughout his 
 text often seems primarily manipulative and opportunistically dedi¬ 
 cated to exploiting vulnerabilities in the other's worldview. At its 
 broadest, that capacity extends to the examination of the other, that 
 self-scrutinizing strength frequently claimed to underlie Europe's 
 uniqueness, a strength that Hegel makes into the driving principle 
 of all thought not condemned to reiterate itself. 
 
 In a striking array of contrasts, Todorov argues that the verbal edu¬ 
 cation of Native Americans favors "paradigm over syntagma, code 
 over context, conformity-to-order over efficacy-of-the-moment, the 
 past over the present." 36 The "education" is in fact ahistorical, con¬ 
 cerned with time only in its inscription of the timeless. If history, 
 or more precisely the narrative articulation of the meaning and pur¬ 
 pose of history, is an invention of the West, it becomes an invention 
 designed to write the Western will triumphantly over the failure of 
 backward civilizations to understand how perceiving the world has 
 changed. 
 
 Introduction 17 
 
As Todorov himself recognizes, the differences he finds between 
 Europe and its other are remarkably close to the historical differ¬ 
 ences in Europe itself between pre-Renaissance and early modern 
 modes of understanding. 37 Geopoliticizing the historical, or vice 
 versa, will soon become a familiar strategy in self-and-other rela¬ 
 tionships. Todorov does not explore this dimension. His book seems 
 humanely concerned with the many ways of understanding the other 
 that offer themselves to the desire to understand. It is necessary to 
 insert the warning that understanding is not the purpose of the self- 
 and-other exercise. The purpose is to settle into discourse power re¬ 
 lationships that are formally political but also supportively psycho¬ 
 logical. Because the other is internal as well as external to the self, 
 the supportive can become the subversive, and that is the dormant 
 irony of the exercise. Todorov recognizes this internality, 38 but the 
 recognition comes late in the book and is not adequately built into 
 its detections. 
 
 The sophistications of self-and-other relationships were brought 
 out initially by scholars examining events in the New World. Events 
 on a different continent, within a different time span, form another 
 province of the mind, and commerce between the two provinces 
 has so far been restricted. If this commerce were to be increased, a 
 variety of connections and differentiations might be ventured. Asia's 
 feminization as part of a literary history that goes back at least to 
 Virgil might be set against the lack of such a history in the New 
 World. The feminization of the land in America, allegedly empty 
 and awaiting the masculine imprint, could be contrasted with the 
 feminine civilizations of a populous Orient, on the spaces of which 
 much had already been written. The New World's proximity to inno¬ 
 cence (and also to savagery) could be set against a sophistication in 
 Asia perceived as verging on decadence. The relationship with Asia 
 can be psychologically complex not simply because of gender assig¬ 
 nations that cultural history has annotated lavishly but also because 
 Islam, the other and the enemy, provided a large part of the biblio¬ 
 graphical and cultural resources through which Europe was able to 
 retrieve its own beginnings, thereby fueling a Renaissance by which 
 Islam was eventually overcome. 
 
 These are adumbrations indicative of how much more must be 
 studied. Even in their preliminary outlines, they make it evident 
 that imperial rhetoric must be flexible in offering its enlightenments 
 if it is to demonstrate to subjected peoples with markedly different 
 cultures and histories the deficiencies that have earned them their 
 
 18 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
subjection. That rhetoric is also the result of the distinctive stresses 
 and sudden opportunities that have entered each imperialism in its 
 formation. Given the real and not merely the conceptual presence of 
 these variables, the tableau of a monolithic self that is Europe con¬ 
 fronting a uniform other that is the Orient is not particularly diffi¬ 
 cult to discredit. The danger is that the discrediting may overwrite a 
 major revision in understanding that ought not to be banished from 
 our minds. 
 
 Few would have wanted to argue, even in the passion for sim¬ 
 plicity that inaugurates beginnings, that all imperialisms were iden¬ 
 tical, that all subject peoples were identically constructed, or even 
 that self and other were inexorably positioned within a discourse 
 that could not be interrogated without disempowering the self and 
 thus dismantling the imperial relationship. Said's accomplishment 
 is not to have invented these simplifications but to have questioned 
 the converse simplifications that before his work were generally 
 taken for granted: to wit, that imperialisms differ importantly and 
 perhaps decisively from one another, that subject peoples are not 
 constructed as others but objectively discerned in accordance with 
 their distinctive characteristics, and that imperial relationships are 
 based not on self-justifying fictions but on perceived actualities that, 
 as they change, will also change the relationships. No one, least of 
 all the resistance to Said, would rush to defend these propositions. 
 The reluctance to do so is Said's real accomplishment. 
 
 Imperialisms obviously vary, although in spotlighting their differ¬ 
 ences, one should remember the quip to which Krishna Menon was 
 addicted: to ask a subject people which imperialism they prefer is 
 like asking a fish whether it would rather be fried in margarine or 
 in butter. Subject nations, like master imperialisms, are undoubt¬ 
 edly constructed in different ways, although here again a book such 
 as David Spurr's, which studies a variety of constructions within a 
 variety of imperialisms under a series of governing tropes, ought to 
 make it evident that dominance everywhere speaks a dominant lan¬ 
 guage. 39 
 
 On the other hand, the reduction of imperial relationships to bi¬ 
 nary dispositions unilaterally controlled and implacably segregated 
 is convincingly eroded by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Lisa Lowe, 
 and Sara Suleri. 40 Indeed, the resistance to Said—or, more precisely, 
 to those academic constructions of Said that we might call "Said- 
 ism"—has grown in strength, reflecting much more than the zeal 
 with which the academy chips away at major generalizations. Its 
 
 Introduction 19 
 
cumulative results can now be called impressive. This book takes in 
 the insights of that resistance and the disarticulating propensities it 
 underlines, but it also testifies to a coercive strength in imperial dis¬ 
 course—a strength repeatedly registered in the literature this book 
 studies—that Said has made strikingly evident and that should not 
 be submerged in the current predilection for rejoicing in the ways in 
 which discourse is undone. 
 
 Theorizing the erosion of discourse has now proceeded to the point 
 where Bhabha, in an incisive comment, can discriminate between 
 differential (Jameson), contrapuntal (Said), and interruptive (Spivak) 
 interrogations of discourse. 41 Differential interrogation, particularly 
 in the romantic era, is an important concern of this book. Contra¬ 
 puntal interrogation, as has been pointed out, offers the ambigu¬ 
 ous advantage of placing protest within the imperial music rather 
 than seeing it as an interruptive derailment calling for rearticulation 
 of the discourse thus derailed. Contestational interrogation, which 
 Bhabha does not consider, rests on a parity between the totalizing 
 drive toward the whole and the separatist energy of the fragment. 
 Because it lies in the grain of literature and even of literature per¬ 
 tinent to the imperial statement, it provides a connection between 
 poetry and politics that can be deeply relevant to the manner in 
 which discourses, including those that are imperially safeguarded, 
 generate both their articulation and their undoing. Thought does not 
 beget "its own executioner," as Yeats suggests, in the darkness set 
 aside by its "own increasing clarity and confidence." 42 It does beget 
 the resistance and the alternative understandings that are needed to 
 maintain its own integrity as thought. 
 
 Articulation and undoing are two sides of the same cultural coin. 
 The first phase of postcolonial thought tended to concentrate on the 
 coercive strength of imperial discourse. The current phase concen¬ 
 trates on its self-dismantling propensities. It is time to put the two 
 phases together and to study literature as the deeply conflicted locus 
 of the interplay of both sets of forces. Canonical literature, in par¬ 
 ticular, offers itself both as a stronghold of the imperial presence and 
 as a principal interlocutor of that presence. Both the acceptance of 
 the canon and its current disavowal are oblique acknowledgments 
 of the canon's imperial nature. They need to be supplemented by 
 an understanding of how the canon disarticulates itself and of how 
 strongly that disarticulation works against the imperial perceptions 
 of which the canon can be the vehicle. 
 
 No single figure can exhaust or even dominate imperialism's range 
 
 20 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
of relationships with subjected peoples. The self-and-other figure can 
 be criticized as deficient in analytical finesse. Nevertheless, it will 
 remain important because it responds so well to moral, historical, 
 and psychological alienations and because the narrative of its break¬ 
 down can be regarded as implicit in the figure itself. The percep¬ 
 tion of India as feminine will continue to instruct our understand¬ 
 ings because of the elaborate range of devaluations that imperialism 
 has been able to find within the feminine and because the Indian 
 counterpoem is singular in refusing to minimize a femininity that 
 it proceeds to reinstate as the emblem of its resistance. Rape and 
 rehabilitation treatments of the England-India relationship can be 
 perceived as drawing on India's femininity and on a devaluation of 
 the feminine into otherness, made possible by the remoteness and 
 exoticism of India as a site. The figure has its limitations, 43 but its 
 narration in reverse by Forster and Scott is indicative of an anxiety 
 in which retribution mirrors intent. It has by no means outlived its 
 usefulness as a metaphor for imperialism's sexual politics, and its 
 exorcism of guilt by responsibility supports a sequence familiar in 
 evangelical arguments. 
 
 Rehabilitation in the evangelical exercise calls for narrowing 
 otherness into difference. The consequence can be the attempted 
 erasure not merely of much that a culture has been educated into 
 finding important in itself but even of the habits of mind that led to 
 those findings. Such procedures draw on the root-and-branch dispo¬ 
 sition of post-Reformation religious thought and on the paradoxical 
 fusion of tolerance within the boundaries of a culture with extreme 
 intolerance of what lies outside those boundaries. One can argue 
 that the former needs the latter if the self-other relationship is not 
 to be doubly undetermined. 
 
 Finally, homosocial treatments of the England-India relationship 
 traverse the figures mentioned, reminding us of the obvious although 
 backgrounded fact that Englishmen ruled India largely through the 
 agency of male Indians. The psychologizing of the power situation 
 (or its reverse) can be brutal in Scott, can be outreaching in Forster, 
 or can express itself in Kipling as hierarchical camaraderie in the 
 togetherness of the great game. The other side of this medal is the 
 memsahib factor, as Raleigh Trevelyan chooses to call it, 44 with its 
 insinuation that the empire might have fared better if it had pre¬ 
 served its purity as an all-male operation. All these figures can assist 
 us in the patterning of texts, but texts would be less than enlighten¬ 
 ing if they did not resist as well as respond to these patternings. 
 
 Introduction 21 
 
The figures that map imperial rhetoric can be varied, but they 
 remain housed within an aggressive, oppositional architecture, an 
 architecture that is not simply part of the history of perception but 
 also part of the way in which perception, driven by power, is able 
 and possibly doomed to fulfill itself. To the scholar safely distant 
 from what must occasionally be retrieved as the injustice of events, 
 the architecture frames a theater rich in ironies. Hegemonic claims 
 within this theater can be treated as made vulnerable by their vehe¬ 
 mence, as inviting undoing because they are uneasily recognized as 
 excessive or even constricting by those who nevertheless propound 
 them. Collaboration, which is quite other than collusion, is a re¬ 
 assuring strengthening of these claims. It is the natural outcome of 
 dominance, which prescribes both a collaborative space and a col¬ 
 laborative role. Collusion is antiofficial, the subtext of the explicit 
 text. It is the other of the self-and-other relationship. 45 
 
 As these reflections suggest, the complications of psychic politics 
 are compounded by their enmeshment in a web of textuality. Dis¬ 
 course is constitutive of a dominance that in turn makes operational 
 the articulations from which it issues and the rhetoric it energizes 
 and by which it is also sustained. The interconstitutiveness of the 
 political, the psychological, and the textual makes conversion into 
 a single currency tempting. Textual conversion is the transaction 
 most likely to appeal to those within an interdiscursive formation 
 whose minds have already been shaped to some degree by their prac¬ 
 tice of literary modes of understanding. The consequent tendency 
 to read textual behavior back into psychological states and political 
 decisions can be strikingly productive but is not without its dan¬ 
 gers. Transferring the dynamics of the subtext to self-and-other re¬ 
 lationships is one prevalent example of this tendency. Another is to 
 treat the instabilities of discourse as indicative of imperial uneasi¬ 
 ness, anxiety, frustration (as in Bhabha's remarks on colonial "non¬ 
 sense"), 46 or even terror (as in Suleri's intensification of anxiety). 47 
 Such imperial states of mind undoubtedly have existed. A Passage 
 to India testifies to their reality, and Kipling's Kim can be said to ac¬ 
 knowledge them by its highly controlled insulation from their pres¬ 
 ence 48 We can wonder, nevertheless, if these states are adequately 
 defined by tying them closely to theories of textual behavior that are 
 themselves open to contestation. 
 
 These cautionary remarks are not meant to minimize the enlight¬ 
 enments of exploring the politics and psychics of the textual. Indeed, 
 a book such as this that foregrounds discourse must also foreground 
 
 22 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the analogies and possibly the connections between political and 
 textual behavior. It must, in addition, raise the question of whether 
 there are imperial genres or at least genres to which imperial state¬ 
 ments gravitate. 
 
 Quint's work goes far to persuade us that the epic is, of all genres, 
 the one most hospitable to imperial statements. This book acknowl¬ 
 edges Quint to the extent of styling as epic even the metagenre of 
 the narrative of imperial discourse. On the other hand, it also con¬ 
 siders drama, nonepic poetry, and the novel as vehicles for imperial 
 propositions. It may even point to the discomfiting possibility that 
 no genre is unreceptive to the imperial spirit. 
 
 If we associate epic and empire too closely, we face the difficulty 
 that the huge territorial aggrandizements of recent empires took 
 place when the epic was in decline and when the long poem was 
 more inclined to turn in on itself than to assert its mastery over 
 the external world. The novel, as Said points out, proliferated dur¬ 
 ing the age of empire, 49 and that fact may cast suspicion on the 
 novel; but if we are persuaded by Mikhail Bakhtin's distinction be¬ 
 tween the monologic epic and the potentially dialogic novel, much 
 of that suspicion must be held in suspense. Narrative itself, rather 
 than its manifestations in the epic or the novel, can be singled out 
 as the agent of imperialism, with the natural movement of narrative 
 to closure signifying the advance of imperial power to its ordained 
 objectives. Resistance to closure then becomes the textual sign of 
 political resistance. Penelope in one tradition and Scheherazade in 
 another indicate how that resistance might be feminized. 
 
 The refusal to accept closure is an important ingredient in the im¬ 
 plicit manifestos of the postcolonial. Parody, irony, and allegory act 
 not merely to postpone but also to undermine the pretensions of 
 dominance to a conclusiveness that would make dominance impos¬ 
 sible to undo. Yet from Chaucer onward, the form of the unfinished 
 has complicated the potential politics of narrative, first by contest¬ 
 ing the purposiveness of the epic with the errancy of romance and 
 then by making formidably more difficult the long poem's search¬ 
 ing of its own assumptions—a search that must be successfully con¬ 
 cluded if the poem is to earn its entitlement to move forward. 50 The 
 canon's contribution to its own dismantling makes the politics of 
 genre more intricate and unstable than the simple assimilation of 
 forms to ideologies might suggest. Some forms are more hospitable 
 to imperial uses than others, but the use of a hospitable form (as 
 in Keats's two Hyperion poems) can indicate that imperial attitudes 
 
 Introduction 23 
 
are being questioned as much as they are being endorsed or even 
 that endorsement itself, offered as in Keats from the perspective of 
 the rejected, can become a radical form of questioning. Hyperion 
 and The Fall of Hyperion are poems of the vanquished, but they are 
 poems that accept a victor's poem that is then twice found impos¬ 
 sible to write. 
 
 Quint's view that the poem of the losers typically restricts itself 
 to disorienting and fragmenting the epic of the triumphant is not 
 quite borne out by Keats's earnest effort to write the poem that the 
 march of mind ordained. 51 His inability to proceed with the epic of 
 the grand advance because of his numbing sense of the tragic human 
 expense of it is a commentary that addresses not only the merits 
 and necessities of change but also that "giant agony of the world" 
 that must be endured if change is to be brought about. The poetry 
 of dispossession is at its most probing in Keats. The two Hyperions 
 speak strongly and disquietingly not only to an England undergoing 
 wrenching modifications in its economic and social structures but 
 also to an India where the Mill-Hegel discourse could be perceived as 
 irresistibly advocating the replacement of a Saturnian by an Apollo¬ 
 nian order of things. 
 
 Pursuing Quint's view further, we would also need to note that 
 India's countervailing epic—the official narration of the history of 
 its resistance—is not an effort at disorientation but a statement in 
 epic form clearly appropriating the Western model of the recovery 
 of Ithaca. 52 In its dedication to finding form amid the fragments, 
 the Indian narrative can even be called high modernist. It is con¬ 
 sciously triumphalist, answering closure with a retaliatory closure, a 
 tryst with destiny, dramatically positioned at the hour of midnight. 
 The question to be asked is whether the dependent styling of the 
 counterstatement allows it to emancipate itself from the imperial 
 narrative it succeeds. The choice is, after all, the Odyssey and not 
 the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, which, harassed at every turn by 
 ethical issues that remain stubbornly problematic, are better models 
 for the complexities of today. 
 
 Discourse can be read as ideology entrenched in rhetoric. It is also 
 responsive to being read as literature, particularly when we trans¬ 
 fer to discourse the articulating strength and the dismantling energy 
 that have been seen as jointly characterizing literature. The ideal, 
 hegemonic discourse, almost Calvinist in its predeterminations, an¬ 
 nounces itself as unilaterally decreed, as fully containing and even¬ 
 tually assimilating to its own integrity the energies of protest and 
 
 24 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
resistance within it, as never overcome and only transiently threat¬ 
 ened by any excess of the actual over the programmed. These specifi¬ 
 cations are remarkably close to those used until recently to judge the 
 excellence of a work of literature. The distinction (and it may be cru¬ 
 cial) is that the new critical poem generates a difference that it then 
 endeavors to take back into itself. The poem of imperial discourse 
 generates an otherness and proclaims its identity by containing and 
 possibly nullifying that otherness. In this respect, it can be deemed 
 Miltonic. Both poems can be treated as open to erosion by an inde¬ 
 terminacy inherent in the behavior of texts. The world is similarly 
 answerable to power and similarly resistant to omnipotence. 
 
 The hegemonic, antithetically organized poem of imperial dis¬ 
 course gives rhetorical substance to and passes into the practice of 
 a hegemonic, antithetical world. The reflections of each in the other 
 offer one more example of the collusions between the world and the 
 text, between aesthetic satisfaction and the satisfactions of power. 
 Such interchanges make problematic the claim that there may be 
 an aesthetic dimension to imperial understanding that can be set 
 apart from the dominance helping to constitute that dimension. 
 Marvelous possessions may adorn the cabinet of one's mind, and the 
 Western sense of wonder as it gazes on these acquisitions may indeed 
 be disinterested (as Greenblatt suggests) 53 and may belong to a realm 
 momentarily indifferent to the imperial. But detaching the aesthetic 
 dimension in this manner simply enables imperial power to func¬ 
 tion in a context free from cultural embarrassments and to helpfully 
 enlarge the subjected territories that provide the contemplative gaze 
 with its marvelous possessions. Warren Hastings, who combined an 
 educated admiration for things Indian with a remarkable talent for 
 acquiring Indian territory, is an example of this ambivalence border¬ 
 ing on schizophrenia that must sooner or later resoundingly devalue 
 what it initially claims to respect. 
 
 If we transfer gender relationships to the imperial theater (as is 
 repeatedly done in this book), it becomes apparent that within the 
 enhancements of possession, some esteem for the inferior gender is 
 not out of place. 54 Civilizations can be imagined as appealingly obso¬ 
 lescent, worthy of art while their conquerors are worthy of history. 
 It is then not inappropriate that the investments of power should 
 offer an aesthetic and psychological dividend, that there should be 
 epicurean opportunities for what Said calls "the pleasures of imperi¬ 
 alism." The exotic "replaces the impress of power with the blandish¬ 
 ments of curiosity" 55 or, in higher substitutions, with the surprise of 
 
 Introduction 25 
 
difference. But it is a surprise held in the grip of a supremacy that re¬ 
 assuringly distances what it elevates. The admirable is also the anti¬ 
 quarian, promoted from the lumber room of history to an honorable 
 place in its museum. 
 
 Unfortunately, difference cannot be securely housed in a lumber 
 room or even in a museum. In writing eloquently of the surprise of 
 difference, Barbara Johnson sees that surprise as opening the doors of 
 perception and as vividly revealing how the world of our knowledge 
 has been hemmed in by the very assumptions that formed it. 56 The 
 surprise is the measure of how much needs to be known. It is also, 
 and more threateningly, a discovery of how much must be changed 
 in order to know it. The history of response to difference has seized 
 on the threat and minimized the opportunity. Far from opening the 
 door, it has proceeded to bolt and bar it. Dominance can read differ¬ 
 ence as a plea for inclusion. It has been figured instead as a demand 
 for exclusion, a demand that unmasks difference as a halfway house 
 to otherness. The surprise of difference can begin in wonder; it ends 
 in anger as surprise by sin. Hegel's self-castigating movement from 
 one to the other in the opening paragraphs of his chapter on India in 
 The Philosophy of History traces a psychological route that the West 
 finds it difficult not to follow. 
 
 The imperial poem thrives on the other's outrageousness. To pre¬ 
 sent the other as unfit for dialogue is to subject discourse to a neces¬ 
 sary dictatorship that claims to be benevolent but that needs to be 
 accountable only to itself. The monstrous in that dictatorship cannot 
 be civilized: it can only be governed and kept in place by the civiliza¬ 
 tion that has constructed it as monstrous, and its insidious presence 
 in the self that created it makes hegemony all the more imperative. 
 In the aftermath of imperialism, the aggressiveness of this contrast 
 is embarrassing. It then becomes encouraging to concentrate on the 
 instabilities of discourse, on its indeterminate spaces, and on the 
 underground proliferations that subvert its official structure. 
 
 In this way, the refusal of the text to totalize can be read as point¬ 
 ing to other refusals that have taken place in history or at least in 
 literary representations of what may have happened in history. The 
 dispersing text becomes the habitat of the terrified imperialist cry¬ 
 ing out like Pound that he cannot make it cohere, the difference 
 being that what will not cohere is now the stuff of empires rather 
 than language. Textual politics invites us to consider the inevitable 
 excess of the actual over the programmed, the growth within dis¬ 
 course of indeterminacies that are indeterminate in extent and that 
 
 26 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the discourse is unable to cordon off, and the million mutinies that 
 the text mounts against the monologic passion of the oeuvre. The 
 question is whether we can unfalteringly carry the refusal of the text 
 to totalize into a world of events where the will to totalize remains 
 very much in being and where deferral and destabilization have not 
 dispersed the concentrations of power behind that will. Politics may 
 indeed partake of textuality, but that does not mean we can repose 
 our confidence in the textual undermining of political intent. 
 
 These caveats are not offered as prohibitions. It is plain that India's 
 reticence, its resistance to being mapped, and its Draupadi-like with¬ 
 holding of itself have been disconcerting to imperial aims. The hege¬ 
 monic gaze is unsettled when it falls short of omniscience. It is no 
 accident that Mowgli in The Jungle Book attains his supremacy over 
 others because he knows the secret name of each inhabitant of the 
 jungle. The secret name is the name of the last withholding, the 
 name surrendered by a nakedness that has learned that it can shield 
 nothing from the imperial gaze. 57 Read thus, Mowgli's knowledge 
 is in direct confrontation with the story of Draupadi's disrobing, 
 the most powerful of all metaphors of India's inviolability and one 
 that the Indian imagination everywhere cherishes. If the Draupadi 
 legend prevails or is successful even in resisting erasure, imperial 
 knowledge can remain anxiously uncertain about what might come 
 together in the unmapped space of its ignorance. 
 
 In practice, imperial discourse is satisfied to be slightly less than 
 omniscient and is prepared to accept a space of residual indetermi¬ 
 nacy, provided that space can be successfully cordoned off. There 
 may indeed be advantages in conceding that such a space exists. 
 To say that something in India's perception of itself remains ob¬ 
 stinately outside intelligent understanding is to make a scathingly 
 adverse comment on the irrationality of Indian civilization, but it 
 is also to argue that imperial power must proceed to contain what 
 imperial knowledge is unable to chart. If 1857 rather than the Bha- 
 gavad Gita is India's fundamental scripture (as MacBryde contends 
 in A Passage to India ), 56 the remedy is to do what Reginald Dyer did 
 at Jallianwalla. Imperial terror, real or tactically exaggerated, may be 
 the origin, but imperial repression is the result. 59 
 
 When political decisions are assimilated to textual behavior, it is 
 usually the indeterminacies of discourse, its figurations of anxiety 
 or aporia, that are read back into historical events. Acceptance of an 
 imperial discourse smacks of collaboration, so little is said about its 
 possibilities. But when the discourse is styled as a self-consuming 
 
 Introduction 27 
 
artifact—as in Macaulay's 1833 speech and the remarks of his col¬ 
 leagues — some discomfiture can be created by assisting the discourse 
 to proceed expeditiously to its extinction and by disposing of the pre¬ 
 texts for deferral contrived by those dedicated to the permanence of 
 empire. 60 The directing images of the Mill-Hegel view are of India's 
 guided advance along the route of civilization and of its growth from 
 immaturity to a fully adult state. Such images foresee their own ef- 
 facement. 
 
 Said in "Orientalism Reconsidered" writes of "the muteness im¬ 
 posed upon the Orient as object" and sees the Orient as "not Europe's 
 interlocutor, but its silent Other." 61 This is a statement that needs 
 some qualification even if we broaden the term "muteness" to cover 
 those stage-managed voices that a sufficiently confident discourse 
 can allot to resistance. From 1890 onward, India was not silent but 
 irritatingly articulate. A range of voices that at the end of the cen¬ 
 tury included Gokhale, Tilak, and Swami Vivekenanda broadened 
 to include Gandhi and Nehru, philosophers such as Radhakrishnan, 
 political novelists such as Mulk Raj Anand, and cultural figures such 
 as Tagore. Scrupulously placed within the flexibilities of the prevail¬ 
 ing discourse, these voices put to subversive use the equivocations 
 they found within that discourse. Playing the discourse game with 
 expertise even when translated into political performance was not 
 enough to free India from British rule. But winning the game or 
 making its prolongation more difficult was more than an achieve¬ 
 ment in a war of words. 
 
 The textualizing of events has run through this introduction as 
 a methodology that can offer striking enlightenments but that can 
 also lead to a reductionism we should be careful to avoid. That cau¬ 
 tion is more strongly called for because the confluence of postmod¬ 
 ernism and postcolonialism has greatly increased the persuasiveness 
 of the elision between textual perception and political understand¬ 
 ing. Both movements find their identity in resisting containment, 
 in disavowing the center, and in seeking to dislodge the entrench¬ 
 ments of previous discourses by irony, parody, indirection, and the 
 distancing of the real as the conspicuously imagined, its reification 
 in the realm of nightmare. 62 All these literary strategies are trans¬ 
 latable into ways of viewing history and ways of interpreting textu- 
 ality. But they also seem to assemble themselves unhappily around 
 Quint's claim that losers typically restrict themselves to fragment¬ 
 ing and disorienting the poems of victors. 
 
 We must remember, though, that as the classic forms of imperi- 
 
 28 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
alism gave way to the stresses within themselves, grand narratives 
 lost their power to sustain us even before Jean Francois Lyotard an¬ 
 nounced their delegitimation. Emancipation itself, cast as a grand 
 narrative, as in India's counterepic of independence regained, has 
 been subject to similar erosions of confidence. Salman Rushdie's 
 Midnight’s Children is an almost exemplary postmodernist display 
 of those erosions, even if, in Satanizing the independence poem, it 
 comes uneasily close to an inverted grand narrative. 
 
 Local coalescences, or Lyotard's petits recits, may be all that the 
 form of the unfinishable can offer. 63 The state of understanding, 
 which may be too fluid to be called a state, can no longer respond to 
 the opposition between winners and losers that we detect in Renais¬ 
 sance and Victorian constructions of empire and that prevails not 
 merely in the pages of Quint's book but in the triumphant discrimi¬ 
 nations of the Mill-Hegel view of the world. 
 
 Postcolonialists are clearly not losers, and reflection suggests that 
 they cannot always be characterized as winners, uncertain of their 
 own identity and preoccupied with the stubborn historical and psy¬ 
 chological residues of a discourse otherwise defunct. The point being 
 made by writers in the confluence is that imperialism is only a genre 
 of totalization and that totalization, behind its many manifestations, 
 remains the implicit enemy. If that is so, it can be credibly argued 
 that fragmentation is the only possible oppositional strategy. 64 
 
 However, fragmentation may not be enough to combat the newly 
 emerging interlockings of conglomerates of power that owe their 
 loyalty not to national causes but to economic models. Unimpeded 
 commerce, heightened competitiveness, and maximized productiv¬ 
 ity are among the key concepts in the discourse of this gathering 
 wholeness, a discourse sufficiently powerful to be acknowledged 
 even in defensive propositions such as the level playing field. 65 
 
 It is difficult to fragment an empire that has no center and makes 
 no territorial claim. To engage coalescences and dispersions of power 
 that are transnational, anonymous, and evasive, we need to counter 
 the economic monotheism to which these shifting alliances sub¬ 
 scribe with a philosophy of pluralism and of cultural distinctiveness. 
 That philosophy, in resisting homogenization, must contrive to fall 
 short of fundamentalism or of aggressively protected ethnic purities. 
 The problem, although formidable, is not new. The uncertain and 
 wavering course of the endeavor to respond to it is, in large measure, 
 also India's history. 
 
 As we consider how imperial discourses are read by events, it be- 
 
 Introduction 29 
 
comes evident that two inheritances of textual understanding are 
 involved. Derridean views of language govern propositions about 
 the fissurings, slippages, and fragmentations of imperial discourse, 
 just as Foucauldian views govern propositions about its coercive 
 strength, its constitutive power, its containing capability, and its 
 predestination of all that it contains. We have to seek a via media 
 that is not the implied advocacy of one school or the other. The 
 power of discourse to write events is limited and is further limited 
 by the power of events to rewrite discourse. Equally, the realities of 
 challenging and undoing the structures of imperial power (including 
 the one that is currently emerging) are not always reducible to tex¬ 
 tual behavior, even though textual behavior can be an indispensable 
 guide to reading those realities. The world is not a text, although it 
 is textured with texts. 66 
 
 30 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
I 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 
 
 S'® 
 
 In March 1553, four ships set sail from Lisbon along the route that 
 Vasco da Gama had pioneered for Western commerce. Three were 
 lost on the way. The fourth ship, the Sao Bento, dropped anchor in 
 Goa only to be lost on the way back. Among those disembarking 
 from the Sao Bento was a common soldier, Luis Vaz de Camdes, the 
 author-to-be of The Lusiads. 
 
 Goa had been seized by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510, an event 
 foretold by Jupiter in The Lusiads, who assures the importunate 
 Venus that Goa will in time be the queen of all the East. Camdes 
 had not arrived to savor the truth of this prophecy, regarding a city 
 he described elsewhere as a modern Babylon, to enjoy the fruits of 
 the paradise da Gama had hailed, or even to conduct preliminary re¬ 
 search for The Lusiads. He came because he may have had no alter¬ 
 native. In a street brawl on Corpus Christi Day in 1552, the quarrel¬ 
 some Camdes had wounded a court official, Garcalo Borges. He was 
 cast into prison for eight months. Borges did not press charges and 
 in fact forgave the poet after receiving an apology. The king's pardon 
 followed on March 7, 1553, presumably with a condition attached to 
 it. A fortnight later, Camdes embarked for Goa. "I set out," he wrote 
 dejectedly, "as one leaving this world for the next." 
 
 He continued on his colorful course, taking part in an expedition 
 against the king of Chembe on the Malabar coast within six weeks of 
 his arrival in Goa and perhaps in an expedition to Ormuz in 1554. In 
 February 1555, he could "be located with some precision" in Soma¬ 
 lia. 1 In the following year, he appeared a third of the way across the 
 world in Macao as trustee for the dead and absent. Opinion differs 
 as to whether this was a promotion or a further degree of exile. In 
 Macao, Camdes once again displayed his customary talent for not 
 getting along with authority. Relieved of his post, he was in some 
 
danger of providing his successor with an additional dossier by join¬ 
 ing the ranks of the dead and absent. The hospitable Vietnamese res¬ 
 cued him from a shipwreck in the Mekong estuary. Clutched to his 
 heart was the waterlogged manuscript of The Lusiads. This incident 
 is a story that seems designed to belong to literature rather than fact. 
 Camoes endows it with a double legitimacy by incorporating it into 
 his epic poem (10.124). He also anticipates Milton here and elsewhere 
 in The Lusiads in his infiltration of the epic voice by the personal. 2 
 
 From Macao, Camoes returned to Goa and was in and out of 
 prison, once for not paying his debts and once, it is conjectured, be¬ 
 cause of the enemies he had made at Macao. He decided to return to 
 Portugal but languished for two years at Mozambique, unable to pay 
 for further passage. It was not until 1570 that he reached Lisbon. The 
 Lusiads was published two years later. The king awarded Camoes a 
 pension of 15,000 reis, which is described as not magnificent but not 
 a pittance. 3 It compares well with the payment of £10 that Milton 
 received for writing Paradise Lost. 
 
 A life that reads like a tale out of Conrad is reflected in a poem 
 that is more robust than thoughtful. Innumerable and boastful ac¬ 
 counts of Portuguese victories past and future remind one of the 
 "tedious havoc" that Milton castigates [PL 9.30), although only after 
 indulging in a fair measure of it himself. Camoes assiduously courts 
 comparison with Virgil by making more than eighty allusions to the 
 Aeneid and claims superiority over past epics because his hero is 
 actual rather than legendary. The machinery of the poem, complete 
 with Greek gods and Olympian squabbling, is also lavishly emula¬ 
 tive of the ancients. It becomes something of an embarrassment in a 
 poem written under Christian auspices, so that at one point (10.82), 
 Tethys is obliged to warn da Gama that she and the mythological 
 apparatus she represents are to be regarded as no more than figures 
 of poetry. It is advice that the reader is expected to apply with dis¬ 
 crimination. The future Portuguese empire that Tethys thereupon 
 proceeds to display to da Gama is clearly not intended to be figural. 
 
 The view of The Lusiads that these remarks introduce runs against 
 the grain of current interpretation. It is put forward to suggest that 
 current interpretations may rest on reading habits that need to be 
 scrutinized. Commentary on The Lusiads is almost nostalgically 
 Eurocentric. Negligible attention is given to the poem's representa¬ 
 tion of Asia, even though Camoes's epic displays the heroic quest as 
 the discovery of a new route to Asia's riches. This reticence is symp¬ 
 tomatic, but it ought to be slightly surprising in an era in which 
 Western revisionism seems prepared to admit that it needs to listen 
 
 32 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
to others as well as to learn from itself. Circumstances make it nec¬ 
 essary to declare the relevance of an Asian viewpoint in the reading 
 of the poem and to do so perhaps with an assertiveness that would 
 not have been called for in a world of evaluation with more gener¬ 
 ous boundaries. 
 
 Historicizing The Lusiads restricts itself at present to considering 
 the poem as an event in the epic genre or as an event in the orches¬ 
 tration of a Portuguese-European identity. The first tactic enables 
 us to separate epic dreams of heroic achievement and glory that are 
 both upper class and in the high style from more prosaic commercial 
 visions that are middle class and in the mean style. The inexorable 
 collusion between commerce and empire is mystified by a disen¬ 
 gagement that enables us to read The Lusiads as an impure poem or 
 as a poem forced out of the decorum of its genre by the glittering 
 possibilities of a breaking open of commercial horizons to which it 
 was unable to remain oblivious. 
 
 The second tactic of considering the poem as an event in a na- 
 tional-cum-European formation of identity can attach considerable 
 weight to the questionings of itself that The Lusiads occasionally 
 places at its margin. These questions are treated as part of an inter¬ 
 nal debate through which Portugal proceeds to write out its meaning 
 and destiny in a manner that can be read as emblematic of Europe, 
 but they also have been treated as troubling the poem or even placing 
 it in jeopardy to a sufficient extent to do away with some of the em¬ 
 barrassments of its imperial stridency in a postcolonial era. 
 
 Lacking in this historicizing is any sustained consideration of the 
 poem as an event in imperial history, as an important and strong ar¬ 
 ticulating voice in the coming to power of a discourse of dominance. 
 This protocol of avoidance is not surprising. Placing a poem within a 
 genre or within a history of identity formation is an activity that can 
 seek to remain descriptive; placing it within imperial history makes 
 evaluation difficult to escape. It also means that the evaluation may 
 put in doubt the status of any poem that contributes powerfully and 
 with sufficient single-mindedness to discourses and practices now 
 generally disowned. The protective barriers erected against this way 
 of approaching The Lusiads are entirely understandable; they make 
 it helpful (and perhaps essential) to import into the poem's Euro¬ 
 centric containment a reading from a different space that is formed 
 by a different experience. For the sake of clarity, I propose to pursue 
 and to endeavor to shape this reading before putting it into engage¬ 
 ment with other readings that have so far prevailed. 
 
 Camoes's insistent claim to be measured against Virgil only re- 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 33 
 
minds us that Lisbon was not a second Rome and that The Lusiads is 
 not a second Aeneid. The difference between the two poems verges 
 on the profound. There is in The Lusiads no Dido to abandon, no 
 Turnus to contend against, no devastated Troy to remember, and 
 no lost homeland to reinstate in the pursuit of an imperial destiny. 
 More important, the poem's freight of feeling carries within it none 
 of Virgil's war weariness, his sense of a heroic and world-ordering 
 imperative weighed down by the sacrifices the imperative exacts. 
 Camoes's epic seems behind Virgil in imperial time and almost a re¬ 
 turn to imperial innocence. 
 
 Epic poems are exercises in purposefulness and therefore cannot 
 place themselves in jeopardy, but to write poetry at all is to submit 
 to a hazard from which even epics cannot be immune. One possible 
 hazard is Tethys's warning to da Gama that the vision of Portugal's 
 future that she shows him from a hilltop is figural. The imperial 
 dream could be in question here, but Tethys's caution is quite rightly 
 treated as addressed to a suspicious church rather than to a subver¬ 
 sive reader. 
 
 The most telling and celebrated jeopardizing of the poem is the 
 old man's harangue at the end of canto 4, as da Gama's expedition 
 sets off on its journey. The diatribe expresses the objections of the 
 conservative opposition to the king's overseas policy as well as the 
 potentially Satanic vanity of the quest for glory and fame. For West¬ 
 ern critics, the old man's speech is crucial in the recuperative re¬ 
 mapping of The Lusiads. An Asian reader would be more struck by 
 the manner in which the speech is placed on a horizon that seems 
 to recede into history. The old man is never heard from again, and 
 once aired, his views receive no further attention. We could argue 
 that they needed no further attention, that they were underlined suf¬ 
 ficiently by events, that the old man's prophecy rang all too true in 
 the shrinking Portuguese empire of the 1580s. But da Gama's voy¬ 
 age is not presented in that disillusioning aftermath as an enterprise 
 that might need to be rethought. It is presented as a climactic and 
 heroic achievement from which a once noble nation has declined. 
 
 The imperial enterprise can be both glorified and doubted. We can 
 be surprised by sin, and Milton surprises us by a resplendent dis¬ 
 play of classical heroism against which the ninth book makes its 
 tragic turn. But Milton is unique in his capacity to enact pride—and 
 more persuasively poetic pride—not simply as a prelude to but as a 
 basis for poetic repentance. Camoes does not seek the poem's self¬ 
 repentance or even its sustained interrogation. Attempts to find in 
 
 34 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the old man's speech an enduring site for this interrogation are com¬ 
 mendable in their intentions but dubious in their success. It might 
 be more fruitful to see in the futility of the old man's protest some of 
 the poem's authenticity as an imperial document. Da Gama's fleet 
 is sailing away not only from Lisbon but also from a worldview now 
 out of date. 
 
 Glory and fame in The Lusiads are not, as with Milton, the noble 
 mind's last infirmities. They are epic pursuits, manifest in Portugal's 
 history as it proceeds to the crowning exploit that is both the poem's 
 prize and the history's climax. An Asian reader, understandably re¬ 
 sistant to the imperial theme, cannot easily forget that Asia was the 
 soil on which glory and fame displayed their banners. 
 
 It is not surprising that heroic statements, however noble as 
 poetry, remain unpersuasive to the victims of those statements. 
 Camoes's poem must accept this impoverishment in a postcolonial 
 world. It may not be alone in this deprivation, but it may be alone 
 in its enthusiastic subscription to the commercial rewards that go 
 with honor, dominion, and the discomfiture of the infidel. 
 
 To the Asian reader, Camoes's world presents itself as a world not 
 of meaning but of riches. The mountaintop from which da Gama 
 is shown the Portuguese future is reached through an impenetrable 
 thicket that reminds one of the approach to Milton's Paradise. 4 Char¬ 
 acteristically, it is strewn with emeralds and rubies (10.77). William 
 Mickle responds to such invitations by describing The Lusiads in 
 the preface to his 1776 translation as "the epic poem of the birth of 
 commerce, and, in a particular manner, the epic poem of whatever 
 country has the control and possession of the commerce of India." 5 
 His view has been strongly contested, but the reductionist charac¬ 
 terization may reflect some of the poem's difficulties in claiming 
 more for itself. In the exhortation that opens canto 7, for instance, 
 religious divisions are first deplored and unity is called for in con¬ 
 tending against the infidel. It is then blatantly argued that those un¬ 
 moved by religion should at least be moved by the prospect of vast 
 riches (7.11). The exhortation takes place on the threshold of the dis¬ 
 covery of India, making it once again clear that the wealth of Ind 
 that Milton infernalizes is, in Camoes's poem, the fitting recom¬ 
 pense for epic valor. 
 
 The purpose of da Gama's voyage was to open a passage to the 
 Orient that would destroy both the Venetian monopoly of the spice 
 trade and the Arab monopoly of the trade routes between the East 
 and Europe. Lisbon would become Europe's richest city, and the 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 35 
 
blow dealt to the Moslem infidel would felicitously serve both com¬ 
 merce and religion. "I hold it as very certain," Albuquerque opined, 
 "that, if we take this trade of Malacca away out of their hands, Cairo 
 and Mecca will be entirely ruined, and to Venice will no spices be 
 conveyed, except what her merchants go and buy in Portugal." 6 For 
 a brief period, this strategy seemed triumphant. Although one-third 
 to one-half of da Gama's men never saw Portugal again, the cargo 
 he brought home sold in Lisbon for sixty times the price paid for 
 it in India. By the early sixteenth century, Venetian trade with the 
 East was sufficiently disrupted for Portugal to take over 75 percent 
 of Europe's spice imports, reaping profits of 90 percent in the pro¬ 
 cess. "For a time," G. V. Scammell comments, Portugal's "remarkable 
 ambitions came near to success, an astonishing achievement for a 
 tiny country short of ships and men, and with such forces as it pos¬ 
 sessed thinly scattered through dozens of forts and posts in East and 
 West alike." 7 
 
 Portugal's moment of commercial glory was brief. Despite the 
 capture of Goa (1510), Malacca (1511), and Ormuz (1515), Eastern traf¬ 
 fic through the Arab world recovered and, indeed, began to surpass 
 its previous dimensions. The failure to capture Aden resulted in the 
 spice traffic being rerouted rather than cut off, and the porousness of 
 Portugal's blockade was attested to by clandestine Portuguese par¬ 
 ticipation in the very trade it was seeking to intercept. By 1600, only 
 20 percent of the pepper and less than 50 percent of the other spices 
 reaching Europe were arriving in Portuguese ships. Indeed, as the 
 sixteenth century wore on, the spice trade lost its preeminence for 
 Portugal, and cargoes were increasingly made up of cotton textiles. 
 The Portuguese also developed a carrier trade, conveying the pro¬ 
 duce of South and Southeast Asia to the markets of China and Japan. 
 Japan had been fortuitously "discovered" by a Portuguese ship blown 
 off course by a typhoon, and for a time, trade between China and 
 Japan was exclusively in Portuguese vessels. These secondary trade 
 gains were scarcely compensation for the shrinking commerce of a 
 waning empire. Seventy years after da Gama's voyage, Camoes was 
 writing of a moment already past and prophesying a future that the 
 present seemed insistent on undermining. 8 
 
 Portugal's declining fortunes became catastrophically evident 
 when King Sebastiao in June 1578 led an expedition to Alcacer-Kebir 
 to verify Camoes's assurance that the Moslem everywhere would 
 quail in terror before the weight of Portugal's armies and the fame of 
 its exploits (1.6-8). The king had reasons for confidence apart from 
 
 36 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Camoes's poetry. Fifty years earlier, in celebration of a triumph by 
 the Portuguese over the Moors, a subservient Moor had ridden a lav¬ 
 ishly caparisoned white elephant, curtseying thrice before the pope 
 and sprinkling the assembled spectators with water. On this occa¬ 
 sion, the outcome would be different, even with an invading force of 
 1,500 horsemen and 15,000 foot soldiers, transported by 500 vessels. 
 Nine thousand camp followers accompanied the expedition, includ¬ 
 ing large numbers of women, to celebrate the victory in the manner 
 of canto 9 of The Lusiads. In four hours of battle under a sear¬ 
 ing African sun, the flower of Portugal's manhood was destroyed. 
 Eight thousand were killed, and 15,000 taken prisoner and sold into 
 slavery. No more than 100 found their way to safety. In the follow¬ 
 ing year, as the plague descended on Lisbon, Camoes contracted his 
 final illness, commenting that he was glad to die not merely in but 
 also with his country. 
 
 It is not difficult to consider The Lusiads as a poem of bombast 
 that history ironically falsifies. The grandiose conception of the state 
 of India (which, in the period's expansively vague geography, in¬ 
 cluded not only India but also Southeast Asia) 9 can be mockingly 
 set against Portugal's limited manpower and its increasingly strait¬ 
 ened finances. Yet the defining Portuguese experience may be the 
 extraordinarily swift expansion of nationhood into empire, an em¬ 
 pire that, although precariously maintained, was more far-flung than 
 any hitherto in history. The dizzying opening of horizons that sea 
 power suddenly made possible accounts for many of the excesses in 
 the Portuguese imperial vision, and the overreaching becomes more 
 endurable as we remember how events inflated the dream. 
 
 The Portuguese effort has its instructive antecedents not in West¬ 
 ern but in Indian history. K. M. Panikkar is, of all Indian historians, 
 the most impressive in depicting how South India's expansion into 
 "further India" was achieved by the very sea power that ten cen¬ 
 turies later was to open India to colonization by the West: 
 
 At the end of the fifth century the area of the Mekong val¬ 
 ley, Malaya and the Indonesian islands were dotted with 
 Hindu principalities some of which, like the kingdom of Fu- 
 nan, had attained considerable importance and prosperity. 
 
 This was the formative period. Hindu culture and organi¬ 
 zation had been established on a firm basis, and the local 
 population—at least the higher strata—assimilated with the 
 Indian emigrants and colonists. The next five centuries wit- 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 37 
 
ness a great flowering of Indian culture in these areas which 
 properly belong to Indian history, because at least till the 
 twelfth century, these people considered themselves as in¬ 
 tegrally belonging to the Indian world. 10 
 
 "Further India" was a cultural as well as a territorial concept, the 
 former persisting while the latter dissolved. In the noblest of his 
 many books, Heinrich Zimmer writes of the Indian cultural world: 
 
 Each of the colonial cultures and art styles of Ceylon, Indo¬ 
 nesia, and Further India, as well as that of Tibet, China, 
 Korea, and Japan, took over in a worthy way the Indian heri¬ 
 tage, giving to it an original and happy local application. 
 
 Out of various ethnological and biological requirements 
 self-contained styles were formed that were the peers in 
 originality, nobility and delicacy of the Indian. 
 
 India remains "the creating hearth": "Indeed, whenever the incred¬ 
 ible brightness of the spiritual, the balanced repose of the dynamic, 
 or the brilliant power of the triumphantly omnipotent are made 
 effectively manifest in Oriental art, an Indian model is not far to 
 seek." 11 There is a lesson to be learned here, and some of it is learned 
 in Macaulay's vision of an "imperishable empire" in which the inte¬ 
 grating force is to be cultural cohesion rather than imperial domi¬ 
 nance. 
 
 Sea power established and sustained the Portuguese empire, but 
 long lines of communication and manpower restraints made that 
 empire (unlike the cultural world of further India) an essentially 
 coastal affair. The brief and solitary reference to the Mughals in The 
 Lusiads (10.64) is not necessarily a reflection of this skin-deep char¬ 
 acter. Although the Hispanic Society's editor finds the lack of at¬ 
 tention to the Mughals surprising, 12 the fact is that the dynasty had 
 not come into existence when da Gama dropped anchor in Calicut. 
 A reference to the Mughals is only possible in the accounts of the 
 Portuguese imperial future that occupy the last books of the poem. 
 Camoes does make such a reference, but the occasion he chooses is 
 the support the Portuguese give to the king of Gujarat in his cam¬ 
 paign against Akbar's father, Humayun. The Portuguese reward con¬ 
 sisted of permission to build a fortress in Diu. Since Akbar himself 
 was on the throne at the time The Lusiads was published, singling 
 out the event was much less than tactful. It also showed the Portu¬ 
 guese wrongheadedness (predictable in a coastal empire) in assessing 
 
 38 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the balance of forces on the Indian subcontinent. In the year fol¬ 
 lowing the publication of The Lusiads, Akbar opened his campaign 
 against Gujarat and, realizing like all successful generals that speed 
 was of the essence, surprised his adversary with a forced march that 
 covered the 600 miles to Ahmedabad in eleven days. Surat had been 
 taken six months earlier, and all of Gujarat was now subdued. The 
 Great Mogul, who fortunately had not read The Lusiads, exacted no 
 price for Portuguese participation in the alliance against his father. 
 Later in the decade, Akbar was to begin his pursuit of a universal 
 religion and was to summon Portuguese Jesuits to his "House of 
 Worship" in Fatehpur Sikri to articulate the insights of Christianity. 
 Tennyson takes note of the event in his carefully researched poem, 
 "Akbar's Dream." 13 In another five years, Camoes's perception of the 
 Great Mogul might have changed, but the period in which he sets 
 his poem remains one in which the Delhi sultanate was collapsing 
 and in which power relationships all over North India were turbu¬ 
 lent and unpredictable. 
 
 In South India, the situation was quite different. The Hindu king¬ 
 dom of Vijayanagar had been growing in power and influence for 
 more than a century. Niccolo Conti, the Italian traveler, visited the 
 capital in 1420. His perfunctory reference to it pales in compari¬ 
 son with 'Abd-er-Razzak's glowing description in 1442: "The pupil 
 of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence 
 has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in 
 the world." 14 The Portuguese traveler, Domingo Paes, visited the 
 kingdom's capital soon after da Gama's arrival and described it as 
 "the best provided city in the world." 15 Vijayanagar's suzerainty ex¬ 
 tended to all of South India, and Portugal respected that suzerainty 
 sufficiently to seek Vijayanagar's permission to build a fortress at 
 Bhatkal. Permission was granted but only after Portugal had demon¬ 
 strated its prowess by Albuquerque's capture of Goa, although with 
 the assistance of 2,000 Indian troops. 16 Portuguese relations with 
 Vijayanagar were extensive, and indeed, much of our information 
 about the kingdom comes from Portuguese sources such as Domingo 
 Paes; Duarte Barbosa, Magellan's brother-in-law (on whom Camoes 
 draws heavily in his account of the matrilineal society of the Nairs); 
 and Fernao Nuniz. Panikkar describes these relationships as "most 
 cordial," 17 but perhaps they are better characterized as opportunism 
 covered with a diplomatic veneer, as is too often the case in relation¬ 
 ships between nations. When Vijayanagar reached its apogee under 
 the rule of Krishnadeva Raya, the veneer of cordiality was sufficient 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 39 
 
for Portugal to assist Vijayanagar substantially in recapturing Rai- 
 chur. Nuniz treats that event as decisive in Vijayanagar's attainment 
 of supremacy in South India. As the kingdom became less stable, 
 Portuguese relationships with it became predictably more disrup¬ 
 tive. It may not have been altogether helpful to Vijayanagar that "the 
 external trade of the great Hindu kingdom was practically in the 
 hands of the Portuguese." 18 That trade, which, as Barbosa noted, ex¬ 
 tended from China to Alexandria, included a considerable number of 
 Persian horses. Nuniz, who earned his living as a horse dealer, esti¬ 
 mates that as many as 13,000 horses were imported annually into 
 Vijayanagar. 19 
 
 The ruler of Vijayanagar at the time of da Gama's arrival in Cali¬ 
 cut was Narsimha Saluva, to whom Camoes is almost certainly re¬ 
 ferring when he speaks of the kingdom of Narsingha. 20 Camoes's 
 response to Vijayanagar bypasses the substantial connections be¬ 
 tween Portugal and the Hindu kingdom. It is restricted to observing 
 that Vijayanagar is more noted for its gold and precious stones than 
 for the valor of its people 21 and that it is the territory in which St. 
 Thomas was treacherously put to death (7.21, 10.108-19). None of 
 Vijayanagar's accomplishments are recognized in a poem that takes 
 it for granted that Oriental nations are incapable of sustaining the 
 forms of civilization and that the best they can do is to provide op¬ 
 portunities for commerce. Others who claim no literary eminence 
 have been able to perceive more in Vijayanagar's history. 
 
 The Vijayanagar style, a Hindu anticipation of the baroque, has 
 aroused disparate reactions and can be accused of florid excess. On 
 the other hand, the political statement the style sought to make 
 could be expected to call on the aesthetics of lavishness, using the 
 controlled profusion of Hindu art as a metaphor for the kingdom's 
 ordered plenitude. That statement was soon to come to an end. 
 
 A coalition of Moslem-ruled Deccan sultanates disastrously de¬ 
 feated the Hindu kingdom's army in the battle of Talikota on Janu¬ 
 ary 23, 1565. They were aided in this crushing victory by two crucial 
 defections from the Vijayanagar forces. The sacking of the capital 
 followed, and in five methodical months of further destruction, Vija¬ 
 yanagar was razed to the ground. "Never perhaps in the history of 
 the world," one scholar writes, "has such havoc been wrought and 
 wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city." 22 The havoc may have 
 been sudden because the people of Vijayanagar were confident in 
 the victory of their enormous army, but it was also systematic and 
 hideously prolonged. War lust does not explain the 150 days of the 
 
 40 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
capital's ordeal after a conclusive victory had been achieved in the 
 field. It was not sufficient for the city to be plundered; the statement 
 it made had to be erased from cultural memory. Western imperi¬ 
 alism possesses no monopoly on the exercise of vindictiveness to 
 otherness. 
 
 Camoes was in Goa at the time of the battle of Talikota, and when 
 he makes his reference to the kingdom of Narsingha as more notable 
 for its gold and precious stones than for the valor of its people, he 
 may have been commenting on that battle. Despite its more abrasive 
 implications, the comment is indeed necessary to reassure investors 
 in empires such as the Portuguese and the consortiums brought into 
 being by the English, the French, the Dutch, and even the Danes. For 
 venture capital to be called out in sufficient quantities, the territory 
 must be rich in resources and its population easy to intimidate. 
 
 A third and more subtle desideratum comes to be added to the 
 imperialist prospectus: the territory must not only accept submis¬ 
 sion but also acknowledge it as proceeding from its identity. When 
 da Gama is conducted to the Zamorin's palace, he first enters a 
 temple filled with abominable representations of the deity in the 
 manner of the catalog of pagan gods in the first book of Paradise Lost. 
 Camoes's condemnatory description rectifies an incident in which 
 da Gama is said to have endeared himself (briefly) to the local popu¬ 
 lace by kneeling in a Hindu temple, thinking it to be an eccentric 
 version of a Christian church. Southey, who considered da Gama to 
 be worse than Francisco Pizarro, seized on the incident as confirm¬ 
 ing da Gama's stupidity. 23 In fact, da Gama was not alone in his error. 
 It was widely assumed at the time that those in India who were not 
 Moslems must be Christians. The legend of Prester John was potent 
 in preconditioning expectations. 24 
 
 After Hindu idolization of the unnatural has been underlined, da 
 Gama can proceed to the enclosed garden of the Zamorin's palace, 
 a country retreat in the center of the city. A Marvellian disengage¬ 
 ment of art from life is suggested, and the barrier, as in Marvell, is 
 porous. Art reaffirms the principles of the real world that are suf¬ 
 ficiently powerful to maintain themselves, even in the segregation 
 of the artistic enclosure. The gateway set in the walls surrounding 
 the palace celebrates this infiltration. It is adorned (with a crafts¬ 
 manship said to be worthy of Daedalus) by scenes depicting previ¬ 
 ous conquerors of India. These conquerors are specified as Bacchus, 
 Semiramis, and Alexander. The representations are as the shadow to 
 the substance, with the substance attaining its full realization in a 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 41 
 
final conquest by the Portuguese, of which the previous triumphs 
 are shadowy types. 
 
 Of the three conquests, the first is mythical. The fictitious cam¬ 
 paign of the second against India was a military disaster, according 
 to Strabo and Arrius. The third conqueror, Alexander, in his brief 
 foray into India, never penetrated to within 1,000 miles of Calicut. 
 Camoes is praised for his capacity for direct observation, for writ¬ 
 ing whereof he knows, unlike Milton, who is compelled to pore over 
 travel books and atlases. The claim is not unjustified but might be 
 more persuasive if The Lusiads made less extensive and more critical 
 use of classical historians and geographers. Here, however, Camoes 
 is not recording his observations but providing artwork for the im¬ 
 perialist folder. Achilles' shield is the distant ancestor of this art¬ 
 work, but the depictions on the gateway commemorate submission, 
 not victory, and are carved on a gateway, not a shield. This crucial 
 change, on which Lusiadic commentary is so conspicuously silent, 
 carves out the difference between Occident and Orient, between a 
 masculine, imperial Europe and a feminine, colonial Asia. Were it 
 not for Semiramis, one could argue that domination over the Orient 
 is a Western entitlement so deeply taken for granted that it can even 
 be found incised into the art of subject peoples. Semiramis, an Asian, 
 may seem to represent a problem, but her figure in the gateway may 
 well be an allusion to the matrilineal habits of the Nairs—habits 
 that Camoes, drawing on Barbosa's account, has already described 
 in unusual detail. Moreover, since The Lusiads draws some atten¬ 
 tion to Semiramis's lurid sexual practices (which Sir Walter Raleigh 
 regards as invented by "envious and lying Grecians "), 15 her imagi¬ 
 nary conquest of India can be seen as implanting those practices in 
 the fertile soil of Oriental decadence. India's talent for the unnatural 
 has been emphasized already in the previous stanzas. Conquest by a 
 woman to whom the unnatural comes easily compounds the effemi¬ 
 nacy and degeneracy of the conquered. A civilization that celebrates 
 its defeats in this manner has earned the ennoblement of a Portu¬ 
 guese conquest. 
 
 Said finds imperialism "supported and perhaps even impelled" by 
 ideological formations that include the notion "that certain territo¬ 
 ries and people require and beseech domination." 26 The gateway to 
 the Zamorin's palace is sculptured as if to demonstrate this propo¬ 
 sition, treating it as inlaid into India's understanding of itself. It is 
 a gateway not only to India but also to a way of viewing the colo¬ 
 nial world. 
 
 42 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
The feminization of the Orient is a perception deeply embedded 
 in imperialist discourse, but as the perception accumulates its his¬ 
 tory, the nuances (or crudities) of that feminization become more 
 instructive. We are not yet at that more sophisticated stage where an 
 Oriental-feminine other comes into being as an object of desire and 
 guilt that a censored self has fashioned from its purged elements. 
 The self's previous collusiveness with what it must hereafter reject 
 and its will to eradicate all traces of that collusiveness can then 
 be reflected in the sternness with which the other is treated. The 
 purged identity is heroically maintained. Exploitativeness can be 
 masked by a defensive anger that then becomes the evidence that the 
 self's illicit relationships with its alternative are being severed and 
 that their tentacular tenacity is being dealt with root and branch. 
 This root-and-branch ferocity is chillingly apparent in Greenblatt's 
 memorable juxtaposition of genocide in Hispaniola with Guyon's 
 destruction of the Bower of Bliss. 27 
 
 Such a specification of the other is best nourished by a religioethi- 
 cal mentality that projects the internal structure of order within the 
 self onto the external relationship between ruler and ruled and that 
 reconceives the nature of subject peoples so as to fit the images of 
 that projection. The Protestant ethic of temperance and thrift is in¬ 
 genious in meeting these requirements. Although conducive to capi¬ 
 tal formation, it is also in potential conflict with the consumerism 
 that is the basis of empire. It is therefore driven to set in subliminal 
 motion an argument for empire that would preempt this conflict. An 
 ambivalent construction of the Orient becomes necessary, in which 
 Western morality can denounce what Western cupidity continues 
 to desire. Conquest that allows both condemnation and possession 
 and finally even redemption of the object is the lucrative way out of 
 this self-inflicted paradox. Oriental opulence has been a persisting 
 stereotype, as Third World poverty is today. When the opulence is in- 
 fernalized, as in Milton, the way is open to self-rebuke conveniently 
 displaced into disciplining of the other and to self-indulgence from 
 the profits of that disciplining. Said's work is indeed supportive of 
 a syndrome in which responsibility follows rape and a hostile rela¬ 
 tionship with otherness violated graduates into a hierarchical rela¬ 
 tionship with otherness redeemed. 
 
 The Lusiads seems not to be troubled by these entanglements of 
 psychic politics. It invites reading as a work of imperialist inno¬ 
 cence. Homeric rather than Virgilian, it is only marginally given to 
 the self-examination that in Virgil undercuts victory with some of 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 43 
 
the sadness of things. It needs no fictions of self-justification. The 
 economics of plunder and the heroic satisfactions of annihilating 
 the enemy are not emasculated by matters of morality. Wealth and 
 women are the rewards of war. The women are provided in canto 9, 
 and the prospective wealth is displayed in the next canto as if the 
 human and cultural resources of the many-splendored earth were 
 matters of absolutely no consequence. Milton looks down from a 
 mountaintop to ponder the terrible dubiousness of history, hanging 
 suspended in the mixed nature of humanity. Camoes looks down as 
 Milton's Comus might have to see the full and unwithdrawing hand 
 of nature pouring forth its bounties, with no other aim than to "sate 
 the curious taste" of an emerging consumerism that has smelled the 
 savor of affluence (Ludlow Masque 709-23; PL 11.884-86). 
 
 One can equate the world that da Gama is invited to view with 
 the banquet Christ refuses in Paradise Regained (2.337-91). There 
 is a higher hunger in which Camoes shows no interest. When the 
 layers of the Ptolemaic universe are unwrapped to display the Por¬ 
 tuguese future as its kernel, the poem also unwraps its identity as 
 scarcely more than a guidebook to the spice trade. India grows rich 
 on gold, precious stones, perfumes, and spices, and Malabar fat¬ 
 tens on trade from China to the Nile (7.31, 41). Bengal outranks all 
 other countries in fertility (7.20). The abundance of Chittagong, the 
 looms of Orissa, and "treasure-strewn" Cambay await exploitation 
 by those who control the routes of maritime commerce (10.106,120, 
 121). Jedda owes its prosperity to the spice trade (9.3). Banda can 
 offer pepper and mace, the Moluccas provide nutmeg and cloves, 
 and cinnamon presents itself as the fame, wealth, and beauty of Sri 
 Lanka (9.14). Borneo's gift to the Portuguese is camphor. The cloves 
 of Ternate and Tidore are all the more precious because they will be 
 purchased with Portuguese blood. Sumatra offers silk and gold and 
 trees weeping fragrant gums and balms in the manner of the trees 
 in Milton's paradise. The Maldives provide coconut palms, Socotra 
 offers bitter aloes, and the islands of Africa supply ambergris (10.132- 
 37 ). 
 
 The limitations of this inventory are persistent and obvious. One 
 might expect more from a work of literature, and Camoes does in¬ 
 deed advise us that gold is the root of all evil and that contempt for 
 riches is a part of human dignity (6.98, 7.98-99). Like the old man's 
 harangue in canto 4, these statements are made in order not to be 
 heard again. All three appear at the end of their respective cantos, 
 marking not the canto's climax but its margin, the sporadic and re- 
 
 44 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
sidual appearance of another poem that no longer matters. We can 
 hear in these distant disturbances the voices of what Quint calls a 
 countervailing epic continuing to be audible at the poem's boundary. 
 Their remote location can be read as acknowledging a text, margin¬ 
 alized as archaic and revitalized as subversive, that has been written 
 over but cannot be erased. On the other hand, the very effort at era¬ 
 sure can be read as pointing to the inexorably diminishing future 
 of these voices in a world now to be constituted by economics, not 
 sententiae. 
 
 The reading of The Lusiads offered here confirms Mickle's charac¬ 
 terization, although the exploitativeness I discern in the poem does 
 not seem to have counted for much with Mickle even in 1776, at a 
 time when the English nabobs were growing rich on the plunder of 
 Bengal and when their misdeeds were a topic of popular literature 
 in their country. 28 My reading differs from those of critics such as 
 Richard Helgerson 29 who would prefer to locate their readings of The 
 Lusiads around the poem's heroic-aristocratic core and to regard its 
 commercial content as peripheral. It also differs from the readings 
 of those who see The Lusiads as a poem divided against itself and 
 who prefer to centralize rather than to historicize the poem written 
 on the epic poem's margin. 
 
 Opportunities for such finessing are not lacking in Lusiadic com¬ 
 mentary. C. M. Bowra sees Camoes as "a Humanist even with his 
 contradictions" and finds among those contradictions "conflicting 
 feelings about war and empire." 30 Thomas Greene suggests that "Os 
 Lusiadas is a poem which turns back on itself." 31 Gerald Moser ob¬ 
 serves that "every intellectual who has reflected on the episode of 
 the Old Man has seen it in the light of his own times and cir¬ 
 cumstances." The old man, according to him, speaks today to "wor¬ 
 ries about man's survival among technological advances." 32 Alexan¬ 
 der Parker argues that the voyages of Columbus and da Gama were 
 regarded by enlightened thinkers of the time (such as Camoes) as 
 opening the way to an "international community" and to "collabora¬ 
 tion between different peoples on a scale never envisaged before." 33 
 Kenneth Jackson in his study of the dialogics of The Lusiads even 
 suggests that "there is some evidence that the re-contact with India 
 is upheld as a Utopian fusion of the Occident-Orient split." The split 
 is apparently to be healed by "love as transformed conquest." 34 
 
 These recuperative efforts bear witness to some uneasiness with 
 the more than occasional stridency of The Lusiads, but the poem also 
 needs to be shown as complicating itself by those who find Mickle 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 45 
 
swaggeringly reductionist. The alternative (as Helgerson clearly sees) 
 is to argue that the true site of the poem is not where Mickle 
 found it. Such restorative readings remain precarious because of 
 their excessive attention to possibilities that the poem sites on its 
 margin or that it raises and then declines to pursue. In fact, the most 
 effective turn against The Lusiads takes place not at the poem's 
 margin but in another poem by Camoes, the justly admired "By the 
 Rivers of Babylon." 35 Something important is said about Camoes's 
 epic when uneasiness with its ideology is placed so explicitly outside 
 its borders. The poem surrenders to the imperial future, and although 
 the surrender may not be without misgivings, the claim of the future 
 is so powerful that the misgivings can only be voices from the past. 
 
 A potential counterforce in the poem to which imaginative energy 
 is heavily and by no means marginally committed can be found in 
 the Adamastor episode. Placed with high prominence both at the 
 midpoint of da Gama's journey and at the midpoint of the poem 
 itself, the myth of Adamastor is found by Quint to be "a figure for 
 an Africa that cannot definitively be subdued by European arms." 36 
 Adamastor's menacing warning to da Gama against proceeding fur¬ 
 ther on his quest picks up elements from the old man's speech and 
 is in the tradition of the epic curse—a promise of resistance to the 
 imperial narrative and of the assiduous undoing of the drive to clo¬ 
 sure on which the authority of that narrative depends. 
 
 In weighing Quint's reading of Adamastor, we must remember 
 that the epic prize sustaining da Gama's quest is Asia and not Africa. 
 The stormy cape (which nearly disposed of the author of The Lusiads ) 
 is a formidable obstacle, but no more than an obstacle, in a drive 
 to finality that leaves the impediment behind both in geopolitical 
 space and as a continuing threat to epic-imperial closure. 37 Signifi¬ 
 cantly, Asia, the consummation of the quest, is not allowed either a 
 site or an image of resistance. Thus the epic topos is crucially lim¬ 
 ited, and as Quint's study makes plain, it is deformed even within 
 those limits, with Adamastor reduced from a human counterforce to 
 a "blind fury of nature," 38 able only to recycle its own wrath. Insofar 
 as resistance is repetitive and even random, it can only struggle inef¬ 
 fectively against the teleological thrust of the imperial narrative, an 
 impetus so powerful that, like that divine providence for which the 
 imperial will habitually makes itself a metaphor, it can even turn 
 resistance to its ends. Thus, the storms that assail da Gama actually 
 blow him closer to the shores of India. This is Bacchus's frustration 
 and not Adamastor's. Adamastor's frustration is to remain perpetu- 
 
 46 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ally taunted by Thetis, locked forever into the African landscape, 
 while Tethys displays to da Gama the many kingdoms that are to be 
 jewels in the Portuguese crown. 39 Thus even this much-praised epi¬ 
 sode only suggests "that epic's representation of its losers, its attempt 
 to adopt their perspective, may not be able to escape appropriation 
 by the victor's ideology." 40 
 
 Differences between Western and Eastern readings of The Lusiads 
 are ultimately disagreements over how to map its center-margin re¬ 
 lationships. One response to these disagreements would be to make 
 the mapping historical. The margin then becomes a previous mode 
 of understanding that the poem places at its boundary but is not pre¬ 
 pared to efface. Moving the margin to the center reinstates the pre¬ 
 vious mode and is too close to nostalgia to be productive. It would 
 be preferable to construct a revisionary critique of The Lusiads that 
 makes use of the footholds the poem offers but is written out of 
 the history the poem enters rather than out of the history it leaves 
 behind. Milton, as we shall see, offers such a critique, and contem¬ 
 porary responses may have something to learn from him. 
 
 When we historicize the poetics of The Lusiads, we can be better 
 aware of our own historical position on what Helgerson calls the 
 hermeneutic spiral. 41 Helgerson uses the figure to account for the 
 difference between Mickle's reading and his, but the figure, once 
 invoked, invites us to carry it further. Readings made in the Elizabe¬ 
 than world of English national consciousness, in an imperial world 
 poised on the threshold of possessing India, and in a postcolonial 
 world that must take into account not only heroic identities but also 
 their exploitative consequences will naturally differ in the way they 
 perceive the poem. The spiral form reminds us not only of these dif¬ 
 ferences but also of the interplay of understandings that ought to 
 take place across them. 
 
 Helgerson's reading is located in an Elizabethan world that, in 
 writing itself, is articulating a nationhood that will persist and pre¬ 
 vail in future constructions of England. The Lusiads, not merely 
 honored but cherished in Portugal as a deep and singular statement 
 of the Portuguese national self, is placed within and read as speaking 
 to this English world. It is the poem of an aristocratic-heroic ethos, 
 set in contrast by Helgerson with Richard Hakluyt's voyages, which 
 speak for a commercial ethos, potentially indifferent to the imperial. 
 
 One must question a separation that was influential in the deco¬ 
 rum of its day but that subsequent events seem to blur. Mickle 
 resoundingly associates commerce with possession, and that asso- 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 47 
 
ciation persisted even though nineteenth-century free traders ques¬ 
 tioned the empire not on moral grounds but on the grounds of its 
 viability as a business concern. They could have been mistaken, and 
 it was more prudent to be safe. As a place for character building and 
 for exhibiting the British heroic identity, the empire had possibili¬ 
 ties that could be said to appeal to an aristocratic code, but it would 
 be rash to conclude that these theatrical opportunities were more 
 important than protecting trade routes. 
 
 To these cautions one should add that the separation for which 
 Helgerson argues was not clear-cut, even in Elizabethan England. 42 
 If "honour, dominion, glory and renown" [PL 6.422) were assigned 
 to a heroic realm and profit was assigned to a practical world free of 
 heroic distractions, that may have been largely to distinguish British 
 matter-of-factness from a confusion of genres that marred the Span¬ 
 ish performance. When Milton displaces the heroic claim with the 
 Satanic manifesto, he does not simply devalue the heroic; he also 
 points, in similes freighted with evocations of the spice trade, to the 
 inexorable link between the heroic and the commercial. Donne's 
 nineteenth elegy, a poem admittedly written in the middle style but 
 one that strains instructively against its boundaries, places material 
 riches and imperial possession (figuratively realized as sexual posses¬ 
 sion) in an intimate relationship within the much-used trope of the 
 New World perceived as the female body. Bonds, seals, and licenses 
 attest to the mercantile strain that pervades the imagery, and since 
 title to possession is conveniently granted by the person possessed, 
 the images can apply the binding forces of both legal contracts and 
 passionate undertakings to the relationship between imperial power 
 and colonial yielding. We pass through the now familiar gateway 
 of The Lusiads to the surrendered wealth of a territory beseeching 
 dominance. 43 
 
 Today's postcolonial reader is concerned not with how England 
 wrote itself, even in Donne's exuberant complexities, but with how 
 Asia is to write itself in a manner that emancipates it from pre¬ 
 vious writings by Europe. For such a reader, the heavy commer¬ 
 cial freight that the poem carries and the characterizing of every 
 Asian country exclusively in terms of its wealth and vulnerability 
 are too dominantly foregrounded for The Lusiads to be approached 
 as a heroic poem that swerves into the commercial. The reverse 
 reading of Camoes's poem as a commercial poem that swerves into 
 the heroic remains possible, but the magnitude of the swerve cannot 
 be made significant to those aware of the exploitative realities, the 
 
 48 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
destructive cooperation of commerce with possession, that history 
 wrote as a postscript to the poem's final cantos. 
 
 The relativities of reading must always be borne in mind as we 
 read. The argument being pursued here is that the turn of the spi¬ 
 ral into our era has opened the way to a new order of reading that 
 calls for a place among the concerns of this book. It is not suggested 
 that the new reading is the only reading our historical situatedness 
 can authorize. It is suggested that intercultural understanding can¬ 
 not proceed until the new reading is more than the voice in the 
 margin that the old man's harangue continues to be in The Lusiads. 
 The look of a canon, largely imperial, must change as readers from 
 territories, until recently subjected, take their proper place in future 
 reading communities. 
 
 If East and West are to approach each other in their readings of The 
 Lusiads, they can do so only against the backdrop of that enormous 
 cultural simplification we call imperialism. Some works of literature 
 resist this simplification, others comply with it, and others find re¬ 
 sistance in compliance. Two of these categories are honorable today, 
 but the third is not dishonorable and scholarship is not served when 
 it is elided into the other two. 
 
 Beginnings simplify in order to generate the impetus that will give 
 them their stamina as beginnings. Beginnings leave something be¬ 
 hind. There will always be an old man on the shore whose age is 
 the proof that he no longer matters. If we discern a pathos in The 
 Lusiads, it is the pathos of a poem mastered by its burden. It has 
 to define an imperial moment, not of transition but of rupture, that 
 opens a strange road into a different era. To assess the poem's pathos, 
 we must assess what history rejects in order to form itself, what 
 lesser possibilities it places in exile or in otherness, and what stri- 
 dencies it nurtures in defending the imperial statement against the 
 residue of its own unavoidable guilt. A poem that calls for these as¬ 
 sessments may not always be pleasant to read. It is more important 
 that reading it should be enlightening. 
 
 The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 49 
 
1 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: 
 Some Thoughts on Milton's India 
 
 Scholarship on Milton's India is not voluminous, and the student in 
 search of understanding cannot proceed very far beyond the Milton 
 encyclopedia article on the subject. The general disposition is to 
 treat the handful of references to India as unrelated excursions into 
 the exotic, part of an encyclopedic epic's obligation to be encyclope¬ 
 dic even in its naming of places. If the references are taken together, 
 their most conspicuous characteristic is that nearly all of them occur 
 in infernal or postlapsarian contexts. They can then be regarded as 
 collectively proposing the Satanization of the Orient in a way be¬ 
 coming familiar to Milton's time. Milton's contemporaries were not 
 unanimous on this matter. 1 Commercial relations with the East were 
 strengthening, and it was hard to argue that the Devil and his as¬ 
 sociates were the only possible source of supply for commodities 
 that European nations wanted. The biblical imagination was less en¬ 
 tangled in these niceties. Egypt was an abomination, and anything 
 east of it was likely to be worse. 
 
 The first book of Paradise Lost is indeed heavily laden with pejo¬ 
 rative references to the Orient. Both the catalog of false gods and 
 the building of Pandemonium provide rich opportunities for moral 
 invective. The opportunities, although seized with characteristic 
 energy, remain sufficiently routine for J. B. Broadbent to observe 
 straightforwardly that "the oriental similes place the building as a 
 citadel of barbaric despotism." 2 It is to be noted that Babylon forms 
 the eastern limit of these similes, almost as if the true heart of dark¬ 
 ness has been set apart for deeper castigation. Nevertheless, Pande¬ 
 monium is not totally Oriental. Its facade reflects the Mediterranean 
 world, with Doric pillars that may be designed to remind us of the 
 colonnade that Gian Bernini built for St. Peter's. The bee was the 
 emblem of Pope Urban VIII, who consecrated St. Peter's, and Milton 
 
duly provides us with a bee simile that deflates the fallen angels 
 and embroils the papacy in Oriental viciousness. We are now in the 
 outer chamber of Pandemonium, and a reference to pygmies beyond 
 "the Indian mount" (1.781) helps us to fix Pandemonium's location 
 in the poem's imaginative space. The reference to "fairy elves" that 
 follows confirms the location. 3 It remembers Shakespeare's Midsum¬ 
 mer Night’s Dream (2.1), where dissension in the fairy realm, suf¬ 
 ficient to upset the seasonal order, arises over a young boy given 
 to Titania by an Indian queen who is Titania's votaress (2.121-37). 
 Spenser goes further in The Faerie Queene, claiming dominion over 
 India for the world of Faerie (2.10.72). The claim can become more 
 than fanciful in view of Queen Elizabeth's Faerie ancestry. 
 
 Pandemonium itself is hierarchically organized, with class distinc¬ 
 tions cementing the imperial display. Its great hall is for the demo¬ 
 cratic multitude, who must contract themselves to cope with the 
 hall's limited seating facilities. "Far within" is the council chamber 
 for the "secret conclave" of the power elite, who are provided with 
 "golden seats" and can maintain without compromise "their own di¬ 
 mensions like themselves" (1.790-97). The first book ends poised on 
 these lines, and as we turn the page, the imagination opens the doors 
 to the interior: 
 
 High on a Throne of Royal State, which far 
 Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, 
 
 Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand 
 Showers on her kings barbaric Pearl and Gold, 
 
 Satan exalted sat, by merit raised 
 To that bad eminence. 
 
 (2.1-6) 
 
 Ormuz was once the emporium of the Orient, and Marvell's de¬ 
 luded voyagers to the Bermudas dream appropriately of "jewels more 
 rich than Ormuz shows." By the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost, 
 this legendary splendor was becoming a thing of the past. Ormuz's 
 fortunes declined after its capture from the Portuguese in 1622 by 
 an Iranian expedition with British naval support. Described in The 
 Lusiads as a barren mountain of salt (10.41.1-2), important only as 
 a marketplace for Eastern riches, it became in Milton's poem that 
 "island salt and bare" to which Paradise was eventually reduced. 4 On 
 the other hand, the wealth of Ind was very much a matter of the 
 present and was commented on by every traveler to India, including 
 English emissaries such as Sir Thomas Roe and Sir Richard Hawkins. 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves si 
 
Their interest in the peoples and cultures of India seems marginal in 
 comparison with their zeal in making inventories, but evangelical 
 fervor can erupt revealingly through the assiduous stocktaking. Thus 
 Thomas Coryat, having first described the Hindus along expected 
 lines as a "gentle people," describes them almost immediately after¬ 
 ward as "brutish ethnicks," as displaying "superstition and impiety 
 most abominable in the highest degree," and as "aliens from Christ 
 and the common-wealth of Israel." 5 
 
 In these circumstances, the "Throne of Royal State" that Satan 
 occupies and that outshines the wealth of Ind could point specifi¬ 
 cally to the Peacock Throne as the most conspicuous embodiment of 
 that wealth. Since 1634, when Shah Jehan moved the Mughal capi¬ 
 tal to Delhi, the throne had stood in the Hall of Public Audience, 
 a structure 600 feet long and 370 feet wide, which might have sug¬ 
 gested the outer court of Pandemonium. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the 
 French jeweler, had examined the throne in 1665, and although his 
 detailed description was translated only after the second edition of 
 Paradise Lost was published, reports about the throne would have 
 been widespread in a London where the East India Company had 
 been in existence for two-thirds of a century. With its pearl-fringed 
 canopy supported by golden pillars, the throne was the epitome of 
 the "gorgeous East" in its opulence. 6 
 
 When Paradise Lost was published, the monarch on the Peacock 
 Throne was Dryden's hero, Aurangzeb. He could be said to have 
 been raised to his eminence by merit, if by merit we mean the suc¬ 
 cessful killing off of every other claimant. History fits the image, 
 but Milton may not have been aware of the fitness. It is tempting 
 to think that he was aware of the inscription, four times repeated in 
 letters of gold, in Shah Jehan's white marble Hall of Private Audi¬ 
 ence, which corresponds to the council room of Pandemonium. As 
 a comment on Satan's situation, its layered irony must be deemed 
 Miltonic: "If there be Paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this!" 
 
 The direct application is obvious, but the statement becomes more 
 interesting read against the grain, with the triple repetition com¬ 
 pounding the force of the "if." Paradise can be not native but alien to 
 the earth, won laboriously against the earth's resistance. Shah Jehan 
 built in this way, and his achievement has become identified with 
 one matchless building demonstrating that death is the mother of 
 beauty. The proud hedonism is really not in conflict with another 
 description to be found over the Victory Gate in Akbar's abandoned 
 palace at Fatehpur Sikri: "The world is a bridge, pass over it but do 
 
 52 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
not build upon it. He who hopes for an hour may hope for eternity. 
 The world is but an hour; spend it in devotion, the rest is unseen." 7 
 Pandemonium has been built, and the two statements put before us 
 both the elation and the vanity of building. The mind is its own place 
 but can only be its own place by installing itself on the Peacock 
 Throne of the self. The throne is in the inner chamber and is thus a 
 statement of identity as well as a public announcement, a tacit dis¬ 
 closure of the weakness to be found in its strength. 
 
 So far, the movement to the center through the precincts of Pan¬ 
 demonium and through a corresponding geography of vainglory and 
 ostentation seems to assign India a decisive place at the heart of the 
 evil empire. The proposition is staged with sufficient persistence to 
 persuade us that no other proposition needs to be made. The moral 
 imagination can be discouragingly simplistic, but Milton is fortu¬ 
 nately not a simple writer. In the spice trade simile, which transports 
 Satan on his iourney to Asia, he is doing much more than once again 
 presenting India as one of the primary sites of infernality: 
 
 As when far off at Sea a Fleet descri'd 
 Hangs in the Clouds, by Equinoctial Winds 
 Close sailing from Bengala, or the Isles 
 Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring 
 Their spicy Drugs; they on the Trading Flood 
 Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape 
 Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seem'd 
 Far off the flying fiend. 
 
 (2.636-43) 
 
 Ternate and Tidore are Spice Islands in the Moluccas, but the 
 phrase is also an alliterative remembrance of The Lusiads, and 
 Satan's voyage, the ancestor of all voyages, is being placed in rela¬ 
 tionship to da Gama's voyage to India, of which Camoes's poem is 
 the epic celebration. The Lusiads, as we have already seen, celebrates 
 a voyage not simply from Lisbon to Calicut but also from a medieval 
 to an imperial world order. Not without regret, it leaves the previ¬ 
 ous view and its voices of protest symbolically at its margins. As the 
 defining of an imperial moment, it made its deflationary appearance 
 in the midst of what should have been another imperial moment. 
 Fanshawe's translation of it was published in 1655, the year in which 
 Jamaica was captured as a consolation prize in Cromwell's failed 
 Western design. 
 
 The failure of the design led to the usual reassessment of what 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 53 
 
Providence may have had in mind for God's Englishmen. An influ¬ 
 ential decoding of the divine rebuke was that English expansiveness 
 should hereafter be commercial. England should complete its refor¬ 
 mation before dissipating in imperial adventures, an identity that 
 had yet to be bonded into nationhood. 
 
 Commerce in such dissociations is always presumed to be inno¬ 
 cent of empire. Milton's accomplishment is to have seen with clarity 
 the necessary and potentially Satanic merging of the two realms. In 
 an age uneasily engaged in discriminating the sanctified from the 
 demonic uses of imperialism, Milton moves hesitantly to the propo¬ 
 sition that imperialism is itself a form of use and a form of use so 
 profoundly exploitative that its right use is impossible. It is not a 
 proposition Milton can endorse resoundingly. Ireland stands in his 
 way and so does the New World. But to write a poem is to transgress 
 ideologies. 
 
 The imperial vision in The Lusiads is one in which honor, domin¬ 
 ion, glory, and renown go hand in hand with the rich rewards of 
 the spice trade. Milton accepts the integrity of that vision and then 
 uses that integrity to discredit both components. Classical heroism 
 is devalued by Christian heroism, and the main motive of commerce 
 is discerned as consumerist self-indulgence. Milton's treatment of 
 Camoes is indeed heavily revisionary. 8 The old man's voice is heard 
 again, but it is a critiquing, not a protesting, voice. It does not help¬ 
 lessly query the new order. It points instead to an immemorial order 
 that cannot be violated without tearing apart those who violate it. 
 The nature of his poem enables Milton to endow his warning with 
 the weight of ancestral authority. But the warning is also cultur¬ 
 ally focused. It exposes the rottenness at the core of the consumer¬ 
 ist apple. 
 
 According to one enthusiastic estimate, da Gama's voyage and 
 Columbus's discovery of the New World were the greatest events in 
 history since the Incarnation. More prosaically, the purpose of da 
 Gama's rounding of the cape was to end the Venetian monopoly of 
 the spice trade and to break the Arab stranglehold on the trade routes 
 by which the "spicy Drugs" of Asia came to Europe. Milton's realign¬ 
 ment can be approached by noting that Bengal was not on the spice 
 trade route and that European trade with Bengal was not in spices. 
 The detour through Bengal may have been made to include within 
 the scope of the simile the East India Company, for which the Bay 
 of Bengal had been a principal theater of operations ever since the 
 founding of Madras in 1640. But the geographical expansion is also 
 
 54 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
designed to advise us of an expansion in the scope of the term "spicy 
 Drugs." As G. V. Scammell, a leading historian of early European im¬ 
 perialism, observes: 
 
 Spice was a vast and ill-defined generic which also embraced 
 perfumes like incense and musk, medicines and drugs (the 
 galingales of China and the aloes of Socotra), dyes, and the 
 exquisite manufactures of the East, ranging from Chinese 
 silk and porcelain to the carpets and tapestries of Persia. 
 
 To those were added the products, as we shall see, of the 
 Middle East—the glassware for example of Damascus. 9 
 
 The term is in fact a synecdoche for the entire range of conspicu¬ 
 ous consumption, and conspicuous consumption had been an issue 
 with Milton ever since 1634, when Comus produced a bizarre eco¬ 
 logical argument in its favor. 10 Thrift needed to be part of the Prot¬ 
 estant ethic if the middle class was to be instrumental in capital for¬ 
 mation. At this point in the poem, "spicy Drugs" anticipates Adam's 
 and Eve's transgression and the hallucinogenic qualities of the for¬ 
 bidden fruit. The link is invited even though drugs in seventeenth- 
 century usage were not typically hallucinogenic and even though 
 Adam Smith as late as 1776 described tea as a drug. 11 Milton's aim 
 in inviting the link and in departing from his view in De Doctrina 
 Christiana that the forbidden fruit was "in its nature neither good 
 nor evil" 12 is to join original sin to all subsequent excesses in con¬ 
 sumption ("Greedily she engorged without restraint" [9.791]) and to 
 inscribe the Satanic voyage within subsequent voyages of explor¬ 
 ation and commerce as the tainted origin from which they may 
 need to be rescued. In the process, attention shifts from the Ori¬ 
 ent as a primary site of evil to the Orient as supplier to a clientele 
 who have discovered it and made use of it to pamper the weakness 
 within themselves. It is notable that the fleet described in the simile 
 is en route to Europe, laden with the profits of the spice trade, even 
 though Satan is en route to Asia. 13 
 
 In looking at Milton's similes, we have to pass by their most im¬ 
 portant characteristic, namely, the extraordinary completeness with 
 which the similes translate what they purport to resemble. We have 
 to restrict ourselves to how India is perceived within the translation. 
 It is already clear that there can be more than one perception, de¬ 
 pending on the course of action or the religious or moral imperative 
 to which the construction of India is annexed. The next reference to 
 India occurs when Satan alights on the outer shell of the "pendent 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 55 
 
world"—an outer shell where limbo is derisively located and that is 
 compared in its desolation to the central Asian plateau: 
 
 As when a Vulture on Imaus bred, 
 
 Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds, 
 
 Dislodging from a Region scarce of prey 
 
 To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids 
 
 On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs 
 
 Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams,- 
 
 But in his way lights on the barren Plains 
 
 Of Sericana, where Chineses drive 
 
 With sails and wind their cany wagons light: 
 
 So on this windy sea of land, the fiend 
 Walked up and down alone bent on his prey. 
 
 (3-43i-4i) 
 
 The crucial element in this compendious simile is the pun that 
 joins Tartar to Tartarus. Milton did not invent the pun,- it is attrib¬ 
 uted to Pope Innocent IV in response to Tartar invasions that, by 
 1241, had extended into Hungary and Germany. In further response 
 to those invasions, Pope Innocent's successor, Pope Alexander IV, 
 issued the following warning to the princes of Christendom: 
 
 There rings in the ears of all, and arouses to vigilant alert¬ 
 ness those who are not befuddled by mental torpor, a ter¬ 
 rible trumpet of dire forewarning which, corroborated by 
 the evidence of events, proclaims with so unmistakable 
 a sound the wars of universal destruction wherewith the 
 scourge of Heaven's wrath in the hands of the inhuman Tar¬ 
 tars, erupting as it were from the secret confines of Hell, 
 oppresses and crushes the earth [so] that it is no longer the 
 task of Christian people to prick up their ears so as to re¬ 
 ceive surer tidings of these things, as though they were still 
 in doubt, but their need is rather for admonition to take 
 provident action against a peril impending and palpably ap¬ 
 proaching. 14 
 
 The similarities between the papal bull and Milton's poem, writ¬ 
 ten over four centuries later, do not need to be labored. Particularly 
 important is the connection between the Tartar invasions and the 
 opening lines of book 4, where the poet wishes that Adam and Eve 
 had been shocked into attention by that "warning voice," that "ter¬ 
 rible trumpet," as the papal bull has it, foretelling the "wars of univer- 
 
 56 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
sal destruction" envisioned in Revelation 12:7-12. The conspicuous 
 difference is that the pope's concerns are limited to the penetration 
 of Europe by the Tartars. India is not even on the horizon of ca¬ 
 lamity. In Milton's simile, on the other hand, India is central. It is the 
 destination to which the vulture flies, leaving an inhospitable and 
 barren habitat in search of a more fertile environment where it can 
 "gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids." It is true that the vulture 
 seeks the sources of the Jhelum (Hydaspes) and the Ganges rather 
 than the plain that those great rivers irrigate and that future inva¬ 
 sions of India were to ravage. But its flight, Satan's journey, and the 
 Tartar debouchment into India run related courses, brought together 
 all the more evocatively because the earthly Paradise was reputed to 
 lie where the Ganges had its beginnings. In the opening lines of the 
 seventh canto of The Lusiads, for instance, all India is hailed as lying 
 in proximity to this Paradise (see also 4.74). More than one ancient 
 father followed Josephus in making the Ganges one of the rivers of 
 Paradise. 15 Milton, like most of his contemporaries, locates Paradise 
 elsewhere, but his simile remains freighted with these associations. 
 
 In linking India to Paradise and the vulture's flight to the Satanic 
 journey, Milton now presents India not as the site of infernality but 
 as its victim. It is a construction reinforced by "lambs or yeanling 
 kids," which, apart from its religious overtones, cannot but suggest 
 the exposure of inexperience and helplessness to the onslaught of 
 power and cruelty. Tamburlaine sacked Delhi in 1398 and is said to 
 have slaughtered 80,000 of its inhabitants, leaving pyramids of skulls 
 to mark the milestones on the city's highways. The Great Mogul, on 
 the Peacock Throne when Milton wrote his poem, proudly affirmed 
 his descent from the house of Timur. Milton's immediate reference 
 is to the Tartars, but the reference can be extended to all the in¬ 
 vasions that the snowy ridge of Imaus could not contain and that 
 erupted into India along a much-traveled route of conquest. We can 
 even read the "windy sea of land," which so felicitously materializes 
 the indeterminate nature of limbo, as pointing to a windy sea not of 
 land, which was to become the route of further conquests. Milton 
 obviously did not intend to say this, but poems have a life beyond 
 their boundaries. 
 
 In the fifth book, Raphael descends to Paradise not to blow "a ter¬ 
 rible trumpet of dire forewarning" but to "bring on discourse" and 
 thereby instruct Adam and Eve on their place in the order of things. 
 He approaches the Edenic pair through a wilderness of "flowering 
 odours," a "spicy forest" that invites us to reflect on the misappro- 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 57 
 
priation of the spice trade (5.291-99). Dinner is served, with an inter¬ 
 national menu on which India is prominently, although vaguely, fea¬ 
 tured. The emphasis is not on indiscriminate variety but on "Taste 
 after taste upheld with kindliest change" (5.336). There is no gorging 
 on the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids. The meal is vegetarian, and 
 the three partake of it in order to suffice and not to burden nature 
 (5.451-52). 
 
 Commenting on the meal, Alastair Fowler detects a "grim irony." 
 Pontus was notorious as a source of poisons, and Punic figs were best 
 known for the threat to Rome that Plutarch made them symbolize. 16 
 Good things can be directed to evil uses, as is apparent even from 
 the pre- and postlapsarian connotations of words such as "errant" 
 and "wanton." Milton is at pains to advise us that when the right 
 order of things existed, it was eloquent about itself, even in such 
 matters as serving an appropriate meal to a visiting angel. But the 
 right order of things can no longer be presumed to exist pristinely 
 behind the masks of misappropriation. Shifting depictions of India 
 do not necessarily lay bare an essential India that lies beyond and 
 is uncontaminated by the depictions. Representations may unmask 
 previous representations, but they, in turn, may put in place assump¬ 
 tions that need to be unmasked. Milton's multiple constructions of 
 India place strikingly before us the relativity of constructions and 
 their entanglement with one another in a confused amalgam that 
 both represents the texture of imperial discourse and lays its pre¬ 
 varications open to scrutiny. Milton is complicit in some of the pre¬ 
 varications. He is also committed to the scrutiny. 
 
 These entanglements have to be borne in mind as we proceed to 
 the proliferations of the banyan tree passage, which, of all Milton's 
 images of India, is the most compelling and also the most evasive 
 (9.1099-1118). Before doing so, we need to consider Satan's activities 
 in the interval between his expulsion from Paradise by Gabriel and 
 his assistants and his second entry for the successful temptation. 
 Satan has circled the earth three times in an east-west and four times 
 in a north-south direction. The purpose of these peregrinations is 
 not merely to survey his kingdom while he awaits another opportu¬ 
 nity but also with "inspection deep" to consider which among the 
 world's creatures might best "serve his wiles." His last stop is the 
 "land where flows / Ganges and Indus," and his final choice, "after 
 long debate," is "The Serpent subtlest Beast of all the field" (9.81-82, 
 86-87). It is more than arguable that the infernal potentiality of India 
 is once again being underlined and that India as victim or as prime 
 provider of a repast fit for angels has receded into the background. 
 
 58 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Satan now enters Paradise but not with his earlier exuberance, 
 when, with "one slight bound," he leapt over the garden's protective 
 barrier (4.181). This time he makes his entry via one of the rivers of 
 Paradise, fortunately not the Pison, which was identified with the 
 Ganges, but the Tigris, which shoots into an underground gulf at the 
 foot of Paradise and surfaces as a fountain next to the tree of life. 
 Satan emerges in the rising mist of the fountain "involved" with the 
 primordial fluidity, as if inextricably part of the elemental nature of 
 things (9.69-76). 
 
 The choice of India as the last stop before Paradise and of the ser¬ 
 pent, with which India is strongly associated, as the fittest vehicle 
 for the original sin might be regarded as appropriate preliminaries 
 to the choice of the banyan tree for the original cover-up. Milton's 
 emphatic dismissal of alternatives seems designed to pave the way 
 for the cumulative infernalization of India. The subtlety and devi¬ 
 ousness of which the serpent is the symbol and the comprehensive 
 concealment afforded by the banyan tree are invested in Paradise 
 Lost with the authority of origins. These propositions were soon to 
 be engraved in imperial rhetoric as routinely part of India's repre¬ 
 sentation. 
 
 Paradise Lost is a scholarly poem, and when Milton, in choosing 
 his tree, waves aside "that kind for Fruit renowned" (9.1x01), he re¬ 
 minds us of an earlier gesture. In the fourth book, the possibility 
 that Paradise may lie at the summit of Mount Amara, "under the 
 Ethiop Line / By Nilus head," is dismissed. It is, Milton tells us, "by 
 some supposed" (4.281-83). In fact, it is hard to find anyone who 
 confidently upholds this possibility, although every discussion of the 
 location of Paradise raises it. The citation count is extensive, but the 
 acceptance count approaches zero. Milton is very much in the ma¬ 
 jority here, tilting at a windmill in the robust fashion of scholarship. 
 In the ninth book, on the other hand, he may be in a minority, even 
 though Raleigh, in discussing this possibility, is able to cite more 
 than one precedent. 17 
 
 Reasons for going against the majority view can always be found 
 and are most persuasive when they can be shown to be part of the 
 imaginative logic of the poem. If the choice of the banyan tree is 
 striking, so too is the readiness to make Paradise a site for post- 
 lapsarian lust. "God attributes to place / No sanctity, if none be 
 thither brought" is Milton's justification for the destruction of Para¬ 
 dise (11.836-37). The desecration of sanctity that Milton's departure 
 from precedent serves to underline deepens the original shame and 
 calls for a more comprehensive cover-up. The connections are plau- 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 59 
 
sible, but we still need to argue that an innovation is not justi¬ 
 fied by referring it to another innovation that need not have been 
 made. 
 
 Another view might be that infernalizing India has always been 
 part of the poem's agenda and that the more benign presentations 
 we have explored merely mean that the infernalization is not total. 
 "The proliferating tree is a tree of error," Fowler tells us categorically. 
 "It is an objective correlative of the proliferating sin that will ramify 
 through Adam's and Eve's descendants." 18 If true, this conclusion is 
 a virulent desacralization of a tree that has always been holy to Indi¬ 
 ans as both the site and the subject of Upanishadic instruction, a tree 
 that Southey, in a poem not particularly sympathetic to India, ap¬ 
 proaches with respect as a temple of nature. 19 Moore similarly refers 
 to the "sacred shade" of those "holy trees whose smooth columns 
 and spreading roots seem to destine them for natural temples of reli¬ 
 gion." 20 
 
 Milton's similes invite straightforward readings by their sustained 
 correspondences between tenor and vehicle. But his language can 
 also circumvent and retreat from the dominant momentum it nour¬ 
 ishes. The tree "spreads her arms" in an encompassing gesture remi¬ 
 niscent of the crucifixion. The "Daughters grow / About the Mother 
 Tree" (9.1105-6), and the gesture can be read as bringing together 
 and protecting the human family rather than as bringing about the 
 confusion that Gerard describes in his Heiball: "The first or mother 
 of this wood or desart of trees, is hard to be knowne from the chil¬ 
 dren." 21 The "Pillared shade" that the daughter trees provide suggests 
 a composed architecture rather than a wilderness of reflections. Yet 
 in putting forward his representation, Milton always seems aware of 
 another representation that may be the normal reading and that the 
 turns of his language are not prepared to reject. The pillared shade 
 also recalls the Doric pillars of Pandemonium, and their "High over¬ 
 arched" formations take us back to the Vallombrosa simile, in which 
 the infernal angels were compared to leaves fallen from the tree of 
 life into the valley of the shadow of death (1.302-4). The "Etrurian 
 shade" of the Vallombrosa trees was "imbowered" as it turned in on 
 itself. The bower of concealment is similar and is in designed con¬ 
 trast to the nuptial bower of book 4, lines 690-708. Yet when Kester 
 Svendsen describes the recesses of the tree as a "deep interior sanctu¬ 
 ary," 22 he is not proceeding against Milton's language. The tree serves 
 as shelter, although it can also be used for concealment. It permits 
 withdrawal into meditative depths. It also encourages absorption in 
 
 60 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
a narcissistic coma. Its "echoing walks" can be self-imprisoning, but 
 they can also prolong the cadences of voices that need to be heard 
 (4.680-85). 
 
 The contesting interpretations of itself that the spreading tree puts 
 forward do not debar us from seeing it as a temple of nature, but 
 they encourage us to read its proliferations and decentrations as an 
 expanding assault on hierarchical order. Its leaves are not really as 
 "broad as Amazonian targe," 23 and if bodily concealment were the 
 objective, other trees in India would have served the purpose better. 
 But other trees would not have lent themselves to the emblematiza- 
 tion delighted in by Renaissance herbalists and compilers of dictio¬ 
 naries. The Amazons are introduced not so that a passing reference 
 can be made to the size of their shields but as a further source of 
 hierarchical disturbance, with which readers of book 5 of The Faerie 
 Queene would have been familiar. They go well with the role rever¬ 
 sal that has been prominent in Milton's version of the Fall and with 
 the feminization of the tree, which, blessed exclusively with daugh¬ 
 ters, compounds by its generative wantonness the destabilization of 
 structure and design. 
 
 As we trace the echoing walks of this particular passage, many of 
 the echoes lead us back through the history of the poem into occa¬ 
 sions or images of the infernal. The lines are all the more disturb¬ 
 ing because the tree's natural attributes lend themselves so easily 
 to demonic appropriation. In addition, Milton compounds the dis¬ 
 commoding effect by making gestures toward scientific accuracy, 
 reminding us that the Fall was history to him even though it may be 
 mythology to us. "Columbus found the American so girt," he tells us 
 decisively. Primitive societies are closer to the source, and the char¬ 
 acteristics of the source can be discerned more clearly in them. 24 
 The land that was mistaken for India justifies its erroneous identifi¬ 
 cation by indicating how the resources of the true India were used. 
 The banyan tree is "at this day to Indians known." Any official of 
 the East India Company could inspect it and verify that there was 
 no better way for Adam and Eve to cope with the sudden problem of 
 their nakedness. 
 
 It is against the passage's traversals of itself and the received inter¬ 
 pretations it accepts and circumvents that we need to consider the 
 figure of the herdsman. Fowler is less than tactful in arguing that 
 "the Indian herdsman is put in because he is primitive and pagan." 25 
 He is put in to point out to us that, although his responsibilities 
 are far more limited than those of the faithful herdsman in Lycidas, 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 61 
 
he observes these responsibilities, unlike the corrupt clergy whom 
 Milton excoriates and unlike Adam and Eve at this moment. He 
 "tends his pasturing herds," and if he seeks the protection of the tree 
 and cuts loopholes through the "thickest shade" of its foliage, it is 
 not to conceal himself but to perform his task more efficiently and 
 with less likelihood of being incapacitated by sunstroke. 
 
 Other revealing images offer themselves as we contemplate the 
 figure of the herdsman. Adam and Eve, like him, are hidden in the 
 tree's recesses, but it is the flock that is now hidden, not the shep¬ 
 herd. The shepherd seeks refuge from the heat of the sun's rays. 
 Adam and Eve seek refuge from the "blaze / Insufferably bright" 
 (9.1083-84) of the Son's presence. The Son is the shepherd, offering 
 a protection symbolized by the tree's outstretched arms, which the 
 guilty pair unknowingly invoke in using that very tree to avoid the 
 Son's gaze. Milton's lines in their dense entanglements work power¬ 
 fully to persuade us that appropriation is not simply a matter of 
 channeling the properties of the tree to infernal uses. The tree is 
 reinvented by the perspective in which it is installed. And the per¬ 
 spective cannot be said to be optional. It is largely responsible for 
 inventing those who use it. 
 
 The final reference to India is in the panorama of the world's em¬ 
 pires that Adam sees from the highest hill of Paradise. The Aeneid 
 (6.790 ff.) is being remembered, with Milton's typical distancing from 
 that seminal text. The vision is seen from a hill and not foretold 
 in the underworld; it is concerned with all empires, not one,- and 
 it turns from those empires to "nobler sights" (11.411), from the se¬ 
 quence of secular pomp to the meaning of sacred history. Camoes, 
 diligently Virgilian in his machinery, is intermediate between Virgil 
 and Milton. Like Virgil, he is concerned with a single nation's im¬ 
 perial destiny. Like Milton, his hero is shown the future from a 
 mountaintop. But it is a future in which empire building is glori¬ 
 fied, not questioned. Adam looks at the havoc to which his actions 
 will lead. Vasco da Gama looks at the fulfillment of his mission in 
 a future that is only possible because of his heroic accomplishment. 
 The splendors of the Portuguese empire are elegantly displayed to 
 him gift wrapped in the layers of the Ptolemaic universe (Lusiads 
 10.78-91). 
 
 Virgil associates the Roman destiny with ancestral statements of 
 the white man's burden, with bringing justice and the rule of law to 
 barbarians. 26 Camoes is less concerned with such refinements and 
 shows us the face of imperialism more candidly. Those who chafe 
 under Portugal's light yoke will be made to pay dearly for their inso- 
 
 62 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
lence. Ironically, the example chosen is Ormuz, which was to pass 
 out of Portuguese hands forever half a century after Camoes pub¬ 
 lished his poem and well before Fanshawe's English translation be¬ 
 came available. 
 
 The mountaintop prophecy, the panorama of empires, and the roll 
 call of place names form multiple lines of connection between Para¬ 
 dise Lost and The Lusiads. The connections are enforced by the sec¬ 
 ond of Milton's alliterative remembrances— "Mombaza, and Quiloa, 
 and Melind" (n.399). 27 Melind was da Gama's last port of call before 
 setting off on the final stage of his audacious voyage to India under 
 the helpful guidance of an Indian pilot. 28 
 
 The overlap in the view from the two mountaintops is extensive. 
 One might argue that some attention has been paid to making it 
 extensive. To connect the two poems is to become pointedly aware 
 of the sudden blaze and swift extinction of the Portuguese imperial 
 dream. That recognition finds its way back into Milton's poem as a 
 general comment on the transience of empires. What we see from 
 the mountaintop in the first place is the peripheral turbulence and 
 pandemonium of history, not the inner theater of clarified engage¬ 
 ment where the forces shaping history are exposed. 
 
 Much has changed in the descent from Virgil, and Virgil's Rome 
 is among the empires dismissed. From an Iraqi mountaintop, Rome 
 and "Agra and Lahor of great mogul" (11.391) are approximately equi¬ 
 distant; 29 "great mogul" designates not simply the dynasty but a dia¬ 
 mond of unprecedented size (the Kohinoor) presented to Shah Jehan. 
 Stereotypes of Oriental opulence are reinforced, taking us back in 
 one of the poem's many circularities to the wealth of Ind and Satan's 
 throne of royal state. But Rome was also a center of ostentatious ex¬ 
 cess, as Paradise Regained makes clear, and so far there has been 
 nothing in the poem to suggest that Asia surpasses Rome in moral 
 turpitude. We can even conjecture that if Milton had known of it, 
 the Augustinian inscription at Fatehpur Sikri would have appealed 
 to him more than any Roman text. 
 
 The inner theater of significance, surrounded by an otherwise 
 meaningless periphery of empires, dramatizes the proposition that 
 the only true kingdom is the kingdom of God. The nature of things 
 in their purity does not permit the rule of one people by another: 
 
 Man over men 
 
 He made not Lord; such title to himself 
 
 Reserving, human left from human free. 
 
 (12.69-71) 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 63 
 
Unfortunately, we are dealing not with the nature of things but 
 with their fallen nature. In such circumstances, "Tyranny must be, / 
 Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse" (12.95-96). 
 
 The argument does not condone tyranny, but it does suggest that 
 attempts to overthrow tyranny will only reinscribe it unless they are 
 accompanied by a radical change in the structure of the self. One 
 can accept this as an argument, but it needs to be pointed out in re¬ 
 ply that Milton unbalances his critique of dominance by too strong 
 an insistence that subjected peoples deserve their own misfortunes. 
 In the England of a failed revolution, this insistence may have been 
 proper to the poetics of the moment. On a less localized scale, we 
 have to observe that phrases such as "Tyranny must be" amount to 
 a de facto acquiescence to tyranny. Tyrants are seldom deterred by 
 the observation that their behavior cannot be excused. 
 
 The failed revolution and the need to justify its failure continue 
 to be present in Milton's thought as the temptation of Rome is 
 offered. In Paradise Regained, Satan accompanies his offer with the 
 hyperbolic statement that not merely India but also Sumatra and the 
 Malay Peninsula render obedience to "Rome's great emperor" (4.73— 
 76). 30 Christ does not contest this exaggeration. Presumably, he has 
 more important things on his mind. He points out predictably that 
 Romans have earned their fate by their degeneracy. "Peeling their 
 Provinces," already exhausted by lust and rapine, and carried away 
 by the "insulting vanity" of their triumphs, they are luxury loving, 
 cruel, greedy, and "from the daily scene effeminate" [PR 4.136-42). 
 That last and climactic epithet, used extensively by the Romans in 
 the denigration of Egypt, was to be much used again in marginal¬ 
 izing India. Originating in Michael's rebuke to Adam [PL 11.634), it 
 becomes the final touch in the conqueror's inward enslavement to 
 the other he constructs for his contempt. 
 
 Milton's description of Rome's degeneracy is not surprising, but 
 his prelapsarian characterization of the Romans as just, frugal, mild, 
 and temperate [PR 4.133-34) seems to invoke Christian rather than 
 classical heroism. 31 The choice of virtues becomes clearer when we 
 turn to the Second Defence: "To be free is precisely the same as to 
 be pious, wise, just, and temperate, careful of one's property, aloof 
 from another's, and thus finally to be magnanimous and brave." 32 A 
 parallel between Rome and seventeenth-century England is clearly 
 in the making, and perhaps it is the pursuit of this parallel that leads 
 Milton to observe that the Romans "conquer'd well, / But govern ill" 
 [PR 4.134-35). 33 Government by conquest can never be good govern- 
 
 64 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ment. Human was "left from human free" by the divine edict, and re¬ 
 lationships between peoples based on dominance can never be other 
 than deformed. Difference turned into confusion and conversation 
 into the failure to communicate when the original tower of domi¬ 
 nance was built. Milton's language at this point moves away from 
 an egalitarian recognition that his previous language has inscribed. 
 In an age when empires were materializing on the horizon and India 
 was beginning to assume its glittering shape as the most coveted of 
 imperial prizes, he cannot quite say that the pursuit of empires can 
 only be destructive and that no people can "conquer well." In addi¬ 
 tion, his concentration on an inner theater where the principles of 
 a single wisdom are made manifest by their performance in history 
 reduces other wisdoms to peripheral status. At best, the periphery 
 can only reflect the center or be the shadowy type to the center's 
 truth. The design of understanding is potentially imperial. Other de¬ 
 signs that are less lofty and humane will sustain themselves on the 
 same geography of privilege. 
 
 The appropriation of Milton to this geography of privilege is an im¬ 
 portant thread in the fabric of this book. His references to India may 
 not be numerous, but his part in India's representation is not merely 
 a matter of six similes that show that he is capable of seeing India in 
 more than one light. Paradise Lost, although not imperialist, is im¬ 
 perial as no other poem in the canon is. It is true that the imperial 
 display is consecrated to the pervading and benevolent force of the 
 universal and mild monarchy of heaven, but in the inevitable secu¬ 
 larizing of the sacred, other translations of the display must emerge. 
 The center-circumference dispositions, the hierarchical ordering of 
 the poem's principal and almost only human relationship, the om- 
 nific word transforming a cosmic chaos that it is not difficult to 
 displace into political anarchy, and the wilderness set against the 
 ordered garden that must be tended and watched over if it is not to 
 relapse into its origins are all perceptions that play a crucial part in 
 the imperialist statement as an apparently timeless work of the lit¬ 
 erary canon, symbolically blind to the contingent, finds its way back 
 into the arena of power. 
 
 Paradise Lost is the work of a totalizing energy by which dreams 
 of empire cannot but be nourished. That nourishment sustains not 
 merely the rhetoric of imperialism but, more fundamentally, the fic¬ 
 tions of self-justification that stabilize that rhetoric and endow it 
 with its necessary dignity. The chapters that follow will consider 
 some of the ways in which representations of India within imperial - 
 
 Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves 65 
 
ist discourse rest on foundations that can be called Miltonic. Ironi¬ 
 cally, the poem's foundations (as distinct from those of the imperial¬ 
 ism that appropriated it) include a concept of Christian heroism that 
 can be perceived as leading through Prometheus Unbound to the 
 nonviolent strategies that gained India its independence. That fact 
 is not simply to be savored with relish; it educates us in the extent 
 to which the canon itself, in its sometimes troubled self-awareness, 
 can be instrumental in its own dismantling. 34 
 
 66 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
3 
 
 Appropriating India: 
 Dryden's Great Mogul 
 sx» 
 
 Dryden's Aureng-Zebe is a drama without precedents or successors. 
 It is the only play directed to a contemporary monarch that sets 
 before him for guidance the exemplary behavior of another contem¬ 
 porary monarch. The monarch to whom the play was addressed was 
 King Charles II, who apparently read the manuscript and even sug¬ 
 gested the modeling of "the most considerable event of it" 1 —a sug¬ 
 gestion that has since been the subject of vain speculation among 
 scholars. The monarch placed before Charles as an example was 
 neither from the courts of Europe nor from the world of the noble 
 savage. He was the Great Mogul whom Milton had infernalized in a 
 poem, the second edition of which had been published the year be¬ 
 fore Dryden's play was performed. 
 
 The moral imagination had its view of the Orient, but self-interest 
 called for prudence in the Orient's infernalization. Commerce in its 
 nature might be traffic with sin, but one did not enter into com¬ 
 pacts with a party resoundingly named as the Devil merely for the 
 sake of more liberal trade in spices. Mughal India, moreover, was 
 still being treated as a sovereign state and not as a potentially sub¬ 
 ject territory. A regime from which trade concessions were sought 
 could scarcely be exposed to continuing vilification from the party 
 seeking the concessions. The East India Company made one attempt 
 to speed negotiations by force but withdrew discomfited, respecting 
 for the time being the strength of Aurangzeb's army. It would take a 
 century for the Great Mogul to become the company's pensioner. 
 
 In Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, published in 1759, two years after 
 the battle of Plassey, Imlac is presented to the Great Mogul and 
 finds himself "astonished at his wisdom, and enamoured of his good¬ 
 ness." 2 The Mughal regime at that time was in a state of almost total 
 disarray. Six years later, it was to cede to the East India Company 
 
the rights of revenue collection that made the company the effec¬ 
 tive master of Bengal. 3 Imlac's encomium possibly looks back to the 
 golden age of Akbar, which Western historians were increasingly dis¬ 
 posed to perceive in contrast to the deterioration ushered in by Au- 
 rangzeb, 4 but the commendation also appeals to the Enlightenment 
 postulate of a universal human nature that is common to all of us 
 and contains all that is essential in us. Citizenship of the world and 
 not the domination of one people by another is the natural conse¬ 
 quence of such a postulate, and exemplary behavior in exotic places 
 is one sign that the postulate is being recognized. 
 
 It is therefore not surprising that Dryden should have put it to us 
 that examples for Europe are to be found outside Europe. It is sur¬ 
 prising that he should have invited us to consider as exemplary a 
 fictional Aurangzeb unrecognizably transformed from the original 
 monarch then on the throne at Agra. The transformation is not for 
 the worse and could hardly have been for the worse, but it raises 
 problems that scholarship ought not to bypass. L. A. Beaurline and 
 Fredson Bowers observe hesitantly that Dryden “makes the protago¬ 
 nist much less aggressive" than he actually was. 5 J. A. Winn is more 
 decisive and goes as far as any other scholar in pointing to the extent 
 of Dryden's misrepresentation: "The historical Aureng-Zebe was a 
 Machiavellian manipulator, but Dryden's character is a perfect ex¬ 
 ample of filial piety, fighting to preserve his father's throne." 6 Un¬ 
 fortunately, this is all Winn has to say on the subject. Dryden com¬ 
 mentators, even when they draw passing attention to the difference 
 between the literary and the actual, seem silently unanimous in as¬ 
 suming an unrestricted right to appropriate India in the interests of 
 making a political statement about contemporary England. Freed of 
 the encumbrance of a double answerability, they can then proceed 
 to concentrate on the fictional constructions necessary to provide 
 dramatic voicing for the English statement. 
 
 Dryden's appropriation of Mughal India is perhaps too methodi¬ 
 cally perverse for abysmal ignorance to be pleaded. Ignorance, more¬ 
 over, would have been difficult after the publication of Frangois Ber¬ 
 nier's book. Dryden could have read Bernier in the original French, 
 but the popularity of the work was sufficient for an English transla¬ 
 tion to be published in 1671. Its title, The History of the Late Revo¬ 
 lutions of the Empire of the Great Mogol, indicates its pertinence to 
 the moment in a way that Travels in the Mogul Empire, its modern 
 title, does not. 7 Waldemar Hansen, in his richly evocative study, The 
 Peacock Throne, aptly describes Bernier as "a wandering Montaigne: 
 
 68 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
analytical, sceptical, yet humane." He goes on to caution us that Ber¬ 
 nier's narrative is full of flaws, bias, and misrepresentation, even if 
 it is often "astonishingly precise." 8 
 
 Bernier's was not the only voice on the subject, but the readability 
 and vividness of his book, with its fluent combination of history, 
 politics, economics, and reportage, made his the voice everyone 
 heard. Percival Spear concludes that "to a large extent Europe's idea 
 of India in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was Ber¬ 
 nier's." 9 It is standard practice to regard his book as the "source" 
 for Dryden's play. Beaurline and Bowers, Winn, and George McFad- 
 den are representative. 10 We might expect Hansen, as a historian of 
 the Mughal era, to be more skeptical, but he too is a member of the 
 consensus: "No less a master than John Dryden based his historical 
 tragedy, Aureng-Zebe, on Bernier's account of Mogul Hindustan." 11 
 
 It is tempting but not correct to conclude from the evidence that 
 Dryden scholars have not read Bernier and that Mughal historians 
 have not succeeded in reading Dryden. McFadden has clearly read 
 both texts, and his account of discrepancies between them, 12 while 
 far from exhaustive, should be sufficient to pose a problem, but it 
 does not pose one, even for McFadden. A source transformed into 
 unrecognizability should cause us to wonder if it is a source at all. 
 The wonder dissipates because the play is universally thought of as 
 aligned exclusively along the coordinates of English history. Mughal 
 history, even as reshaped by Bernier, is evidently a matter of no im¬ 
 portance. 
 
 Samuel Johnson is the first critic, and seemingly the only one, to 
 raise the question of what Aurangzeb might have thought of Dry¬ 
 den's play. He finds it fortunate that distance in space is as effective 
 a safeguard as remoteness in time: "Aureng-Zebe (1676) is a tragedy 
 founded on the actions of a great prince then reigning, but over 
 nations not likely to employ their critics upon the transactions of 
 the English stage. . . . His country is at such a distance that the man¬ 
 ners might safely be falsified and the incidents feigned." 13 
 
 Aurangzeb may not have been displeased but he may have been 
 puzzled by Dryden's portrait of him as the new model of the Resto¬ 
 ration hero, triumphant through moderation rather than destroyed 
 by excess, combining patience with the capacity to act decisively, 
 able to stand and wait but also able to seize the day, but only in the 
 interests of the nation. Bernier admired Aurangzeb for his skills in 
 realpolitik, but the emperor may have preferred an appreciation that 
 was based on the necessities of survival in Mughal India. Without 
 
 Appropriating India 69 
 
reading The Prince, he acted on its principles, as well as on the prin¬ 
 ciples of the Indian improvement on Machiavelli, Kautilya's Artha- 
 Sastra, which was actually written several centuries earlier. Aurang- 
 zeb could have contemplated with amusement his reflection in the 
 mirror of Dryden's representation. In the real world of the Mughal 
 struggle for power, Dryden's prince would have lasted for no more 
 than five minutes. 
 
 English history in the 1670s was dominated by the succession 
 problem, as Mughal history had been two decades earlier. Dryden 
 may have been attracted by the apparent parallel, but the Mughal 
 route to power, repeatedly trodden and ancestrally bloodstained, 
 was scarcely one he could recommend for English adoption. Taktya 
 Takhta, a Mughal proverb on the perils of power, can be translated as 
 "throne or coffin," but no translation can reproduce the pun's grim 
 proximities. Jacobean tragedy is the proper genre of Mughal history, 
 but its sense of inexorability, of destructive energy seeping through 
 vain containments, was no longer fitting for an England that had 
 placed the order of things within appropriate boundaries. If Dryden 
 began by being attracted to a parallel, his next discovery may have 
 been that he could pursue the parallel only by dismantling one of its 
 constituents. 
 
 It is time to rearticulate the proposition regarding Bernier. Bernier 
 is not the source of Dryden's play, but his book may be its indispens¬ 
 able background. Dryden is not ignoring Bernier's text; he is writing 
 a critique of it. Mughal history is exemplary, but the example is 
 negative. 
 
 If we do not see a negative example in Dryden's treatment of 
 Mughal history, it is because we are looking too fixedly at the re¬ 
 lationship of his text to English circumstances and ignoring the 
 events in India that the text overwrites and comprehensively re¬ 
 verses. There is a point in Dryden's use of Bernier apart from making 
 use of the interest in India that his book had aroused, satisfying 
 the current vogue for drama set in exotic places, practicing one- 
 upmanship on Elkanah Settle, and providing guidance on the Stuart 
 succession. If Dryden revised his conception of the hero, abandon¬ 
 ing his commitment to rhymed drama in the process, 14 the historical 
 Aurangzeb may well have been the other that his heroic ideal needed 
 to articulate itself. Some confusion, of course, is unavoidable when 
 the new model hero is also called Aurangzeb. 
 
 It is not difficult to find examples that will make evident a consis¬ 
 tency which cannot be accidental in Dryden's reversals of the his- 
 
 70 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
torical text. The fictional Aurangzeb is the legitimate successor to 
 the throne; the historical one is a usurper who gained the throne by 
 defeating in battle and later putting to death the legitimate succes¬ 
 sor, Dara Shikoh. The fictional Aurangzeb is unfalteringly loyal to a 
 father “beleaguered by his sons and despised by his second wife." 15 
 The historical Aurangzeb wrested the kingdom from his father, put¬ 
 ting him under a form of house arrest that as time went on turned 
 into close confinement. He was not freed from captivity even on 
 his deathbed. The fictional Aurangzeb magnanimously forgives the 
 three brothers who contest his legitimate right to the throne. The 
 historical Aurangzeb forgave nobody. Forgiveness was a weakness 
 he did not cultivate. He paraded Dara Shikoh humiliatingly through 
 the streets of Delhi facing backward on a mud-plastered elephant, 
 had him found guilty in a trial for heresy, and put him to death 
 while in prison to avoid the popular anger a public execution might 
 have aroused. He drove Shuja out of India to a presumed death by 
 exhaustion in Arakan. He incarcerated Morat in the grim recesses 
 of Gwalior Fort, rendered him comatose with repeated infusions of 
 opium (a process that took several months), and had him done away 
 with when he could no longer be said to be living. In Dryden's 
 play, this situation too is reversed, with Morat deciding to do away 
 with Aurangzeb and Nourmahal reserving for herself the pleasures 
 of actually administering the "deadly draught" to her stepson (3.313— 
 16). Both the fictional and the real Aurangzeb showed patience, but 
 the patience of the latter was that of a tiger stalking his prey. The fic¬ 
 tional Aurangzeb served the kingdom. The real Aurangzeb seized it. 
 Descending from the broad strokes of characterization to the niceties 
 of language, we can note that the fictional Aurangzeb is described 
 contemptuously as a "preaching Brachman" (3.216). The historical 
 Aurangzeb spent a good part of his life persecuting Brahmans who 
 were foolish enough to preach. In short, to avoid being hissed off the 
 Restoration stage, the fictional figure would have to totally disavow 
 the real one. This is precisely how he proceeds to fashion himself. 
 
 Once the main line of transformation of Dryden's play has been 
 established, it is possible to look at movements across and against 
 that line. Indamora (the name is not casually chosen) is described 
 as "a Captive Queen" in anticipation of the captive queen India was 
 later to become. She serves her true master (not his competitors) 
 with loyalty, showing us how fully imperialism looks forward in 
 its metaphors. Dryden professed to admire the constancy of Indian 
 ladies, which may have appealed to him in itself or because it fitted 
 
 Appropriating India 71 
 
better into male fantasies: "Those Indian Wives are loving Fools, and 
 may do well to keep themselves in their own Countrey, or, at least, 
 to keep company with the Airia’s and Portia’s of old Rome: some of 
 our Ladies know better things." 16 The Indian lady to whom Dryden 
 is referring at this point is the passively adoring wife of Morat, im¬ 
 possibly named Melisanda. Her self-effacement reaches its climax 
 in an act of suttee, which "cruel Laws to Indian Wives allow" (5.385). 
 Indamora is made of more spirited stuff. All four men in the play are 
 in love with her, and if Dara and Shuja are not, it is probably because 
 they are not among the play's participants. Nourmahal jealously de¬ 
 scribes her as "this Fatal Helen" (5.257), voicing once more the unex¬ 
 pected knowledge of Greek mythology that Dryden's Indian charac¬ 
 ters habitually display. Indamora is not above manipulativeness, but 
 it is all for a good cause, even though Aurangzeb has a chained hero's 
 suspicions about which side she may be on, politically or sexually. 
 Relieved of his suspicions, he gives vent to his feelings: 
 
 Love mounts, and rowls about my stormy mind, 
 
 Like Fire, that's born by a tempestuous Wind. 
 
 Oh, I could stifle you, with eager haste! 
 
 Devour your kisses with my hungry taste! 
 
 Rush on you! eat you! wander o'r each part, 
 
 Raving with pleasure, snatch you to my heart! 
 
 Then hold you off, and gaze! then, with new rage, 
 
 Invade you, till my conscious Limbs presage 
 Torrents of joy, which all their banks oe'rflow. 
 
 ( 4 - 533 - 4 I) 
 
 Michael Alssid is much too charitable in claiming that this out¬ 
 burst of sexual greed "marks, so to speak, the saint's return to the 
 human condition." 17 It is a further and a vigorous step in the con¬ 
 tinuing feminization of the Orient. The use of the word "invade" 
 must be found notable, even in this orgiastic outpouring of the will 
 to plunder, of which India cum Indamora is the object. Commerce, 
 in the economic sense, is not absent from the horizon of Dryden's 
 play, and its conflation with sexual images is underlined rather than 
 discouraged. Indamora can talk (in strange language for a captive 
 from Kashmir) of making port with full sails (4.525) and of finding 
 security in convoys (5.360-61). But it is Morat who, having relin¬ 
 quished the crown for the sake of the brightest jewel in it, reduces 
 the high romance of the world well lost for love to the profit taking 
 of the East India Company: 
 
 72 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
'Twas not for nothing I the Crown resign'd; 
 
 I still must own a Mercenary mind: 
 
 I, in this venture, double gains pursue, 
 
 And laid out all my Stock to purchase you. 
 
 (5.126-29) 18 
 
 If Indamora represents India's desirability, Nourmahal represents 
 its disruptiveness. "A spirit so untam'd the world ne'r bore" is Shah 
 Jehan's weary conclusion regarding her (2.376), but his inability to 
 cope with her can be read as a lesson on how not to govern India. 
 It is widely assumed that Nourmahal was Dryden's invention, but 
 the name was also bestowed on Nur Jehan who, far from being Shah 
 Jehan's second wife, was the wife of his father, Jehangir. This identi¬ 
 fication has not been made by Dryden scholars because of the trans¬ 
 ference from one generation to another, but Dryden, as we know by 
 now, thinks nothing of such displacements. 
 
 Mehrunissa, as she was called before Jehangir bestowed her titu¬ 
 lar name on her, has fascinated biographers with her extraordinary 
 beauty, her ambiguous origins, and a deviousness that she some¬ 
 times seemed to pursue only to create opportunities for further devi¬ 
 ousness. Harold Lamb, in a sympathetic fictionalization, maintains 
 that she only did what she had to do to keep the kingdom together 
 during Jehangir's frequent bouts with alcohol and opium. 19 In T. J. 
 Murari's novel, Taj, she is, more typically, a woman richly fasci¬ 
 nating but always to be feared for her insatiable ambitiousness. 20 
 Hansen at one point describes her as a "scheming bitch," although 
 his overall characterization of her is fortunately more complex, and 
 Dutch merchants in Agra labeled her as "that vicious woman who 
 is filled with cunning up to her throat." 21 She was also symbolically 
 an expert rider and hunter and, on the other hand, a person of taste 
 and cultural accomplishment. Her ability to compose verse sponta¬ 
 neously in Persian enchanted Jehangir during his fits of sobriety. 
 
 Dryden is not wholly insensitive to these complexities. Nourma¬ 
 hal can more than hold her own in her exchanges with Shah Jehan, 
 and despite the latter's prating on the identity between monarchs 
 and husbands (2.330), he can eventually only exert his "Despotic 
 pow'r" over her by calling on a palace guard to seize her (2.346; com¬ 
 pare Samson Agonistes 1054-55). Winning arguments is not Shah 
 Jehan's strong point, but in Dryden's depiction of him, it is diffi¬ 
 cult to see where his strong point can be hidden. In her dealings 
 with Aurangzeb, Nourmahal is a different person, thus showing that 
 
 Appropriating India 73 
 
India can be effectively governed. At first (vile woman that she is), 
 she looks forward to witnessing his "hourly ebbs of life" as she ad¬ 
 ministers the "pois'nous draught" to him in carefully measured in¬ 
 stallments. But Aurangzeb's fortitude in the face of adversity brings 
 about a change of heart, and in one of those sudden volte-faces be¬ 
 loved by Restoration dramatists, she confesses herself in love with 
 the Mughal Englishman. Warned by a scandalized courtier that she 
 treads on the verge of incest, she replies in a manner that could be 
 called charmingly artless: "Count this among the Wonders Love has 
 done: / I had forgot he was my Husband's Sone!" (3.354-55). It does 
 not take long for her to collect herself sufficiently to justify continu¬ 
 ing in her course: 
 
 I stand with guilt confounded, lost with shame, 
 
 And yet made wretched onely by a name. 
 
 If names have such command on humane Life 
 Love's sure a name that's more Divine than Wife. 
 
 That Sovereign power all guilt from action takes, 
 
 At least the stains are beautiful it makes. 
 
 (3-364-69) 
 
 By the time she bares her heart to Aurangzeb, she has become con¬ 
 siderably more ingenious: 
 
 Promiscuous Love is Nature's general Law: 
 
 For whosoever the first Lovers were 
 Brother and sister made the second Pair, 
 
 And doubled by their love, their piety. 
 
 (4-I32-35) 
 
 This unusual reading of Genesis is angrily received by Aurangzeb, 
 who seems to have read the same book in an orthodox masculine 
 manner (4.489-92). His indignation poses no obstacle to the tidal 
 wave of Nourmahal's infatuation: "In vain this haughty fury you 
 have shown / How I adore a Soul so like my own!" (4.143-44). Re¬ 
 pulsed again, she offers Aurangzeb a dagger. If he cannot grant her 
 love, he can grant her death. He refuses to do her this favor. She de¬ 
 cides he can live no longer. As he is about to drink of the poisoned 
 cup (comparing himself inappropriately to Socrates and revealing 
 once more the odd reading habits of Mughals), Morat enters. He has 
 promised Indamora a day's stay of Aurangzeb's execution. Nourma¬ 
 hal's response is characteristic, making it clear that monarchs value 
 their "perks": "What am I, that you dare to bind my hand? / So low, 
 I've not a Murder at command!" (4.187-88). Nourmahal's spirited- 
 
 74 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ness and her energetic defense of her behavior have a place in the 
 scheme of things, but only if those inhabiting the place learn to re¬ 
 spect its boundaries. A Mughal court is a convenient place to lay 
 down principles not altogether unquestionable in Restoration En¬ 
 gland, and in the reassuring dispositions of that court, Nourmahal 
 needs a monarch and a husband. Lacking both, she is understand¬ 
 ably frustrated. Her wildness calls out for government, but another 
 queen has to go with the kingdom, and if she did not, a pun would 
 have to be sacrificed. Indamora's advantage is that she does not exist 
 except as a different name for India. Nourmahal's disadvantage is 
 that she did exist historically, as the wife of Aurangzeb's grandfather, 
 so that marriage to her would be a comic absurdity not to be con¬ 
 templated. Nourmahal has.no alternative but to run amok. It is dif¬ 
 ficult to go mad in heroic couplets, but Dryden shows extraordinary 
 skill in maneuvering the disintegrating metrics of madness within 
 the tight confinement of the verse form. Indeed, the passage might 
 be described as metaphorical metrics in its continuing transgression 
 and unavoidable reinscription of its boundaries. Fittingly, the cli¬ 
 max is a parody of suttee, immediately following Melisanda's death 
 by fire. Nourmahal dies in a blaze of poetic justice, consumed by the 
 fires of passion within herself. 
 
 Despite Dryden's apparently casual treatment of Mughal history, 
 it will be apparent by now that we need to read that history with 
 some attention if we are to hear its echoes satisfactorily in his play. 
 In the set piece review of the qualities of the claimants for the throne 
 that opens the first act, we are told that Dara is inclined to "im¬ 
 placable revenge" (a prominent characteristic of the real Aurangzeb) 
 and that Morat's courage is a slave to his envy (Aurangzeb's behavior 
 was marked by envious hatred of Dara). Bestowing the hero's defects 
 on the competition is one way of keeping those defects sufficiently 
 alive in the play to remind us of the quite different historical reality. 
 But the judgment of Shuja that follows is more than a sloughing off 
 of defects. It is resonant with political implications: 
 
 From Sujah's valour I should much expect 
 But he's a Bigot of the Persian Sect: 
 
 And, by a Foreign Int'rest seeks to Reign, 
 
 Hopeless by Love the Sceptre to obtain. 
 
 ( 1 - 94 - 97 ) 
 
 The reference to James is evident and startling and can be read as 
 a warning to the duke to rely on the affections of the people and the 
 legitimacy of his succession rather than on foreign aid. 22 The Mughal 
 
 Appropriating India 75 
 
allusion, however, is not to Aurangzeb via one of his contenders but 
 via one contender to the leading contender, Dara. Shuja was plea¬ 
 sure loving rather than valorous, and his interest in religion was 
 minimal. Dara's very name was Persian, a variant of Darius. He was 
 deeply interested in Sufism, which Islamic orthodoxy might regard 
 as a Persian sect. But he was an eclectic, not a bigot, and his trial for 
 heresy was based on treating as deviance not merely his eclecticism 
 but even the readiness to give dissent a hearing. He was in fact found 
 guilty and condemned by bigots, with whom Aurangzeb, a funda¬ 
 mentalist, was fully in sympathy. Finally, he did not rely on foreign 
 assistance. He was the legitimate successor and the popular choice. 
 
 Dara embarrasses Dryden to such an extent that these few lines 
 are almost all that is left of him. The difficulty is that many of the 
 qualities Dryden wished for in an English successor—legitimacy by 
 merit as well as birthright, popular support, and tolerance of reli¬ 
 gious variety—were to be found in the unfortunate Indian prince. 
 The systematic misrepresentation of Dara so that these qualities 
 could be bestowed on Aurangzeb was always a possibility, but rather 
 than paint him methodically in false colors, it was better not to paint 
 him at all. Dara's disappearance is the main cost of Englishing Au¬ 
 rangzeb. The other principal expense is Shah Jehan's reduction to a 
 travesty of himself, whose incompetence and helplessness justify a 
 struggle for the succession and make all the more noble Aurangzeb's 
 filial loyalty. Morat remains as an example of that overstated hero 
 whom the Restoration stage had offered for admiration and whom 
 Dryden's new model was fashioned to replace. 
 
 Even the title pages of Aureng-Zebe play their part in the appro¬ 
 priation of India. The scene is described as "Agra in the year 1660." 
 By 1660, the struggle for the succession was over. Dara had been 
 found guilty of heresy and beheaded. Shuja had been driven out of 
 India. Morat was a prisoner in Gwalior Fort, and Shah Jehan was 
 under house arrest. But 1660 was the year of the Restoration. The 
 coming to power of the legitimate claimant to the kingdom was the 
 crowning event of 1660 in England and is the climactic event in 
 Dryden's play about India. A history fictionally contrived to echo 
 itself in space is called on to repeat itself in time. 
 
 It can and should be argued that Mughal history is treated by 
 Dryden with a disrespect that no writer would have thought of bring¬ 
 ing to bear on the Greek and Roman past. Such a disrespect points to 
 a stubbornly resident devaluation of the Orient. It is, to put it plainly, 
 not to be taken seriously. On the other hand, it can be said that 
 
 76 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
if Dryden pillages Indian history, he does so only to construct ex¬ 
 amples for England and that the examples include not only Aurang- 
 zeb but also Indamora and Melisande. The counterargument recoils 
 on itself and may have been intended to do so from the beginning. 
 The distance between the fictional and the historical, between the 
 golden world and the bronze one, is also the distance between En¬ 
 gland and India, and it is a distance increased rather than decreased 
 by the drastic rearrangements shown to be necessary if Aurangzeb 
 is to be satisfactorily Englished. The play offers itself as an endeavor 
 to display India as exemplary, but the very comprehensiveness of its 
 effort to do so draws attention to a historical reality that is quite the 
 reverse of the play's apparent intentions. A promise of likeness be¬ 
 comes a statement of otherness and so takes its place in a familiar 
 tradition of perceiving India. It is strategy rather than content, the 
 way of arrival rather than the state reached, that makes this particu¬ 
 lar articulation distinctive. 
 
 If the historical Aurangzeb's unveiling as a negative example repre¬ 
 sents the otherness of India, Indamora and Nourmahal are sharply 
 different yet intertwined manifestations of the feminization of India 
 by a soon-to-be-dominant West. India as desirable yet dangerous, as 
 welcoming but also unpredictable, and as finding its identity under 
 the guidance of the husband-monarch are possibilities that discourse 
 makes explicit and that history is soon to make substantial. It might 
 be noted that the spousal metaphor points not only to an India 
 that wishes to be governed (as in The Lusiads) but also to an India 
 that wishes to be English. It would be obviously untrue to argue that 
 Dryden recognizes this wish in his play's determined abstention 
 from even scenic Indianness. Nevertheless, appropriation is a form 
 of marriage and a form that will become variously embedded in 
 future constructions of India by the English. 
 
 Appropriating India 77 
 
4 
 
 James Mill and the 
 Case of the Hottentot Venus 
 
 The battle of Buxar is more important than the battle of Plassey, 
 which has been reduced to the status of a skirmish, but battles are 
 no longer acceptable as signaling changes in the direction of history. 
 In seeking an alternative, we might wish to consider representations 
 of history as not merely cast in the narrative form but as formed 
 largely by the argument between narratives. It then becomes in¬ 
 structive to consider the spate of British histories of India after Plas¬ 
 sey and Buxar and the changing characterizations into which those 
 events were fitted. An outline history of histories can be enlighten¬ 
 ing in indicating why the specific version that proved decisive pre¬ 
 vailed. 
 
 Robert Orme wrote the first of these studies in 1763, a military 
 history of the British in India, chronicling the repeated triumphs of 
 the British fighting spirit against Indians doubly weakened by an 
 enervating climate and a protein-deficient diet. 1 As military history, 
 the account is not notable, but it was sufficiently invigorating for the 
 East India Company to appoint Orme as its official historiographer. 
 In undertaking to purchase at least fifty copies of any book written 
 on India, the company provided further evidence of its earnest con¬ 
 cern in having its rapidly growing assets valued. 
 
 Orme's book was followed by Alexander Dow's three-volume 
 study (1768-72); by Francis Gladwin's examination of Mughal India 
 during the reigns of Jehangir, Shah Jehan, and Aurangzeb (1788); and 
 by Thomas Maurice's seven-volume history of Sanskrit and classi¬ 
 cal Hindustan (1800) and his further history of modern Hindustan 
 (1802-10). To these should be added Mark Wilks's history of South 
 India (1810-17), 2 which Thomas Moore drew on for his notes to Lalla 
 Rookh . 3 The climax came in James Mill's three-volume history of 
 British India (1817), a work that became prescribed reading for offi- 
 
cials of the East India Company and that was predictably described 
 by Macaulay as the greatest achievement in historiography since 
 that of Edward Gibbon. We must also take into account the sur¬ 
 vey of India, begun in r8oi and not completed until nearly half a 
 century later. An effort of determined and mind-boggling diligence, 
 the survey mapped India with exemplary thoroughness through the 
 laborious process of triangulation. 4 It was an imperial statement 
 geographically complementing the act of possession implicit in the 
 histories. 
 
 Nearly all of these copious histories were written by soldiers and 
 servants of the East India Company. That fact exposes their ideo¬ 
 logical investment, although it does not follow that the work of 
 scholars would have been more disinterested. Hegel, an academic, 
 writes Mill very much larger. He does so by integrating Mill's views 
 on India into a systematic philosophy that claims all human under¬ 
 standing as its province. 
 
 The different views of the past that eighteenth-century histories of 
 India provide do not, as Milton leads us to hope, show "truth closing 
 up to truth" out of the confusion and the ferment of error. The con¬ 
 vention may be that one seeks to know the past in order to install it 
 as the future's instructor. The reality can be that one constructs the 
 past in order to enlist it as the future's accomplice. We can look at 
 these successive histories of India as providing those about to attain 
 possession of the subcontinent with a range of managerial options 
 called for by readings of India's past that were constructed to sup¬ 
 port these options. 
 
 The option adopted will not be chosen because its projection into 
 the past is more faithful to the "facts" or because it is narratively 
 more persuasive. It may be chosen because it is congenial to pre¬ 
 vailing ideologies, and since ideologies and historical narrations are 
 both responsive to power dispositions, the choice may exhibit the 
 maximum collusiveness between the intellectual and the historical 
 fictions. These are considerations urged on us with some force, but 
 there is a further consideration arising from the link between com¬ 
 merce and empire that has been repeatedly pointed to in these pages. 
 That consideration, put with an unavoidable drabness that may fail 
 to draw attention to its importance, is cost-effectiveness. The East 
 India Company was a business concern. It is not out of order to ask 
 to what extent the political and cultural world that its relationship 
 to India brought into being was the result of decisions congenial to 
 its balance sheet. 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 79 
 
Dow's History of Hindostan, principally a compilation drawn from 
 Persian sources, shrinks away enlighteningly from the promised 
 scope of its title. It reduces itself to a history not of India but of 
 its rulers and, more restrictively, of those Moslem dynasties that 
 ruled India by right of conquest—a right that, as we shall see, can 
 be claimed or conceded by figures as diverse as Hastings, Jones, and 
 Macaulay. As in The Lusiads, which Mickle revealingly calls the epic 
 of whoever held possession of India, India's submission is incised 
 into its psyche. The Hindus, according to Dow, are "of all nations the 
 most easily conquered and ruled." They "permit themselves to be 
 transferred from one tyrant to another without murmuring." 5 Such 
 language might be read as paving the way for the arrival of a new 
 tyrant, but the British intention is more charitable. It is to provide 
 the dominance India seems to seek but to add to it the benevolence 
 that only England can offer. 
 
 The most abusive characterization of India's propensity for sub¬ 
 mission comes not from an East India Company historian but from 
 the more lettered pen of Oliver Goldsmith: 
 
 The Indians have long been remarkable for their cowardice 
 and effeminacy; every conqueror that has attempted the in¬ 
 vasion of their country having succeeded. . . . They are 
 slothful, submissive and luxurious,- satisfied with sensual 
 happiness alone they find no pleasure in thinking; and con¬ 
 tented with slavery they are ready to obey any master. . . . 
 
 Fed upon rice and clothed in effeminate silk vestments they 
 are unable to oppose the onset of a European army. . . . 
 Upon the whole therefore, they may be considered a feeble 
 race of sensualists, too dull to find rapture in any pleasures 
 and too indolent to turn their gravity into wisdom. 6 
 
 Dow and Goldsmith define India as a chronically subject nation, 
 and such a nation naturally exposes itself to the utmost liberty of 
 representation. It can be coerced into becoming whatever the con¬ 
 queror beholds. The conqueror's gaze is that of the inheritor in the 
 first place and will only become that of the reformer as moral self¬ 
 esteem intrudes into the elation of power. Thus the first proposals 
 are those of continuity, that dominance be exercised along lines al¬ 
 ready in being. The British are to take over and operate more effi¬ 
 ciently (and somewhat less onerously than Aurangzeb) the adminis¬ 
 trative and fiscal apparatus of the Mughal state. Akbar's tolerance is 
 to be prudently substituted for Aurangzeb's fanaticism, which stiff- 
 
 80 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ened internal resistance, reduced extractive efficiency, and made the 
 payment of imperial dividends vastly more difficult. 
 
 Imperial dividends had been adequate before Plassey. Trade with 
 India had prospered sufficiently for the Harlowe family in Samuel 
 Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48) to have built its fortunes largely on 
 that trade. The East India Company had outdistanced its Dutch coun¬ 
 terpart, with textiles overtaking spices as the main component of 
 commerce with Asia. The Bengal silk trade had surpassed that of 
 China. Tea, in turn, was overtaking textiles, and the East India Com¬ 
 pany's predominance in the tea trade was strengthening. But the 
 balance of trade was disturbingly adverse. Two-thirds of British im¬ 
 ports from India in the decade before Richardson's book had to be 
 paid for not in goods but in bullion. Gold and silver obtained from 
 the New World could be disposed of at a considerable profit in India, 
 but the trade pattern depended precariously on a single source of 
 supply. 7 Safeguarding steps were needed that did not involve curbing 
 the consumer demand on which the company's fortunes were based. 
 The conquest of Bengal rearranged the trade balance so that India 
 thereafter became a debtor nation. It also eradicated the sometimes 
 thin line that separates commerce from plunder. 
 
 Tragic events in a world six months away from England by a still- 
 hazardous sea voyage would not normally have been a matter for 
 even abstract concern, but the influx of nabobs with fortunes built 
 on the ruin of India created stresses in the English social fabric. The 
 aristocratic and the mercantile had coexisted in England in an un¬ 
 easiness raised to a principle by Milton's statement that one was "By 
 merit more than birthright Son of God" (PL 3.309). As mercantile 
 wealth reinforced the claims of its owners for a more decisive place 
 in the national order, it became desirable to insist that not all mer¬ 
 cantile fortunes were made by merit. Class conflicts and Enlighten¬ 
 ment ideology combined at this point to create a brief interval in 
 which the equity of empire could be questioned. 
 
 Thus, while East India Company historians were taking the im¬ 
 minence of possessing India for granted, English opinion was not 
 without its misgivings. The nabobs became the focus of a resent¬ 
 ment considerably beyond the customary irritation provoked by the 
 nouveau riche. Macaulay is not exceptional, and may even be rep¬ 
 resentative, in seeing these years as "the most frightful of all spec¬ 
 tacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy." He finds "the 
 misgovernment of the English . . . carried to a point such as seems 
 hardly compatible with the very existence of society." The Life of 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 81 
 
Clive, from which these remarks are taken, devotes an informative 
 paragraph to the unpopularity of the nabobs and their satirizing in 
 contemporary literature. Samuel Foote's play The Nabob, first per¬ 
 formed on June 26, 1772, is among the most striking of these de¬ 
 pictions. A dialogue between Touchit and the mayor of the small 
 English town where the play is set is a virtual translation of contem¬ 
 porary events in India: 
 
 Touchit: Here are a body of merchants that beg to be ad¬ 
 mitted as friends and take possession of a small spot in a 
 country and carry on a beneficial commerce with the in¬ 
 offensive and innocent people, to which they kindly give 
 their consent. 
 
 Mayor: Don't you think now that is very civil of them? 
 
 Touchit: Doubtless. Upon which, Mr. Mayor, we cunningly 
 encroach, and fortify little and by little, till at length, we 
 growing too strong for the natives, we turn them out of their 
 lands, and take possession of their money and jewels. 
 
 Mayor: And don't you think, Master Touchit, that is a little 
 uncivil of us? 
 
 Touchit: Oh nothing at all. These people are but a little 
 better than Tartars or Turks. 
 
 Mayor: No, No, Master Touchit; just the reverse; it is they 
 have caught the Tartars in us. 8 
 
 The persistence of the medieval papal pun on Tartarus is striking 
 (Byron uses it in his poem on the death of Keats), but its transference 
 to the predatory West from the savagely gorgeous East is a refreshing 
 comment on the imperialist adventure. Later, when Matthew Mite 
 (the nabob) offers Lady Oldham the fiendish alternatives of marriage 
 to her daughter or foreclosure on the mortgage, she spurns the pro¬ 
 posal with opulent indignation: "I would much rather see my child 
 with a competence, nay, even reduced to an indigent state, than 
 voluptuously rioting in pleasures that derive their source from the 
 mines of others." 9 Lady Oldham's stern judgment is not peculiar 
 to her plight. It is, she insists, "the voice of the public," and Mite, 
 shrugging it aside as "the common cry of the times," has to reply 
 by demanding that gratitude should be shown to those who have 
 given England "dominion and wealth." The argument is decisively 
 rejected: "Your riches ... by introducing a general spirit of dissipa¬ 
 tion, have extinguished labour and industry the slow but sure source 
 of national wealth." 
 
 82 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Mite exaggerates to dismiss when he refers to Lady Oldham's pro¬ 
 test as “the common cry/' but the cry was considerably more than 
 audible. "Man over men / He made not lord" is not a statement re¬ 
 assuring to imperialists. Not everyone was as forthright as Roger 
 Williams in asking what difference there was "between Asia and 
 Africa, between Europe and America" in "respect of the Lord's spe¬ 
 cial propriety to one country more than another." 10 But the hero in 
 Henry Mackenzie's widely read Man of Feeling (1771) speaks in the 
 same tradition when he asks, "What title have the subjects of another 
 kingdom to establish an empire in India-" 11 Cowper, a schoolfellow 
 of Hastings, asks: 
 
 Is India free, and does she wear her plumed 
 And jewelled turban with a smile of peace, 
 
 Or do we grind her still ? n 
 
 Most important of all is Samuel Johnson, who, in a formidable 
 parenthesis, describes 1498, the year of Vasco da Gama's voyage to 
 India and of Columbus's arrival on the American mainland (in what 
 is now Venezuela), 13 as "a year hitherto disastrous to mankind." 14 
 "The Europeans," Johnson says resoundingly, "have scarcely visited 
 any coast but to gratify avarice and extend corruption: to arrogate 
 dominion without right and practice cruelty without incentive." 15 
 Johnson's comment comes toward the end of a period of cultural 
 self-criticism in which Dryden's Montezuma, Montesquieu's Per¬ 
 sian, Swift's King of Brobdingnag, Voltaire's Micromegas, and Gold¬ 
 smith's Chinaman attempt to look back at Europe, although within 
 the perspective of the Western gaze. 16 
 
 The change taking place becomes evident when we contrast John¬ 
 son's statement with Adam Smith's conclusion that the "discovery 
 of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of 
 Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded 
 in the history of mankind." 17 Hegel's view (as will be seen) is simi¬ 
 lar, and the felicities of chronology do indeed call for the coupling 
 of these voyages that brought the whole world into the imperial¬ 
 ist embrace. But the two encounters, although intimately related, 
 also differ significantly in their representation before the imperialist 
 will. One calls for civilizing the wilderness,- the other calls for taking 
 over and amending the institutions of an existing nation-state. In 
 the end, the rhetoric of civilizing the wilderness infiltrates the en¬ 
 counter with India as supplanting institutions rather than reforming 
 them becomes the shaping force behind the imperial agenda. It is 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 83 
 
less complicated to deal with savages and animals than with peoples 
 pretending to civility. Spenser's Artegall makes this discovery in The 
 Faerie Queene. Nevertheless, India cannot be governed without the 
 large-scale collaboration of Indians. There is therefore a boundary to 
 the slighting of Indian culture, even if that boundary is sometimes 
 not easy to detect. 
 
 As has been indicated, the first proposal to come before the British 
 was that of continuity with its Mughal predecessor. The regime, 
 especially under Akbar, had shown itself capable of extractive effi¬ 
 ciency without arousing a dangerous intensity of resentment. Its 
 administrative and particularly its fiscal apparatus could be taken 
 over without major alterations. As the British positioned themselves 
 along the line of continuity with the Mughals, it was natural that 
 they should see Islam as the state's official religion and Hinduism 
 as circumferential, a folk culture rather than a religious alternative. 
 Moreover, Hinduism was known almost exclusively through its my¬ 
 thology, and the proliferative exuberance of that mythology tended 
 to confirm its decentered character. Sanskrit was, for practical pur¬ 
 poses, a language unknown to the West, 18 and Hindu philosophical, 
 religious, and literary texts remained locked up in the inaccessibility 
 of Sanskrit, except for scanty and fragmentary renderings into Per¬ 
 sian. 
 
 In a characterization that grows in strength as we ponder it, Wendy 
 Doniger treats the relationship between Hindu mythology and phi¬ 
 losophy as the relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollo¬ 
 nian. 19 Other pairings can be proposed, but this contestation nego¬ 
 tiates yet once more the creative entanglement between unity and 
 diversity that is so pervasive in the texture of Indian thought. The 
 moral is that the philosophy and the mythology should not be con¬ 
 sidered apart from each other. The architecture of the Hindu temple 
 —the totality that holds in a massively announced and yet precari¬ 
 ous relationship, the multitudinousness of the facade, and the inner 
 sanctum, with its "condition of complete simplicity"—is a reminder 
 of this necessary copresence. 20 When attention settles exclusively 
 on the mythology, the Western intelligence is likely to find it mon¬ 
 strous, and this is indeed the standard adjective. Yet it is the prolif¬ 
 erative mythology and not the Apollonian philosophy that has been 
 India's principal cultural export to the further India that Zimmer's 
 work surveys. 
 
 The marginal status of Hinduism and the dangers of the margin 
 as a subversive site are evident in William Beckford's Vathek (1784). 
 
 84 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
This novel is a retelling of the Faustian legend as an Arabian Nights 
 fantasy with a liberal admixture of the Gothic. The familiar fable ap¬ 
 peals to the proposition of a universal human nature that is subject 
 everywhere to the same temptations. It normalizes Islam, and the 
 normalization is further secured by the first in a series of lavishly 
 scholarly notes that testify to the awakening interest in Orientalism 
 and seek to claim documentary accuracy for the exuberant inven¬ 
 tiveness of the story. The note defines the solemn status of a caliph as 
 vicegerent of God and as prophet, priest, and king to his people (the 
 traditional functions of Christ). 21 This particular caliph is involved in 
 the capricious pursuit of forbidden knowledge, which seems to fas¬ 
 cinate him largely because of the price that has to be paid for it. The 
 giaour who tempts him (the word is a corruption of "kafir," meaning 
 infidel) is an extremely unattractive inhabitant of India. Hinduism is 
 thus made the infernal circumference of an Islam that was itself the 
 infernal circumference of Christianity. The double devaluation indi¬ 
 cates the lack of esteem in which Hindu religion and practices were 
 coming to be held. A quite unnecessary note in the scholarly appa¬ 
 ratus draws due attention to the absurdity of these practices. 22 This 
 is not to denigrate the elegance and zest of Beckford's novel, which 
 comes to a fine climax in the halls of Eblis, modeled on the meta¬ 
 morphosis of the fallen angels in the tenth book of Paradise Lost. 
 Southey may have drawn on it for The Curse of Kehama. 
 
 The notes for Vathek are sufficiently up to date to include refer¬ 
 ences to William Jones, who had founded the Asiatic Society of Ben¬ 
 gal seven years before Beckford's novel was published. In glancing at 
 Jones, they show no awareness of the alternative that his construc¬ 
 tion of the Indian past was building. If a proposal for continuity such 
 as Dow's is to be debated, it must be challenged by a proposal that is 
 reformist. Jones in effect offered such a proposal by putting forward 
 a different version of the Indian past that called for a different style 
 of future management. Hinduism is now seen as central rather than 
 marginal and even as a cornerstone of the edifice of civilization or a 
 lost chapter of the Western identity. Sanskrit was a parent language 
 of humankind, and Sanskrit philosophy and literature were distin¬ 
 guished statements in the history of civilization. Far from being the 
 emissary of Eblis, Vathek's giaour might well be the bearer of an an¬ 
 cient enlightenment. 
 
 Jones translated Kalidasa's Sakuntala in 1789, four years after 
 Charles Wilkins published his translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In 
 1786, Duperron published his Recherches historiques et chronolo- 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 85 
 
giques sur 1 ’Inde. The second volume contained translations of four 
 Upanishads not from the Sanskrit but from a Persian rendering 
 made, we are told, at the behest of Dara Shikoh. Jones's translation 
 of Kalidasa swept Europe. Hastings read Wilkins's version of the Gita 
 and prophesied that its wisdom would endure long after the British 
 presence had departed from India. 23 Having said that, he proceeded 
 to strengthen and greatly enlarge that presence. 
 
 Raymond Schwab writes with deep scholarship and persuasive¬ 
 ness of the importance of the discovery of India as a shaping force 
 in the romantic project. 24 The sustaining vision of that project, as 
 Schwab perceives it, was to bring about a world humanism, enlarged 
 to be free of Greco-Roman constraints, that would fully open up the 
 future of human creativeness to the sum of the best that had been 
 known and thought. But the dominance of the West in any scheme of 
 world understanding is not to be easily relinquished. "Thought's em¬ 
 pire over thought," Shelley's memorable and latently self-annulling 
 metaphor, 25 proclaims the transience of intellectual empires, which 
 in their nature cannot join self-knowledge to world knowledge and 
 must repress the "mutiny within" that challenges thought in its im¬ 
 perial pretensions. It is a caution counting for little when empires 
 not of thought were being put together by means that would soon 
 call for the manufacture of ideological empires. 
 
 Jones and his colleagues provided a different and inconvenient 
 history of India, but it was not a history offered to suggest that the 
 march of conquest be suspended so that a subject people could be 
 given back its rights. Jones himself, in putting forward a tract con¬ 
 taining some mildly progressive proposals, went out of his way to 
 reassure Lord Ashburton that he would "certainly not preach them 
 to the Indians," who, he believed, "must and will be governed by 
 absolute power." 26 With an appointment as Supreme Court judge at 
 Calcutta in the offing, this may have been the only thing to say. But 
 Jones's uneasiness with the reassurance he offers is made apparent 
 by his immediate retreat from it: "Yet I shall go through life with a 
 persuasion that they [the Indians] are just and rational." 
 
 It is hard to see why a just and rational people should be sub¬ 
 jected to the exercise of absolute power, unless the purpose of power 
 is to free that people from institutional confinements that previous 
 exercises of power have imposed. The view that India should be gov¬ 
 erned by its own laws and customs, that it should be brought back 
 to itself by an enlightened despotism, is thus for Jones not simply a 
 way of enlisting Indian support for British authority but an impor¬ 
 tant part of his troubled justification of the right of the British to 
 
 86 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
govern India. 27 A more pragmatic and more typical view, concerned 
 with the efficiency rather than with the responsibilities of imperial 
 government, is put forward by Hastings: 
 
 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 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. 28 
 
 "The weight of the chain" is a phrase that must be called brutally 
 frank, and the entire passage makes it apparent that Hastings is con¬ 
 sidering not the rights of the Indian people —the Magna Carta that 
 Burke optimistically found embodied in Fox's East India Bill, which 
 he himself may have drafted 29 —but simply the optimal strategy of 
 management. To maximize collaboration and minimize resistance, 
 it might be desirable for a people to be governed by their own laws. 
 The Orientalist contribution was to argue that the laws should be 
 those appropriate to the heritage of Hindu civilization rather than 
 those promulgated by the Mughal regime. In this sense, the Orien¬ 
 talist proposal was revisionist. It sought to move to the center what 
 had hitherto been at the circumference. The "obligation of benevo¬ 
 lence" was to further lessen "the weight of the chain" and also purge 
 away the guilt of conquest by reinstating what had so far been over¬ 
 laid. 
 
 Jones planned a heroic poem to be entitled Britain Discovered 
 that he did not live to write and of which only the "design" exists. 
 It was to be modeled on Spenser, not Milton, whom Jones wor¬ 
 shiped. 30 Jones may have turned to Spenser because he saw in The 
 Faerie Queene an ancestral poem of the intertwined relationship be¬ 
 tween the patriotic and imperial selves. A text more enlightened 
 than The Lusiads and revelatory of a nation more distinguished and 
 self-searching than Portugal was needed to replace Camoes's poem 
 as the epic of those who held possession of India. As the argument 
 to book 2 makes apparent, much of Britain lies waiting to be dis¬ 
 covered in India. Kipling's refrain, "What can they know of England 
 who only England know?," is anticipated in a design in which the 
 core of a nation is disclosed to itself on its periphery: 
 
 The gods of India convened on Mount Cailas, by Rudra or 
 Mahadeva, the power of destruction; their names, numbers, 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 87 
 
characters, attributes, and attendants. The goddess Ganga 
 announces the views and voyage of the Tyrian hero: ex¬ 
 presses her apprehensions of his ultimate success, but ad¬ 
 vises the most vehement opposition to him,- declaring that 
 his victory will prove the origin of a wonderful nation, who 
 will possess themselves of her books, profane her waters, 
 mock the temples of the Indian divinities, appropriate the 
 wealth of their adorers, introduce new laws, a new religion, 
 a new government, insult the Brahmins and disregard the 
 sacred ordinances of Brahma. 31 
 
 A similar but less detailed prophecy is made in The Lusiads (7.46) 
 by a soothsayer inspired by a demon who is surprisingly said to have 
 spoken truly. Ganga's much fuller account of the havoc anticipated 
 from the British takes us aback by its admission that the British vic¬ 
 tories in India will nevertheless exhibit "the origin of a wonderful 
 nation." Her prophecy verges on the oxymoronic. Its decoding must 
 depend on the undoing of the typical agenda of conquest that she 
 foresees, by the quite different behavior of the British as conquerors. 
 The inventory of destruction spells out the weight of a chain that 
 must not materialize. In doing so, it indicates the formidable extent 
 of a task that calls out for a nation that must be no less than "won¬ 
 derful" if it is to falsify Ganga's natural expectations. 
 
 The implicit claim for England's imperial uniqueness expresses 
 Jones's hopes. The agenda the claim must set at naught itemizes 
 his anxieties. The distance between the two and the extreme imbal¬ 
 ance between the comprehensive prophecy of havoc and the brief 
 and solitary countervailing reference to a "wonderful nation" open 
 a fissure that even imperial power may be unable to accommodate. 
 Significantly, Ganga's forebodings are not addressed in the design of 
 Britain Discovered until the final book, where a safeguard is offered 
 that seems scarcely in proportion to the fears that have been voiced: 
 "The nuptials of Britain and Albion, or allegorically, of Royalty and 
 Liberty united in the constitution of England. The attending Druid 
 . .. recommends the government of the Indians by their own laws." 32 
 
 The Ganges is a river that seems to draw Jones into the current 
 of politics. In his "Hymn to Ganga," Aurangzeb is seen as "a ruffian 
 king / The demon of his empire, not the grace," whose misdeeds lead 
 to the throne being rent by discord and to its capture by "nations yet 
 unknown." 33 The argument to the hymn advises us that the poem is 
 "feigned to have been the work of a brahman, who, by a prophetical 
 
 88 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the British government 
 and concludes with a prayer for its peaceful duration under good 
 laws well administered ." 34 
 
 The Brahman's views seem notably different from those voiced in 
 Britain Discovered by the goddess Ganga, whom one might take to 
 be a higher authority. It is an inconsistency more striking than real. 
 The Brahman is in effect giving his prophetical assent to the subtext 
 that will hopefully nullify Ganga's prophecy and that Ganga herself 
 oxymoronically acknowledges. "Toleration and equity" do indeed 
 call for a spirit of prophetic discernment, given the plight of Bengal 
 when Jones wrote his poem. But perhaps because of Bengal's ab¬ 
 jection, toleration and equity no longer extend to the "government 
 of the Indians by their own laws." The Brahman's prayer seeks no 
 more than "good laws well administered." The final couplet leaves 
 the Indian content of those laws uncertain: "As they preserve our 
 laws, and bid our terror cease / So be their darling laws preserv'd in 
 wealth, in joy, in peace." 35 
 
 The passage teeters on a difficult balance, suggesting that terror 
 (a word compounded in effectiveness by its almost casual use) can 
 be bidden to cease if the laws of the victor are respected and adding 
 that the laws and customs precious to the hearts of Indians (hence 
 the word "darling") can also be protected at the same time. The word 
 "preserv'd" on both sides of the balance announces a symmetry as if 
 it were a harmony. It is a literary sleight of hand that circumvents 
 a harassing anxiety over a gap in political reality that may not be 
 bridgeable. 
 
 Jones's uneasy positioning of these poems between the "absolute 
 power" that accrues from conquest and the counterclaim of a cul¬ 
 ture he had learned to respect encourages us to read him between 
 the lines. Aware of imperialism as potentially culture exterminating, 
 he seeks to restrict its destructiveness by advocating safeguards that 
 cannot be effective because their comprehensive implementation 
 would be uncongenial to the imperial purpose. To carry on the gov¬ 
 ernment of India as far as possible through Indian laws and customs 
 is no more than pragmatic. But the implications of Jones's scholar¬ 
 ship and of the romantic enthusiasm over India that Schwab has so 
 impressively documented went considerably further and sought rec¬ 
 ognition of India as a parent culture rather than benign tolerance of 
 its oddities. To concede this would have been to grant India parity in 
 a dialogue with the West, and both parity and the very notion of dia¬ 
 logue are opposed profoundly to the logic of dominance. Dialogue 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 89 
 
would not simply lessen the weight of but eliminate the chain "by 
 which the natives are held in subjection." 
 
 It was time for a new construction of India's history. Continuity 
 and revisionism both entrenched the past, although in different ways 
 and with sharply different primacies. It was time to argue that the 
 past had had its day, which could not be reinstated, and that all that 
 could be learned from studying the past was the basis of its inability 
 to advance beyond itself. The British mission was not to improve on 
 Akbar or to resurrect the Mauryas. It was to write a new text and 
 not to amend an old one. The moment called for a construction of 
 Indian history that would provide the future with a different em¬ 
 powerment. James Mill was the spokesperson of that moment. 36 
 
 The deifying of history and the entrenching of progress defined 
 by the standards of those whom history has chosen are important 
 features of nineteenth-century thought. Mill's work is in the tradi¬ 
 tion represented by such cliches as the "ascent of man," the "onward 
 march of events," or even the "grand march of intellect," to use 
 Keats's phrase, which he spent his poetic life questioning. Even the 
 title of Mill's book—A History of British India — is important for the 
 way in which it appropriates that march, enlarging a special interest 
 so that it can become the voice of an imperial constituency. There 
 was no "British India" at the time Mill's book was written. There 
 was only a land grab of unprecedented dimensions by a showpiece 
 of private enterprise known as the East India Company. To call the 
 results of this operation British India is not to write history, but it is 
 to provide the judgmental framework within which history is here¬ 
 after to be viewed. 
 
 When Spear compares the quality of life in Mughal India with 
 that in seventeenth-century Europe, he concludes that there may 
 be good ground for thinking that "the average peasant had more to 
 eat than his European counterpart and suffered no more oppression 
 from the lords. Mughal India, with an estimated one hundred mil¬ 
 lion inhabitants, had for about a century and a half a standard of life 
 roughly comparable with that of contemporary Europe, though ar¬ 
 ranged on a different social and economic pattern.” 37 Angus Calder 
 agrees with Spear that the Indian peasant may have been better 
 nourished than the European and was no more subject to the pres¬ 
 sures of tyranny. He goes on to add that "Mughal India was overall as 
 cultured, well governed and comfortable as any part of the world." 38 
 These findings are typical and contrast with Mill's conclusion, noted 
 by Patrick Brantlinger, that India nearly two centuries later had not 
 
 90 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
even attained the stage of civilization that Europe had attain 
 the Middle Ages. 39 Even more arbitrary than the verdict is thi 
 in which India is situated on a European-invented trajectory 
 velopment that all civilizations are obliged to follow, with England 
 pressing on from the furthest point yet reached. The undeviating 
 "march of passion and endeavour" that Keats was pondering even as 
 Mill wrote was to result inexorably in the triumph of the Apollonian. 
 
 When Mill published the book that, according to William Ben- 
 tinck, made him rather than Bentinck the real governor-general of 
 India, 40 there were 850,000 slaves under British proprietorship, most 
 of them in the West Indies. A man could be executed for stealing a 
 shilling in Barbados. The Hindu penal code, severe though it was, is 
 judged by Calder to have been much less savage than the English. 41 
 Mill makes much of the allegation that punishment in India was 
 proportioned to caste, but no honest person can say that punishment 
 under British rule was not proportioned to color. Child marriage (or, 
 more accurately, betrothal) was indeed deplorable, but it was not 
 more deplorable than forcing children to work for sixteen hours a 
 day under conditions likely to lead to their early death. The act 
 charitably reducing that period to twelve hours came into force only 
 a few years before Mill's book. Suttee was a monstrous social prac¬ 
 tice, not called for in Hindu religion, as even Southey notes 42 and 
 resisted by Hindu reformers. The burning of witches all over Europe 
 and North America in the previous two centuries can scarcely be 
 called less monstrous. Aurangzeb has been justly described in these 
 pages as a bigot, but compared to the Spanish Inquisition (not abol¬ 
 ished until 1820), his regime must be hailed as a model of tolerance. 
 In Australia, where a count seems to have been kept of the number 
 of lashes legally administered to miscreants, the number had risen 
 in 1835 to the staggering total of 332,810. 43 
 
 Compilations like these on both sides of the ledger indicate that 
 people who throw stones are likely to live in glass houses. But they 
 may also point to an unexpected subtlety in Mill's agenda. It is not 
 just India that must be reformed or regulated. England must elimi¬ 
 nate or restrain within itself the negative collocation that is India. 
 India is merely the geopsychic site for a cluster of undesirabilities 
 that continue to be illicitly desired. Enlightened civilizations must 
 make these undesirabilities alien to themselves. 
 
 Naming at this level is an extreme intensification of the self-other 
 relationship. It is not altogether without precedent. Dryden wittily 
 pursues India as a negative example, but Mill, who is no Dryden, is 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 91 
 
writing in a genre that is not Dryden's. A book that is to become 
 standard reading for officials of the East India Company cannot be 
 treated in the same manner as a play whose insinuations can be ele¬ 
 gantly oblique. Mill's project answers to his temperament. There is 
 a straightforwardness about him that should discourage deft deflec¬ 
 tions, even among those anxious to complicate the dour movement 
 of his thought. Self-and-other diagrams invite the suspicion that the 
 other is being officially dismissed in order that it may be clandes¬ 
 tinely entertained. Mill's work does not exclude a space for the self¬ 
 scrutiny that should follow upon such healthy skepticism, but mov¬ 
 ing into that space is a responsibility left to the reader. 
 
 One measure of an enlightened civilization is the manner in which 
 it treats its women. Thomas De Quincey apparently found this idea 
 in Kant. 44 Feminine India gives women a high metaphysical status. 
 Its social praxis has been less commendable, but it may be England 
 that here provides the most lurid manifestation of that area of dark¬ 
 ness bearing the name of India. In 1810, a woman described as the 
 Hottentot Venus was exhibited in a cage in London and prodded 
 with canes by curious spectators 45 Tamburlaine's similar treatment 
 of Bajazet had been held up before Elizabethan audiences more than 
 two centuries earlier as an example of Oriental barbarity. The justi¬ 
 fication for this obscene episode was that the woman did not object 
 to and may indeed have appreciated the anatomical curiosity exhib¬ 
 ited by her viewers. After she died, her body was surrendered for 
 further investigation. Speculations that Africans represented a lower 
 form of human life, simian rather than Edenic in its ancestry, were 
 current and are reflected in the imperialist games that the young De 
 Quincey plays with his elder brother. 46 
 
 Scholarly authority is important in imperial games, and the au¬ 
 thority behind De Quincey's version is Lord Monboddo's six-volume 
 work, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1774-92). Monboddo 
 considers orangutans and human beings as similar animals. He does 
 not restrict this observation to Africans. The elder brother, who 
 dominates the games, does not deny that the inhabitants of Tigro- 
 sylvania (the imperial power in these exercises) once had tails. His 
 point is that they no longer have them, unlike the inhabitants of 
 colonial Gombroon. 47 But this is only because the sedentary pos¬ 
 tures more common in higher civilizations have, over long years of 
 adaptation, worn off the tails of the inhabitants of Tigrosylvania. In 
 the psychopathology of imperialism, laughter can be important in 
 retrieving excess. 
 
 92 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
"I had a perfect craze for being despised," De Quincey writes. "I 
 doted on it and considered contempt a luxury that I was in continual 
 fear of losing. Why not? Wherefore should any rational person shrink 
 from contempt, if it happen to form the tenure by which he holds 
 his repose in life?" (1:59). Such masochism fits well into an imperial¬ 
 ist framework, providing sites of colonial victimization that can be 
 psychologically coveted even while the consequences of inhabiting 
 them are bewailed. The game obliquely authorizes imperialism since 
 it is seen as the result of the collaboration of both participants. But 
 the game's rules are also exposures of imperialist premises, such as 
 the premise that distance is no barrier to dominion or the proposi¬ 
 tion that in "a contest between two parties, of which one possessed 
 an article whilst the other was better able to use it, the rightful prop¬ 
 erty is vested in the latter" (1:90). 
 
 Most important, the game concedes the hegemonic nature of im¬ 
 perial discourse: "It was the understood necessity of the case that 
 I must passively accept my brother's statements so far as regarded 
 their verbal expression." The claims of the discourse cannot be re¬ 
 jected. They can only be deflected "by some distinction or evasion 
 lying within this [verbal] expression, or not blankly contradicting 
 it" (1:90). Fortunately, there is "in almost everybody's words, an un¬ 
 intentional opening left for double interpretations" so that "unde¬ 
 signed equivocation prevails everywhere" (1:77). 
 
 Undesigned equivocation became important in the later stages of 
 the game in India, as the independence movement began to gather 
 strength. In the early nineteenth century, the task was to lay down 
 the game's rules and, even more crucially, its ruling rhetoric. In per¬ 
 forming this task, Mill was a principal agent. 
 
 It has been suggested that people who throw stones usually live 
 in glass houses. Mill is not content with throwing stones. He pro¬ 
 ceeds to lay down a barrage. "Rude," "ignorant," "superstitious," and 
 "credulous" are epithets he uses of Hindu civilization so frequently 
 that it is difficult to find occasions on which they are not employed. 
 In two particularly abusive consecutive sentences, Hindu religion 
 is described as gross, disgusting, incoherent, disordered, capricious, 
 rife with passion, laden with portents and prodigies, violent, and 
 deformed. 48 Sakuntala, which caught the admiration of the West, 
 contains a few beautiful passages of poetry but nothing else "which 
 either accords with the understanding, or can gratify the fancy, of an 
 instructed people." 49 
 
 In the face of this invective, it is difficult to comprehend William 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 93 
 
Thomas's characterization of Mill's work as a philosophical history, 50 
 but if we listen with determination, the sound of thought can be 
 heard behind the thumping. Mill's purpose is to devalue Hindu cul¬ 
 ture beyond the possibility of reinstatement. The number and sever¬ 
 ity of his references to Jones indicate that Jones had become an 
 embarrassment, opening doors that ought to have remained closed 
 by naively suggesting that there might be something to be learned 
 from subject peoples. Mill writes a "philosophical" history in which 
 history is defined so as to rule out this unpleasant possibility. Those 
 who are furthest along civilization's learning curve have already as¬ 
 similated everything that previous locations have to offer. Thus the 
 revisionist proposal can be dismissed, and Hindu civilization can be 
 found inferior at every point to Islamic civilization without the con¬ 
 tinuity proposal being revived. 51 
 
 Mill's devaluation beyond the possibility of reinstatement can be 
 linked to Elizabethan perceptions of Ireland, and indeed, the rheto¬ 
 ric of abuse is strikingly similar in both instances, going beyond the 
 sameness that attaches to all abuse. Romantic perceptions of Ire¬ 
 land were made less harsh by the political marriage accomplished 
 by the Union Act, by the entry of Anglo-Irish writing into the main¬ 
 stream of English letters, and by the sympathy for Ireland voiced 
 by leading romantic writers. Indeed, it can be argued that the two 
 histories of representation—those of Ireland and India—begin to di¬ 
 verge at this point and that Ireland becomes the alternative to India 
 rather than its parallel. Arnold's potentially dialogic view of the re¬ 
 lationship between the Saxon and the Celtic is significantly never 
 applied to India. It is interregnum Ireland that, extracted from its 
 time frame, is brought to bear on the construction of nineteenth- 
 century India. As an offshore bastion of Antichrist inhabited by an 
 obstinate, treacherous, and deceitful people, whose much magnified 
 uprising in 1641 was soon to be uncannily reenacted in the events 
 of 1857, interregnum Ireland had much to offer the scenario now in 
 the making for India. 
 
 One consequence of the scenario can be the demand for a tabula 
 rasa as opposed to a palimpsest—the slate must be wiped clean if 
 what is written on it is not to be nullified by previous writings. The 
 other extreme would be that imperial management should cease 
 endeavoring to reform what is beyond amendment and restrict its 
 intervention to the minimum necessary to prevent an "incorrigible" 
 country from ruining itself. Mill himself may be more inclined to 
 the latter course than the former, but both in Elizabethan Ireland and 
 
 94 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
in nineteenth-century India, British policy shifts considerably be¬ 
 tween the extremes that radical devaluation offers as its boundaries. 
 The immediate historical consequences are, at least conceptually, 
 heavily interventionist and perhaps build ironically on the benefi¬ 
 cent intervention that is taken for granted in the Jones agenda. The 
 direction of intervention (and of beneficence) now changes, moving 
 away from a reinstatement of Hindu culture that is hereafter to be 
 seen as regressively nostalgic and moving toward India's alignment 
 with the march of civilization led by the West. 
 
 The new option is also cost-effective since it does not require the 
 creation of an Orientalist cadre at the top level of management. In¬ 
 stead, the interfacing of the European and the Indian can be accom¬ 
 plished at a lower level by an Anglicized Indian elite whose invest¬ 
 ment in the system will ensure its continuing loyalty. 
 
 A further advantage of Mill's reading of India is that it provides 
 a "philosophical" basis for the distaste for India that is the com¬ 
 mon bond of utilitarians and evangelists. Spears's anthology of Euro¬ 
 pean opinions on India documents this growing distaste by show¬ 
 ing the mixed comments of an earlier period steadily giving way to 
 comments that are almost uniformly adverse. 52 Although Southey 
 writes a preface to The Curse of Kehama dutifully denouncing the 
 monstrosities of Hindu religion, his poem's castigation of that mon¬ 
 strosity is too hesitant for the mounting zeal of his reviewers. When 
 Jones rashly compares Kalidasa to Shakespeare, the retort in Black¬ 
 woods devalues considerably more than Kalidasa: "Neither the hu¬ 
 man mind nor human fife did ever so exist in India, as to create 
 such kind of faculties as those of Shakespeare or to furnish fields for 
 their inspiration." 53 The discovery of the Elephanta caves produced 
 speculations that Egyptians, Greeks, or Jews were responsible for 
 their origin. When J. Goldingham, an astronomer of the East India 
 Company with extensive antiquarian interests, turned to the obvi¬ 
 ous conjecture that the caves might be the work of Indian hands, his 
 article was forwarded with the following comments by his superior, 
 General John Carnac: "The immense excavations cut out of the solid 
 rocks at the Elephanta, and other caves of like nature on the island 
 of Salsette, appear to me the operations of too great labour to have 
 been executed by the hands of so feeble and effeminate a race as the 
 aborigines of India have generally been held to be." 54 
 
 Utilitarians and evangelists both preached conversion of this 
 feeble effeminacy, secular for one school and sacred for the other. 
 Conversion rests on the emphatic perception of unlikeness, and 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 95 
 
propositions such as those of Jones and his colleagues about India's 
 ancient culture, about classical languages that lay in proximity to 
 a unified lost language, and about the common features of the 
 Greek and Hindu pantheons were claims concerning likenesses that 
 needed to be erased. In positing a single learning curve along which 
 all civilizations are obliged to travel, Mill does not wish to suggest 
 that Indian civilization is to be given even the minimal dignity of 
 being viewed as a stage in the attainment of a triumphant European 
 truth by which it can be recuperated rather than dismissed. At the 
 end of a long period of tutelage and "management," otherness can 
 conceivably begin to give way to likeness. India can approach the 
 West along a line of advance that now consigns it to a period more 
 remote than the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, it is the space of differ¬ 
 ence that matters, and Mill's real concern is to enlarge that space by 
 making it historical as well as cultural and psychic. 
 
 We thus arrive at a situation in which likeness can be preached as 
 an objective and otherness recognized as a reality, in which manage¬ 
 ment is based on estrangement, and in which the alienness of India 
 is constructed as everything that the European self has shed and that 
 India must be taught to shed in its turn. A previous generation had 
 mingled with India. Mingling now carries with it the danger of in¬ 
 fection by a previous self, of regression into an unacceptable past. 
 
 Aloofness from India as a sanitary precaution, prudent for the 
 historically advanced, is apparent in Mill's own resolute avoidance 
 of the possibility of experiencing India. He never visited India and 
 made no attempt to interest himself in any of its languages. He 
 merely wrote the book that became a grammar of Indian civiliza¬ 
 tion for officials of the East India Company. In prefacing his history, 
 he invites attention to these potential drawbacks and, in five tautly 
 reasoned but wholly fallacious pages, converts the drawbacks into a 
 major asset: "Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be ex¬ 
 pressed in writing. As soon as everything of importance is expressed 
 in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge 
 of India in one year, in his closet in England, than he could obtain 
 during the course of the longest life by the use of his eyes and ears 
 in India." 55 
 
 Those in the field report; those at the center analyze. This is a 
 commonplace of bureaucratic arrogance, but it goes well with the 
 hauteur of the British administration, with the deepening convic¬ 
 tion of India's intractable otherness (side by side with an official 
 policy of making it more English), and with endeavors such as Philip 
 
 96 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Mason's in The Guardians to give philosophical dignity to the shun¬ 
 ning of social contacts. Mason's book makes considerable claims 
 for Plato's ultimate influence (mediated by the master of Balliol, 
 Benjamin Jowett) on the manner in which British civil servants per¬ 
 ceived their Olympian role in India. Plato, Mason notes, "wished to 
 prevent his guardians from owning land or houses, gold or silver, or 
 mingling with their fellow men." 56 The British followed the more 
 convenient part of this advice. Even this limited adhesion ensured 
 that "the aloofness often charged against the English as a fault, was 
 in fact in the special circumstances of their empire in India, doubly a 
 virtue. It provided not only impartiality but the ability to disengage; 
 the English could complete their job and go home." 57 
 
 Memories of home were reassuringly preserved in the English can¬ 
 tonment, segregated from the town (as it was typically called) and 
 ironically reproducing in its status delineations the caste distinc¬ 
 tions that utilitarians and evangelists denounced. The cantonment is 
 an enclosed garden, an "Eden rais'd in the waste wilderness" [PR 1.7), 
 a fragile enclosure watched over by Providence, against which the 
 chaos of India beats "outrageous as a sea" [PL 7.212). Its reversal and 
 complement is the cage in which the Hottentot Venus was confined, 
 where chaos is contained by the garden of civilization surround¬ 
 ing it, where outside and inside exchange their allotted locations, 
 with hell at the center and the heart of darkness within. Both ar¬ 
 rangements are modelings of the Ptolemaic universe, the first being 
 Milton's immensely influential version. Their common ancestry 
 points to their natural collusiveness, notwithstanding their struc¬ 
 tural inversions of each other. If the first version fits imperial power 
 at its origination, the second fits it at its zenith, when it is able to 
 cage a conquered people, to examine and pronounce on its anatomy 
 (as was literally true of the Hottentot Venus and figuratively true of 
 the survey of India), and to subject it to controlled experiments in 
 government, the consequences of which are inevitably verified by 
 the coerced behavior of the experimental object. The empowerment 
 the figure confers is heady indeed, but its consequence is that what 
 is in the cage remains irretrievably in the hearts of those who cage 
 it. It can and must be contained, but it cannot be exorcised. The cap¬ 
 tor's identity and the lucidity of the captor's self-image depend on 
 its subversive and persistent life. 
 
 Olympian aloofness and the way in which that aloofness sustains 
 constructions by the imperial gaze are matters negotiated with ex¬ 
 traordinary finesse in E. M. Forster's Passage to India. The opening 
 
 fames Mill and the Hottentot Venus 97 
 
pages of the novel almost succeed in making the movement from 
 the cantonment to the town a microenactment of the difficulty and 
 illusions of a passage that Whitman had made into the mind's ulti¬ 
 mate adventure. The two worlds share nothing "except the overarch¬ 
 ing sky." 58 The town is reduced to a pervasive featurelessness by a 
 rhetoric that consistently strips it of any features. There are no steps 
 leading to the riverfront. In fact, there is no riverfront. The streets 
 are mean, and the temples ineffective. The bazaars have no paintings 
 and hardly any carvings. The few fine houses that exist "are hidden 
 away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited 
 guest." The very wood of the carvings that are to be found "seems 
 made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving." The overall impres¬ 
 sion is of abasement and monotony, of "some low but indestructible 
 form of life." 
 
 In these opening pages, India is more backward than Mill ever 
 found it, but Europe, represented by the Civil Station, improves on it 
 only by providing a different and less disturbing lack of distinction. 
 "It charms not, neither does it repel," Forster says, with the affec¬ 
 tation of the phrase advising us that the cultivated nondescriptness 
 of the cantonment may also be an affectation, not a "form of life." 
 The Civil Station is "sensibly planned," and its bungalows "are dis¬ 
 posed along roads that intersect at right angles." Order prevails, but 
 order is throughout only the avoidance of disorder. "It has nothing 
 hideous in it and only the view is beautiful." 
 
 The view is of Chandrapore, which, seen from the Civil Station, 
 "appears to be a totally different place." Distance provides imagina¬ 
 tion with the clues not for one text but for several. "It is a city of 
 gardens. It is no city, but a forest sparsely scattered with huts. It is a 
 tropical pleasance washed by a noble river." In each case, the imagi¬ 
 nation models the exotic so as to amend the tidy and sterile trite¬ 
 ness of the vantage point from which Chandrapore is perceived. The 
 trees play an important part in this modeling, like the trees Emma 
 Roberts saw in 1837 framing and concealing the city of Lucknow. As 
 the river on which Lucknow is situated wound its course through 
 lofty, arched gateways, she saw "a bright confusion of palace and 
 temple shadowed and interspersed with trees of gigantic growth and 
 redundant luxuriance." 59 Forster's trees "screen what passes below," 
 but even when scorched or leafless, "they glorify the city to the En¬ 
 glish people who inhabit the rise." Newcomers "have to be driven 
 down to acquire disillusionment," to see things as the evangelists 
 saw them. 
 
 98 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Forster's paragraphs agitate important questions about the contin¬ 
 gency of constructions, the proper distance, and the appropriate van¬ 
 tage point, but amid all these relativities, one important gathering of 
 perspectives is ignored. Everything is seen from the hill and nothing 
 from Chandrapore. The multiple readings that constitute and under¬ 
 mine the project of a text that might be India are conveyed with 
 extraordinary sensitivity, but the possibilities all fall within the gaze 
 of dominance. 
 
 Ironically, this gaze is held within and given back by the philoso¬ 
 phy of the very culture on which it looks down. Both the imperial 
 perspective and the elemental resonances of the caves at Marabar 
 testify to the unavoidability of a world of representations, represen¬ 
 tations that contain and characterize the effort to know reality and 
 its inextricable entanglement with the passion to command it. The 
 featureless mud of Chandrapore offers itself as clay to the imperial 
 artist. Marabar's deeper denudation tells the creator that he can 
 know only himself, that the match he has lit will show not the un¬ 
 discovered country of reality but only the transient flame of its own 
 life, fancifully latent in the cave's stone. The self-reflexive nature of 
 understanding, its coiling back into its own limitations, may indeed 
 be the substratum of Forster's novel, its hidden connection between 
 the metaphysical and the political. It is also a cornerstone of Indian 
 thought. That the nearest Western equivalent to Maya is not illu¬ 
 sion but representation 60 is a fact that Schopenhauer, among West¬ 
 ern thinkers, was singular in seizing on and in incorporating into 
 a philosophy of his own. Since he wrote, the relativity of construc¬ 
 tions and the impossibility of avoiding them have become standard 
 propositions in our classrooms. The West has indeed gazed on India's 
 caged body. But it is Indian thought that may have successfully phi¬ 
 losophized the caging of the mind that views that body within the 
 gaze it has created and willed. 
 
 James Mill and the Hottentot Venus 99 
 
5 
 
 Hegel's India and the 
 Surprise of Sin 
 sxa 
 
 There is a point in Hegel's Philosophy of History at which the grand 
 march of the idea is suspended. The drumbeat of the argument is 
 no longer heard. The writing takes on a gentler, more reflective ca¬ 
 dence, faintly disturbing because it is so uncharacteristic. We move 
 away from the irresistible progress of the chariot of history's life, 
 driven forward by the totalizing imperative. The trumpets cease to 
 sound as we step like Calidore into the pastoral beguilement. 1 
 
 The moment when Hegel's book forgets itself occurs at the open¬ 
 ing of his chapter on India. "There is," he tells us, "a beauty of 
 a peculiar kind in women, in which the countenance presents a 
 transparency of skin, a light and lovely roseate hue, which is un¬ 
 like the complexion of mere health and vital vigour." 2 He proceeds 
 to three feminine mirrorings of this "almost unearthly beauty," a 
 beauty "breathed, as it were, by the soul within." It is "perceived 
 in women in those days which immediately succeed childbirth." 
 It is also seen in them during that "magical somnambulic sleep 
 which connects them to a superterrestrial world." Finally, the artist 
 Schoreel has "given this tone to the dying Mary, whose spirit is al¬ 
 ready rising to the regions of the blessed, but once more, as it were, 
 lights up her dying countenance for a farewell kiss." Such a beauty, 
 Hegel announces beckoningly, is found "in its loveliest form in the 
 Indian world." 
 
 At this point, the nightingale's singing grows fainter, the loveli¬ 
 ness that distracted us is exposed, and the bell summons us back 
 to the stern reality of self-making. Destiny calls on us to seize the 
 era. It is trivial to seize the moment, even when the moment seems 
 in and out of time. The beauty by which we have been beguiled is 
 now described as "a beauty of enervation in which all that is rough, 
 rigid, and contradictory is dissolved." We might think it desirable to 
 
rid ourselves of roughness and rigidity, but "enervation" reminds us 
 to be vigilant and an earlier phrase has already characterized India's 
 unearthly beauty as "soft, yielding and relaxed." History is written 
 by men, and the wrong gender must be kept in the margin, its allure¬ 
 ments held in check. The charm of the "Flower-life," which India 
 typifies, may be "rich in imagination and genius," but dreams have 
 no place in the world. For a philosopher of mind such as Hegel, they 
 have no place even in the mind's world, and the poem he had all 
 but written must be defaced: "Should we look at it more closely, and 
 examine it in the light of Human Dignity and Freedom—the more 
 attractive the first sight of it had been, so much the more unworthy 
 shall we ultimately find it in every respect." 
 
 We are surprised by sin here, and Hegel's use of this tactic is at 
 least comparable in effectiveness to anything Stanley Fish found in 
 Milton. 3 Milton uses the tactic with sufficient persistence to jus¬ 
 tify its treatment as a method. With Hegel, on the other hand, this 
 may be the only occasion on which the book forgets its duty. It is 
 not accidental and it may be crucially important that India is the 
 place of this forgetfulness. Bengal's notoriously enervating climate 
 had softened and relaxed the minds of too many scholars, and Hegel 
 is enacting the Orientalist infatuation with India so that it can be 
 both mirrored and dismissed. 4 His text, in its cumulative yielding 
 to the momentum of that enactment, seems to lay bare the unsus¬ 
 pected strength of his vestigial sympathies, but it is also rebuking a 
 specific and influential readership that has yet to free itself from a 
 digression dangerous to the true tasks of history. 
 
 The site that is India in Hegel's ultimate geography has been vis¬ 
 ited many times by the Western mind. It is the land of the lotus- 
 eaters, Dido's Carthage, Cleopatra's Egypt, and Spenser's Bower of 
 Bliss, 5 with its reminder that Asia is part of the spelling of inconti¬ 
 nence. When Nirad Chaudhari entitles one of his books on India The 
 Continent of Circe , 6 he is drawing on a tradition of imperialist deni¬ 
 gration that, one hopes, is temporarily absent from his mind. Hegel 
 forgets his book in writing of India because India is another tradi¬ 
 tional name for forgetfulness. It is the place where the will to move 
 on is challenged because moving on is irrelevant to the dream state. 
 This dream state, moreover, is not simply a pastoral hibernation. In 
 its progress from absolute East to absolute West, history has passed 
 through it and willed itself out of its snare. It remains vulnerable to 
 its residual blandishments. 
 
 To leave intact a text that acknowledges more than it should is a 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin ioi 
 
claim to honesty and a title to anger. Hegel's anger with India runs 
 strong and deep. China, which is at the same stage or prior to India 
 in the East-West movement of the sun of consciousness (p. 103), is 
 spared this vituperation, but China is not the site of the sudden un¬ 
 veiling of the self's need in the other that demands retaliation as 
 the price of its exposure. Only Africa is treated more abusively than 
 India, and that may be because by 1820 Africa was the only conti¬ 
 nent still available to the newly arrived imperialist. Philosophically, 
 Hegel sees Africa as ineligible to enter history, as the site of a con¬ 
 sciousness that is totally unreflective, anterior to any organization 
 of itself (pp. 93-99). Like other Hegelian characterizations, this is 
 a construction made to fit the Procrustean bed of his system, but 
 even within these distortions, the statement that one must abandon 
 all normal criteria of humanity in seeking to understand Africans 
 cannot be considered less than appalling. 7 Equally reprehensible are 
 Hegel's comments on the gentle Taino people who greeted Colum¬ 
 bus with innocent hospitality: 
 
 A mild and passionless disposition, want of spirit, and a 
 crouching submissiveness towards a Creole, and still more 
 towards a European, are the chief characteristics of the na¬ 
 tive Americans. . . . The inferiority of these individuals in 
 all respects, even in regard to size, is very manifest. . . . The 
 weakness of the American physique was a chief reason for 
 bringing the negroes to America, to employ their labor in 
 the work that had to be done in the New World, (pp. 81-82) 
 
 Hegel does not add that the slave trade became necessary because 
 of the decimation of Native Americans in an act of depopulation for 
 which it is difficult to find a parallel. 8 In the face of these comments, 
 some effort is required to remember that the dialectical progress of 
 the idea is from freedom for one (China, India), through freedom 
 for some (Greece, Rome), to freedom for all (Germany). "All," more¬ 
 over, is specifically not restricted to those whom history has chosen 
 as its vehicle. "We know that all men absolutely (man as man ) are 
 free" (p. 19; Hegel's italics; see also p. 104). Unfortunately, the consis¬ 
 tent actuality of Hegel's rhetoric (as distinct from the not infrequent 
 nobility of his thought) makes his commitment to the human com¬ 
 munity run a poor second to his racism. 9 
 
 Racism is not inherent in The Philosophy of History. The idea, 
 in its Olympian loftiness, ought to be color-blind in the choice of 
 its agents. In the climate of the day, this impartiality may not be 
 
 102 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
possible, but it can scarcely be said that the tree of Hegel's thought 
 bends reluctantly to the imperial wind: "It is the condition of the 
 inferior, the animal and spiritual inferior making itself more visible 
 which is the objective superiority of the white skin colour." 10 When 
 we move to a higher plane, "it is in the Caucasian race that spirit 
 first reaches absolute unity with itself. It is here that it first enters 
 into complete opposition to naturality, apprehends itself in its abso¬ 
 lute independence, disengages from the dispersive vacillation be¬ 
 tween one extreme and the other, achieves self-determination, self¬ 
 development, and so brings forth world history." 11 
 
 Lesser people may seek to emulate the Caucasian example, but 
 Macaulay's brown Englishman will have England in his behavior, 
 not in his blood. The "declining nation has lost the interest of the 
 absolute,- it may indeed absorb the higher principle and begin build¬ 
 ing its life on it, but the principle is only like an adopted child, not 
 like a relative to whom its ties are immanently vital and vigorous." 12 
 The black condition ranks still lower, being "capable of no develop¬ 
 ment or culture" [Philosophy of History, p. 98). 
 
 As we might expect from these declarations, Hegel's remarks on 
 India are appropriately rough and rigid, showing scant respect for 
 the "charm rich in imagination and genius . . . permeated by the 
 rose-breath of the Soul" that his text subversively courted for twenty 
 lines. Such a slippage must never again occur, and Hegel is only 
 superficially contradictory in his eagerness to take back whatever 
 has been conceded. The imagination that once populated a "garden 
 of love" becomes Bacon's imagination, joining what nature has sev¬ 
 ered, severing what nature has joined, and making unlawful matches 
 and divorces of things. India is the home of mixed genres, hybrid¬ 
 ization, and, of course, monstrosity. It is a "wild tumult of excess" 
 (p. 157), a "wild extravagance of fancy" (p. 155), the world of a "mon¬ 
 strous, irrational imagination" (p. 166), a dream state "revelling in 
 the most extravagant maze, through all natural and spiritual forms" 
 (p. 167). 13 Unable to integrate the material with the spiritual, India 
 vacillates between flagellant asceticism and "a voluptuous intoxica¬ 
 tion in the merely natural" (p. 167). 14 As for the wisdom of India, 
 its "widely bruited fame" has been greatly diminished by "a more 
 accurate acquaintance with its real value" (p. 159). 15 If Hindu cul¬ 
 ture was once highly rated, it was in "the enthusiasm of discovery" 
 (p. 159). The extensive diffusion of Indian culture is no more than 
 a "dumb, deedless expansion" |p. 142). "The people of India have 
 achieved no foreign conquests," Hegel adds, making clear how ex- 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 103 
 
pansion should proceed if it is to be considered articulate. On the 
 contrary, the Indian people "have been on every occasion vanquished 
 themselves." 16 Hegel's thinking is proceeding through that much- 
 used gateway opened by The Lusiads. India, he continues, has an 
 essential place in "General History" but only as a "Land of Desire" 
 (p. 142; Hegel's italics). This is not the desire of the self seeking its 
 margin and speaking from the margin in the name of all it has ex¬ 
 cluded. It is not the mind's enlargement of its ancestral boundaries, 
 its overflowing of those defensive constraints within which it may 
 have lived in order to know itself. Hegel does indeed mention India's 
 "treasures of wisdom" but only after he has given priority to "pearls, 
 diamonds, perfumes, rose-essences, elephants, lions, etc." The "etc." 
 devalues what follows in relation to an inventory that has trivial¬ 
 ized itself. Hegel can now tell us momentously and mockingly that 
 "the way by which these treasures have passed to the West, has at 
 all times been a matter of World-historical importance, bound up 
 with the fate of nations" (p. 142). Commodifying feminine India's re¬ 
 lationship to the West and waving aside its possible contribution to 
 world wisdom come together at this point in a derisive climax. No 
 more need be said regarding the romantic delusion that saw India as 
 a primary site of the mind. 
 
 Hegel, in writing of the Indian people, does not find the individual 
 nobler than the institution, as Southey finds himself doing in The 
 Curse of Kehama: "Deceit and cunning are the fundamental charac¬ 
 teristics of the Hindoo. Cheating, stealing, robbing, murdering are 
 with him habitual. Humbly crouching before a victor and lord, he is 
 recklessly barbarous to the vanquished and subject" (p. 158). 
 
 In his 1883 lectures delivered at Cambridge, Max Muller found it 
 necessary to devote an entire class to the honesty of Hindus and 
 their abhorrence of deceit. 17 Some of the sources he quotes were 
 available to Hegel and are indeed used in The Philosophy of Religion. 
 They count for nothing in this tirade. "The Brahmins," Hegel goes 
 on remorselessly, "are especially immoral. According to English re¬ 
 ports they do nothing but eat and sleep. . . . When they take any 
 part in public life they show themselves avaricious, deceitful, volup¬ 
 tuous." He continues to rely on the English (some of whom thought 
 differently) as uniquely qualified to report on a strange phenome¬ 
 non inaccessible to the rest of the civilized world: "'I do not know 
 an honest man among them' says an English authority." Little can 
 be expected of the younger generation with such models of behavior 
 before them: "Children have no respect for their parents: sons mal¬ 
 treat their mothers" (pp. 158-59). 18 
 
 104 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Hegel finds nothing in India that has not been found by Mill and 
 the missionaries, but he would be less important if he were more 
 original. He dignifies existing stereotypes by blessing them with 
 a philosophical ennoblement. Mill initiates that ennoblement by 
 placing the stereotypes within a view of history. Hegel carries the 
 process further by placing history, in turn, within a completely in¬ 
 clusive frame of understanding. 19 It becomes a province of the mind 
 supported by the same underlying principles that regulate all of the 
 mind's other provinces. The nature of those principles and of the 
 deeply embedded empowerments that world history obtains from 
 them are tersely presented in Hegel's introduction to his lectures: 
 
 Universal history—as already demonstrated—shows the de¬ 
 velopment of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of 
 the Spirit, and of the consequent realization of that Free¬ 
 dom. This development implies a gradation—a series of in¬ 
 creasingly adequate expressions or manifestations of Free¬ 
 dom, which result from its Idea. The logical, and—as still 
 more prominent—the dialectical nature of the Idea in gen¬ 
 eral, viz that it is self-determined—that it assumes succes¬ 
 sive forms which it successively transcends; and by this 
 very process of transcending its earlier stages, gains an af¬ 
 firmative, and, in fact, a richer and more concrete shape,-— 
 this necessity of its nature, and the necessary series of pure 
 abstract forms which the Idea successively assumes—is ex¬ 
 hibited in the department of Logic. Here we need adopt 
 only one of its results, viz. that every step in the process, as 
 differing from any other, has its determinate peculiar prin¬ 
 ciple. 20 |p. 63, Hegel's italics) 
 
 Milton talks of the contracted palm of logic opening into an ornate 
 and graceful rhetoric. 21 The figure is conventional among classical 
 rhetoricians. With Hegel, the hand is not designed to be graceful. It 
 is designed to encompass the world, to grasp it firmly in the text 
 of the hand. Logic is not a mere "department" but the directing 
 force at the center of an empire. Robert Young is right in describing 
 Hegel's philosophical system as "a form of knowledge which un¬ 
 cannily simulates the project of nineteenth-century imperialism." 22 
 But it is also menacingly more than that. Mill can be called an im¬ 
 perialist thinker. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel appears as the 
 proponent of an imperialism of thought who invites us to consider 
 whether thought, as we have come to know it, is worth pursuing on 
 any other basis. 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 105 
 
Despite its resolute and characteristic self-confidence, the para¬ 
 graph we are examining wavers between an evolutionary view of 
 history expressed in the term "gradation" and a transformational 
 view expressed in the reference to "successive forms" that the idea 
 "successively transcends." The major metaphor Hegel employs is 
 consistent with "gradation." The sun of consciousness rises in the 
 Orient and waxes until it achieves its Germanic apogee (at which 
 point Hegel felicitously drops the metaphor). Similarly, a world his¬ 
 tory that proceeds from infancy to maturity passes through a series 
 of gradations, and old age can even be regarded as a sign of the West's 
 wisdom rather than its decline. Hegel merges both metaphors in his 
 characterization of Africa, along with a judicious injection of the 
 primeval: "It is the Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of 
 childhood which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is 
 enveloped in the dark mantle of Night" (p. 91). 
 
 Dialectical progress is presented as self-diagnostic. Civilization 
 moves forward by educating itself, by identifying its distinctive limi¬ 
 tations, and by finding a way to overcome those limitations within 
 a larger inclusiveness that enriches rather than imperils its identity. 
 This is the path of gradation. To replace it by the forward leap of tran¬ 
 scendence, we have to postulate civilizations that, without outside 
 assistance, cannot proceed further along the learning curve of world 
 history. This is the imperialist postulate, and Hegel is powerfully at¬ 
 tracted to it because of his commitment to the principle of a chosen 
 people, singularly fitted to the advance of the idea at each specific 
 stage of its realization and therefore taken up and empowered by the 
 idea in the course of its irresistible drive to self-fulfillment. 
 
 To make transcendence not only possible but also essential, Hegel 
 treats world history in its passage through the Orient not as a series 
 of gradations but as a sequence of blind alleys, impasses from which 
 there can be no deliverance because the structure of the problem has 
 been articulated so as to make deliverance impossible. Thus India is 
 described as a people without a state, and China as a state without a 
 people (p. 161). These characterizations have little to do with either 
 India or China, but if we look at them diagrammatically and not on 
 the basis of their factual justice, it is obvious that with exclusions so 
 fundamental, neither civilization can find or even invent the other. 
 If we pass to the relationship between existence and transcendence 
 that is the propelling force behind Hegel's view of history, neither 
 India, China, nor Islam can make any progress in inscribing this re¬ 
 lationship because none of these civilizations is capable of inventing 
 immanence. 
 
 106 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Inventing immanence is a privilege of the West, possible only 
 when there is audacity enough to secularize the sacred and when the 
 subtle knot of the human and the divine still stands at the center of 
 the Western view of history. China, India, and Islam have between 
 them the pen, the ink, and the paper. The presuppositions exist for a 
 crucial movement forward (p. 116), but without a transcendental dis¬ 
 closure, these presuppositions remain only fragments shored against 
 the half knowledge of successive civilizations. 
 
 Appropriations of Christianity form a considerable presence in 
 Hegel's thinking about history. That presence becomes stronger 
 when we realize that it is in the nature of a type to be incapable 
 of arriving at the truth. Typology inscribes a decisive difference be¬ 
 tween world history as it passes through the Orient and world his¬ 
 tory under an illuminating dispensation that rescues it from the im¬ 
 passes to which it has hitherto been subject. To the imperialist mind, 
 typology also makes available the deep distinctions it embeds in his¬ 
 torical time for translation into geopolitical space. In addition, the 
 concept of the elect nation, so potent in Reformation thought, can 
 be transposed into the concept of a people chosen by history whose 
 right to make the future in the image of the idea can be militantly 
 safeguarded against any dissenting will. The strength of the Hegelian 
 ideology is not the strength of argument alone. There are powerful 
 convergences in the history of thought and in the accumulation of 
 the rhetoric of empire by which Hegel's argument is profoundly sus¬ 
 tained. 
 
 Correcting Hegel's misrepresentations of India would involve us 
 in many pages of pained and pointless protest. It is more important 
 to identify and trace the forces that control the misrepresentations. 
 Only an extraordinary dedication to the imperialist agenda could en¬ 
 able Hegel to write as he does of India with the "that art thou" of 
 Hindu philosophy staring him in the face. 
 
 "That art thou" is a recognition of deliverance from individual 
 limitations not into unity but into identity with the ultimate. It is 
 not normally translated into a social text, but if we consent to the 
 move, "that" can reasonably be read as the telos that the collective 
 self seeks and "thou" as representing the growing immediacy and 
 comprehensiveness with which the telos is inscribed and discov¬ 
 ered in social performance. We are not far from Hegel at this point, 
 but Hegel cannot afford to treat Hindu understanding as a state on 
 which future understandings can be built. Repudiation and not recu¬ 
 peration is the demand of the imperial agenda and of the dismissive 
 force generated by self-and-other relationships. Hindu understand- 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 107 
 
ing must therefore be constructed as a state of incarceration from 
 which no forward movement is possible. 
 
 Deliverance from the prison house is comprehensively frustrated 
 because of that dispersive vacillation from which only Caucasian 
 thought is free. The vacillation fragments any potential relationship 
 between the extremes that thought inhabits and between which the 
 dialectic flows. Hindu thought is particularly given to this dispersive 
 vacillation and uniquely unable to break away from its disintegrat¬ 
 ing force because its extremes have been constructed as mind and 
 antimind and not as two positions that consciousness can occupy 
 without ceasing to be consciousness. 
 
 Sublation can take place between a proposition and its negation, 
 but it obviously cannot take place between a proposition and its 
 erasure. If the Hindu ultimate is constructed as the erasure of all 
 propositions, then one can only recoil from it into a delirium of pos¬ 
 sibilities deprived of any anchor in significance. There is no point in 
 insisting that the world is the text of the idea if every conceivable 
 text is aimless doodling. 
 
 Hegel's insistence on the "stupefaction" of the Hindu union with 
 the ultimate is thus a misrepresentation that he had to invent. It 
 gave him a metaphysics dedicated to severance rather than imma¬ 
 nence and a textuality so prolix that it was incapable of writing the 
 world. It offered to the European gaze the sterile yet edifying spec¬ 
 tacle of a civilization profoundly unable to analyze itself. All that 
 the West could learn from such a civilization was the necessity of 
 utterly disowning it. 
 
 A further consequence of the ultimate distancing between stupe¬ 
 faction and the wild whirl of possibilities is that the ethical vacuum 
 between them can be filled by power according to its caprices. Mar¬ 
 lowe's Tamburlaine anticipates Hegel in his pursuit of freedom for 
 one, of unlimited power as the basis of unfettered self-expression. 
 Tyranny must be, although, as Panikkar notes, India was the site of 
 the longest-lived republic in world history. 23 
 
 A corrective essay should be written, but this chapter restricts 
 itself to offering a postscript. In his preface to The Principal JJpani- 
 sads, Radhakrishnan reminds us that "Brahman" "is derived from 
 the root brh 'to grow, to burst forth.' The derivation suggests gush¬ 
 ing forth, bubbling over, ceaseless growth." The real, Radhakrishnan 
 adds, "is not a pale abstraction but is quickeningly alive." Since "At¬ 
 man" is derived from "an," "to breathe," the Atman-Brahman iden¬ 
 tity is doubly directed to the plenitude of life rather than to the 
 emptiness of the void. 24 
 
 108 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
We could conclude that Hegel's disinterment of stupefaction at the 
 core of Hindu thought (being buried alive is used by him as an im¬ 
 plicit metaphor) is metaphysically uncalled for and etymologically 
 outrageous. It is more important to recognize that "the whole is the 
 true" is a proposition native to Upanishadic as well as to Hegelian 
 thought. It is on this basis that Sri Aurobindo, the foremost of India's 
 modern philosophers, sees human consciousness evolving out of its 
 limitations into progressively higher and more inclusive states. The 
 aim is world enlightenment and not the providentially encouraged 
 march of the Western will. 25 
 
 Immanence can have more than one meaning, even within Hegel's 
 parameters, but not when the text it inscribes is filled with con¬ 
 tempt for those who do not win battles and when the contribution 
 of the Orient to the substance and spirit of world history is reduced 
 to variations on the theme of failure. That India should be devalued 
 by taking a central principle of Indian religious philosophy and in¬ 
 stalling it as the uniquely Western foundation of an understanding 
 from which India is thereupon excluded is an injustice notable for 
 more than its astonishing magnitude. India, according to the West, 
 conspicuously lacks a view of history that can make history itself a 
 vehicle of human significance. Its failure to keep accurate chrono¬ 
 logical records is only a symptom of a much deeper malaise. This is 
 Mill's finding (History of British India, p. 329) and Hegel's (pp. 161- 
 62) and is echoed thereafter by innumerable voices. It is poetic jus¬ 
 tice that a crucial principle of Indian thought should be installed as 
 the basis of an understanding India is now said to lack. It is also ap¬ 
 propriate that those designated as indifferent to history should have 
 pride of place among history's recurring victims. 
 
 Hegel's setting apart of a West capable of progress by gradation 
 and an Orient for which transcendence is necessary but impossible 
 entrenches Western superiority in a manner difficult to overturn. 
 It might be argued that once the way forward has been shown, the 
 East can emulate the West within its own distinctiveness. But the 
 West progresses by debate within itself, by identifying and work¬ 
 ing through its exclusions, and these are characteristics that Eastern 
 absolutism lacks. Civilizations come to a standstill because they are 
 imprisoned in their own mystiques. This is true of the West too, but 
 Hegel was not considering the problems of a world that stands on 
 the threshold of the twenty-first century. For his time, the wean¬ 
 ing of the East from its distinctiveness, its exposure to the gaze of 
 rational understanding, called for tutelage, guardianship, wardship, 
 trusteeship, paternal care, and related recuperations in imperialism's 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 109 
 
moral armory. These benevolent metaphors do not appear in Hegel, 
 who may be more prepared than others to insist that the inevitable 
 must also be the morally just. They do appear with the numbing mo¬ 
 notony of an unscrutinized consensus in the self-justifying fictions 
 of British rule in India. 
 
 The feminization of the Orient is as ancient as Western percep¬ 
 tions of the Orient, but Hegel bestows a new dimension on the de¬ 
 valuation of the feminine by making it not only inferior but also 
 obsolete. Rough and rigid honesty, for all its awkwardness, takes 
 precedence over the highly wrought culture of Oriental societies as 
 substance takes precedence over etiquette. If "the Character of Spirit 
 in a state of Dream" is "the generic principle of the Hindoo nature" 
 (p. 140), the dream world can be a garden of love, but it can also be 
 a place of wild extravagance and tumultuous excess, with the out¬ 
 come indeterminate as long as the dream is its own arbiter. If femi¬ 
 nine fancy is not checked by masculine judgment, it will produce 
 results consistent only in their capriciousness. Some of the results 
 may be charming and a few may yield moments of unearthly beauty, 
 but history has to be philosophized as a grammar of change and can¬ 
 not be written as an anthology of accidents. India is the world of the 
 feminine, "the region of phantasy and sensibility" (p. 139). Jones had 
 imprudently pointed to India as the site of poetry, but there is a time 
 as well as a place for literature, and that time comes to an end when 
 the sun of reason rises, bringing to a close the extravagance of the 
 age of fancy. 26 
 
 The aggressive linear movement from East to West, from feminine 
 to masculine, and from irresponsible fancy to answerable reason can 
 be contested by the spiral, a form of thought often associated with 
 the Hegelian dialectic. The spiral is notable for its recuperation of 
 itself, its extraordinary openness to its history. Every point on it is 
 a point of both arrival and departure. The form unites gradation and 
 transcendence but only if it circles back on its past, lifting it into a 
 different discourse so that the constituents of its life are renewed in 
 another pattern. In Eliot's Four Quartets, the most sustained enact¬ 
 ment of the spiral form in literature, the point of the poem and the 
 purpose of thought is to persistently unsettle and revalidate itself. 
 
 Herbert Marcuse is prominent among those philosophers who ar¬ 
 gue for the dialectic's openness, who find it proceeding by unsettling 
 and revalidation rather than by progressive consolidation, the cumu¬ 
 lative assimilating of the world to the idea. "Dialectical logic," Mar¬ 
 cuse tells us, "reveals modes and contents of thought which tran- 
 
 IIO UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
scend the codified pattern of use and validation." It "recovers tabooed 
 meanings," he continues strikingly, "and thus appears almost as a 
 return or rather a conscious liberation of the repressed." 27 In a simi¬ 
 lar vein, Hans-Georg Gadamer stresses the self-undermining nature 
 of the master-slave relationship. The dominant term is defined not 
 by an imperious act of exclusion but by its eventual dependence on 
 the forces it has marginalized: "The truth of self-consciousness will 
 have to be sought not in the consciousness of the master but in the 
 servile consciousness." 28 
 
 As these remarks make evident, there can be more than one way 
 of writing Hegel. Theodor Adorno adds significantly to these ways by 
 offering us a negative dialectic conducted from the site of the other 
 not as an overthrowing but as an extension of Hegelian thought. 29 
 
 In opening up the Hegelian dialectic, Marcuse, Gadamer, and 
 Adorno point to potentialities that Hegel has both offered and sup¬ 
 pressed. Dialectical thought, when it is not imperially directed, is 
 unsettled by the exclusions that define it, and it can be argued that 
 this self-disturbance must eventually leak back, even into imperi¬ 
 alism's certainties. "Every one is also the other of another," Hegel 
 says, probing a segregation that forms the axis of postcolonial theory. 
 "If this mutual alienation is comprehended," he continues, "being 
 negates its negation and thereby affirms itself as the one in the 
 other" (italics added). 30 More sinuously, Hegel argues that negation 
 "posits what it excludes" and that the "Absolute differentiates itself 
 and mediates itself to itself through its own negativity" (Hegel's ital¬ 
 ics). 31 The status of the other in these mediations and discoveries is 
 far from conforming to an imperialist model. 
 
 Hegel can even substantiate uncannily Gadamer's reading of the 
 master-slave relationship: "The independent master becomes depen¬ 
 dent on the skills and virtues of the servant. . . . The servant now 
 ranks higher in value than the master who merely beholds the shal¬ 
 low sign of his freedom in the servant." 32 
 
 Hegel's rhetoric, like his thought, can display another side when 
 the text is less engaged with events than The Philosophy of His¬ 
 tory. The Phenomenology of Spirit has more than one passage that 
 indicates the mind's unhappiness with the boundaries which have 
 formed its present but which in doing so, have inhibited its future. 
 The act of exclusion that constitutes thought generates a desire to 
 overcome the exclusion, to take into thought whatever thought has 
 made marginal. The following is perhaps the most eloquent expres¬ 
 sion of the discontent with itself which can be for Hegel almost 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin in 
 
a condition of consciousness: "Lacking strength, Beauty hates the 
 understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of 
 spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself un¬ 
 touched by devastation, but rather the life that endures and main¬ 
 tains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismember¬ 
 ment, it finds itself." 33 
 
 Self-discovery in "utter dismemberment" is scarcely an imperialist 
 recommendation. In this statement, Hegel approaches a condition of 
 humility before otherness. The beyond must not merely be recog¬ 
 nized. It must also be sacrificially entered, as the crisis zone for the 
 unavoidable life-in-death of consciousness. For the imperial mind, 
 the beyond is beyond the pale. The mind constitutes itself and main¬ 
 tains itself by refusing to recognize what lies outside its just limits. 
 
 There is indeed another side to Hegel. The somber instructiveness 
 of The Philosophy of History lies in watching him proceed against 
 the best part of himself. Imperialism's constricting strength be¬ 
 comes apparent when a thinker of his stature resolutely shuts down 
 the potential openness of the modus operandi of his own thought. 
 In mapping his system onto history, he finds himself obliged to con¬ 
 centrate compulsively not on the spiral's capacity to recuperate its 
 past but on the forward and eradicating thrust of the line running 
 through the spiral's center. If the present is to be adequately privi¬ 
 leged, the past must be relentlessly devalued. 
 
 We "leave" Africa, "not to mention it again" (p. 99). We "quit" the 
 "Dream-State characterizing the Hindoo Spirit" (p. 167). The present 
 is implacably Eurocentric. The "magnificent territory on which Car¬ 
 thage once lay . . . must be attached to Europe." The French, Hegel 
 adds encouragingly, "have lately made a successful effort in this 
 direction" (p. 93). The possibilities of attachment do not end with 
 Mediterranean Africa. Alexander "opened the Oriental world to the 
 Europeans," bequeathing to the world "one of the noblest and most 
 brilliant of visions which our poor reflections serve only to ob¬ 
 scure." The quality of those reflections can be improved by following 
 more diligently the trail blazed by this "great World-Historical form" 
 (P- 2 - 73 )- 
 
 With Africa kept off the premises, the Orient brought in only to set 
 the stage, and the Slavs allowed on the stage as a respectable civiliza¬ 
 tion but not the voice that the time needs (p. 350), the curtain can lift 
 on Western Europe's assumption of its destiny. The chosen people 
 have been chosen by the disqualification of all other candidates, as 
 well as by their distinctive relationship to the idea, their unique 
 
 112 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ability to articulate it as history. In fact, the chosen people have accu¬ 
 mulated overwhelming privileges that override any protest others 
 may wish to make about their concept and execution of the world 
 will. God does not merely speak first to the English, as Milton sug¬ 
 gests in Areopagitica . 34 God sees no point in speaking to anyone else. 
 
 That the idea should be carried forward by a succession of peoples 
 whom it has anointed is not a necessary consequence of Hegel's 
 thought. We could argue at least as plausibly that world history 
 should be given its shape by all the world's peoples. Indeed, it is diffi¬ 
 cult to see how "freedom for all" can be established when the greater 
 part of that "all" is permitted no voice in defining the institutions 
 that might secure that freedom. Much must turn on the definition 
 of freedom. The Philosophy of History conspicuously refuses to min¬ 
 ister to this need for definition, treating freedom throughout as if its 
 nature were self-evident. Implicitly, it can be said to argue that the 
 real extent of freedom is in proportion to the accuracy of society's 
 alignment with the idea. Popular opinion and a fortiori world opin¬ 
 ion can be judged as irrelevant to this geometry. The argument can 
 then call for a leadership fully responsive to the current status of 
 the idea in history and for social engineering as a monopoly of that 
 leadership. Against the elect of the idea, the rights of all others 
 are decisively extinguished. The following passage is quoted in Wal¬ 
 ter Kaufmann's translation since Kaufmann has rightly objected to 
 those who mistranslate Hegel and then use the mistranslation to sus¬ 
 tain an interpretation that would not otherwise stand. It is among 
 the most brutal statements made by Hegel: 
 
 This people is the dominant one in world history for this 
 epoch—and it can be epoch making in this sense only once. 
 Against this absolute right which it has to be the embodi¬ 
 ment of the current stage of development of the world spirit, 
 the spirits of the other people have no rights, and they, even 
 as they whose epoch has passed, do not any longer count in 
 world history. 35 
 
 Kaufmann's specific objection is to Karl Popper, whose critique of 
 Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies is not an exercise in 
 moderation. Yet much that Popper says is justified by this single 
 paragraph, in which the arrogance of election attains dimensions 
 that can only be described as overbearing. 
 
 In characterizing the thinking in Hegel's statement as "ruthless 
 imperialistic nationalism" and as "a new event in the history of 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 113 
 
political thought, an event pregnant with far-reaching and fearful 
 consequences," Ernst Cassirer is representative in his distress. He 
 seeks to mitigate the adverse impact of this passage by arguing that 
 the idea "develops itself in three moments"—namely, "Art, Religion 
 and Philosophy"—that these moments constitute "ends in them¬ 
 selves that have to be respected and furthered," and that Hegel did 
 not argue for the subjection of these realms to the overriding au¬ 
 thority of the state. 36 
 
 These autonomies may hold within a given civilization that has 
 appointed itself as the standard-bearer of the spirit, but it does not 
 follow that outdated civilizations contain cultural possibilities that 
 need to be "respected and furthered." Civilized nations, Hegel says 
 bluntly, are justified "in regarding and treating as barbarians those 
 who lag behind them in institutions which are the essential mo¬ 
 ments of the state." This relegation to barbarian status is not simply 
 a cultural demotion: "The civilized nation is conscious that the 
 rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy 
 as only a formality" (Philosophy of Right, p. 219). 37 
 
 We can sense insecurity behind this imperial arrogance. The "abso¬ 
 lute right" of the chosen people is militantly claimed not simply be¬ 
 cause of their uniqueness but because of the necessary transience of 
 that uniqueness. The title to dominance will pass to others, and those 
 empowered to sweep aside all dissent today will become part of the 
 silences of tomorrow. One must seize the moment with energy, even 
 ferocity. The page must be written decisively before the page turns, 
 relegating its omniscient narrators to the ranks of those whose epoch 
 has passed and who "do not any longer count in world history." 
 
 The overwhelming privileges of the elect make it important that 
 they should be convincingly identified, but Hegel has nothing to say 
 on a matter that should be bristlingly problematic. We can specu¬ 
 late that the chosen announce themselves by being uniquely fitted 
 to the next stage in the realization of the idea, but this authentica¬ 
 tion is less than overwhelming when it is the chosen who decide the 
 nature of the next stage. Yet it is hard to see how the situation could 
 be otherwise. In the absence of a democratic forum to recognize and 
 sustain the dictatorship of the chosen (a paradox that history has 
 occasionally entertained), military dominance becomes not merely 
 the most reliable but, for practical purposes, the only sign of elec¬ 
 tion. The respect for military dominance and the contempt for those 
 unable to exercise it that Hegel displays throughout The Philosophy 
 of History become understandable in this light but are not for that 
 reason less disturbing. 
 
 114 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
As the sealed train of the idea's journey leaves the country of the 
 chosen in search of its future, we are tempted to ask what its desti¬ 
 nation might be. Hegel warns us that predicting what is to come is 
 not the proper business of the historian. Nevertheless, he provides 
 us with a fascinating conjecture: 
 
 America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the 
 ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History 
 shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and 
 South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are 
 weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. Napo¬ 
 leon is reported to have said: "Cette vieille Europe m’en- 
 nuie." It is for America to abandon the ground on which 
 hitherto the History of the World has developed itself, (pp. 
 86-87) 
 
 Abandoning the ground suggests that the New World can give us 
 an altogether new text, but the reference to Napoleon puts us on 
 notice that it may not be wholly a territory of the mind that Hegel 
 seeks. A further set of reflections on America as the land of the 
 future develops the unsettling implications of the remarks in The 
 Philosophy of History. It is quoted prudently in Kaufmann's transla¬ 
 tion: 
 
 Suppose that, after having considered the greater epics of 
 the past [The Iliad, El Cid, and Tasso's, Ariosto's, and 
 Camoes's poems] which describe the triumph of the Occi¬ 
 dent over the Orient, of European measure, of individual 
 beauty, and of self-critical reason over Asiatic splendour . . . 
 one now wished to think of great epics which might be writ¬ 
 ten in the future: they would only have to represent the vic¬ 
 tory of the living rationality which may develop in America, 
 over the incarceration into an infinitely progressing mea¬ 
 suring and particularizing. For in Europe every people is 
 now limited by another and may not on its part begin a war 
 against another European people. If one now wants to go 
 beyond Europe it can only be to America. 38 
 
 There is much to note in this paragraph. First we have the propo¬ 
 sition that the "greater epics of the past" are greater because they 
 describe the triumph of the Occident over the Orient. Paradise Lost 
 is significantly not mentioned, even though Hegel elsewhere con¬ 
 trasts the pursuit of empires on which the sun never sets with a 
 simple German monk (Luther) seeking the new world within (pp. 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 115 
 
414-15)- The superiority of the Occident over the Orient is implicitly 
 drawn as the triumph of measure over excess, of individual beauty 
 over proliferation, and, explicitly, of self-critical reason over Asiatic 
 splendor. Similar formulas in a similarly martial context are recited 
 in Yeats's poem The Statues . 39 All of this is standard bludgeoning of 
 the Orient, with great literature taking part in the castigation. There 
 is, then, an unexpected turn in the argument as the measuring and 
 particularizing that were the basis of the European triumph became 
 the dimensions of its incarceration. The idea is continental, im¬ 
 peded and deflected by regional conventions and boundaries. At this 
 stage, the submerged territorial metaphor takes over the thought, 
 and Lebensraum becomes a demand of the mind that requires that 
 other minds be evicted from the premises. A collective identity must 
 turn in destructively on itself if it cannot wage war against those who 
 constrain that identity. America's moving frontier gives the living 
 rationality of the idea the space it needs in order to become itself. 
 
 Militaristic images stride through Hegel's writing, proclaiming 
 themselves in his dismissal of India's dumb, deedless cultural ex¬ 
 pansion, his withering remarks on the physique of the Tainos, and 
 his contemptuous portrayal of Tainos and Hindus crouching ab¬ 
 jectly before their European overlords. Great epics enlist literature 
 in ideological warfare, recording and celebrating the necessary con¬ 
 quest of the Orient by the Occident. The world-historical form of 
 Alexander was the initiation and prophecy of that conquest. The 
 voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama that completed the en¬ 
 circlement of the world by the West "may be compared with that 
 blush of dawn, which after long storms first betokens the return 
 of a bright and glorious day" (p. 411). Napoleon, the contemporary 
 version of the great form of Alexander, is idolized by Hegel: "I saw 
 the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnais¬ 
 sance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, 
 concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reach out over 
 the world and master it." 40 The tramp of Napoleon's armies over 
 Europe resounded thrillingly in Hegel's study: "The world-spirit has 
 given the age marching orders. These orders are being obeyed. The 
 world-spirit, this essential power, proceeds irresistibly like a closely 
 drawn armoured phalanx." Those foolish enough to oppose the ad¬ 
 vancing giant are characterized by Hegel as "powerless vermin." 41 
 These statements make more comprehensible the otherwise bizarre 
 depiction of a Europe weakened by peace, tied hand and foot by 
 settlements and boundaries, and incapable of carrying history for¬ 
 ward in the grand march of the heroic ideal. 
 
 Il6 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
"The History of the World," Hegel writes, "is not the theatre of 
 happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are 
 periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance" 
 (pp. 26-27). It is an ancient thought and a modern one. Aeneas can 
 abandon Dido. Auden, writing in the 1930s, can tell us that building 
 the just city matters and that we must not settle in the village of the 
 heart. 42 But the great poets (Virgil is not in the Hegelian canon) write 
 not simply of the mind's purgations but of its entanglements and of 
 the necessity of those entanglements if mind is to be mind. Hegel 
 writes monolithically of the mind's betrayal in the Indian garden of 
 love. His chapter on India is a response to that betrayal. Elevated by 
 Hegel's own prose into a delusive timelessness, India stands revealed 
 as a present and lasting danger, not part of the mind's mixed loyal¬ 
 ties but that interior enemy from which the mind must be cleansed. 
 Its siren call, all the more dangerous because of its masquerade as 
 the call of the spirit, must be identified and debased so that it is 
 never again taken seriously in history. 
 
 In moving through the contest between discourse as hegemonic 
 and discourse as self-interrogating, this book endeavors to steer a 
 course that keeps the contest alive instead of collapsing it into either 
 of its terms. The second term is adding to its following, and one 
 might prefer it if only because it is able to take back some of the 
 treason of philosophy and scholarship. To bring about this recovery 
 from a disillusion that may have set in with Said, philosophical and 
 scholarly texts that are ideologically tyrannized in their formal con¬ 
 clusions will need to be laid open to literary retrievals. 
 
 In Hegel's case, the acknowledgment and emphatic disavowal of 
 the other in himself on the site that is India is deeply revelatory 
 and, once recognized, can be seen as the driving force behind the 
 otherwise inexplicable vehemence of his rhetoric. The scene and its 
 consequences become an almost exemplary display of self-and-other 
 dependencies. Clandestinely incorporating Indian insights into a 
 Western world system built on the rejection of India is a tactic 
 psychologically consistent with this display. So also is the insis¬ 
 tence on withholding the opennesses of dialectical thought from 
 relationships between cultures and confining those opennesses to 
 the chosen culture of the historical moment. But in the end, it is 
 the denigration of India that counts, as the anxieties of empire be¬ 
 come converted into the fuel for the imperial engine's assertiveness. 
 To read scholarship as literature can be instructive, but it is not in¬ 
 appropriate to persist in asking ourselves whether those who ruled 
 India read it in this way. 
 
 Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 117 
 
6 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine: 
 Early Women Writers on India 
 && 
 
 This chapter deals largely with two novels: Elizabeth Hamilton's 
 Translation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah and Lady Morgan's (Syd¬ 
 ney Owenson's) Missionary. Both novels were widely read in their 
 time but are scarcely known in ours. Hamilton's novel is hard to 
 find, and commentary on it is strikingly scanty. The Missionary, 
 kept alive until now by Shelley's commendation of it, was once far 
 more celebrated than anything Shelley produced. Despite some re¬ 
 vival of interest in Owenson, it remains the least commented on of 
 her novels. 
 
 To write on these novels is not simply to search the margin in yet 
 another of the incremental operations of scholarship. Recontextual- 
 ization of these works restores their topicality and helps to explain 
 why they mattered in their time. But recontextualization also re¬ 
 trieves a literary sophistication that would otherwise not be present 
 in our reading of these novels. Their relationship to the discourse of 
 imperialism is befittingly complex, but to savor that complexity, we 
 have to situate them with some care in relation to a quite brief time 
 span in the development of that discourse. Significantly, much of the 
 writing of the romantic era is in alignment with this time frame and 
 can be read as responding to its possibilities and coercions. 
 
 By 1830, the Mill-Hegel construction had taken over English per¬ 
 ceptions of India. Macaulay's minute of 1835 established English as 
 India's language of higher education and the English achievement 
 in civilization as the standard of excellence India must seek to ap¬ 
 proach. Utilitarians and evangelists came together in a common zeal 
 for reform by making use of the space of difference between "su¬ 
 perior" and "inferior" cultures to argue that reform in the English 
 direction was essential if India was not to be trapped in itself. The 
 reform experiment, moreover, would be less contaminated than it 
 
might be even in England since custom and error, those twin sis¬ 
 ters, could be disallowed any voice in the proceedings. A subjected 
 country is not without its advantages as a laboratory for the social 
 scientist. 1 
 
 The "obligation of benevolence" for Hastings 2 consisted of the 
 responsibilities (unilaterally determined) that made power seem re¬ 
 spectable to itself. More self-righteously, it was presented by evan¬ 
 gelicals as an atonement for past injustices, including those for 
 which Hastings was responsible. 3 "We cannot now renounce them 
 without guilt," Charles Grant said of the Indians in 1792, halfway 
 through the Hastings impeachment. He went on to add propheti¬ 
 cally that "we may contract great guilt in the government of them." 4 
 His agenda for atonement consisted of the "moral improvement" of 
 those subject to British rule in India and the rooting out of the "in¬ 
 ternal principles of depravity" in their cultures. 5 
 
 It cannot be said that India was particularly eager to accept Grant's 
 atonement; it was inflicted, moreover, on hundreds of thousands of 
 square miles of territory that had been spared the original sins of 
 Clive and Hastings. The point to be made is about effectiveness, not 
 justice,- two converging movements of reform produced a momen¬ 
 tum difficult to resist, particularly in the exclusive boardrooms of a 
 private company that could still make decisions affecting the future 
 of a subcontinent. Yet the reformin g im petus, although vigorous, was 
 short-lived, impeded from the beginning by institutional resistances 
 both Indian and English. Two decades later, the events of 1857 shifted 
 the emphasis from social engineering to preserving law and order. 
 
 Mill's own agenda, before reformist zeal enlarged it, had sought 
 no more than peace preserved and justice impartially dispensed. The 
 Olympian aloofness offered by this formula fitted the British mood 
 after 1857. The introduction of English as India's higher language and 
 the beckoning possibilities of conversion to Christianity had been 
 presented as the means for collapsing the otherness of India into a 
 space of difference that could be progressively reduced. The original 
 otherness that had been conceived so as to justify these measures 
 was now reinstated in all its intractability. Bengali babus could never 
 be honorary Englishmen. Imitation had been amusing once, but it 
 could be parodic as well as flattering. More threateningly, it could be 
 a form of usurpation. 6 
 
 On the whole, it was better for East and West not to meet. It was 
 preferable for India to be a place of exile where the Great Game was 
 played on a frontier resembling the American West, with the En- 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 119 
 
glish identity realized at a periphery and not at a center lost to the 
 cosmopolitan. To manage India, the site of passion, deceit, and irra¬ 
 tionality, with firmness and with wisdom was to enact in the theater 
 of empire the conquest of the self. 
 
 There could be alternatives, even for the same author. In Kipling's 
 world, India is not the madwoman in the attic but a prized posses¬ 
 sion to be cared for and guarded, externally from rapacious Russians 
 and internally from the wildness in itself. Dryden's Nourmahal, it 
 will be remembered, anticipates that wildness side by side with In- 
 damora's embodying of India's desirability. We can see the wildness 
 as amiable rather than hysterical. We can see the desirability as dan¬ 
 gerous rather than rewarding. Perceptions can shift widely between 
 these elasticities, leaving their containment discursively in place. 
 India can also be a jungle where we discover reassuringly that the 
 fundamental law, as in civilized societies and empires, is the obedi¬ 
 ence of the lower to the higher. On the other hand, Kim can live in 
 an enclosed garden where the events of 1857 have left no scar on the 
 smiling earth. As with the view of Chandrapore from the canton¬ 
 ment in Forster's novel, more than one construction can be shaped 
 and sustained by the gaze of the beholder. But India endearing or 
 dangerous, reticent or treacherously secretive, as not a promise but 
 an appeal or as a promise that becomes an appeal remains consis¬ 
 tently feminine India. 7 
 
 Perceiving India as feminine is a familiar practice of the literary 
 imagination. Scholarship should be a different matter. It is factual 
 and not Active, neutral and not partisan, entrenched protectively in 
 the disinterestedness that Matthew Arnold once called the Indian 
 virtue. Claims to this effect have not ceased to be heard, but they are 
 considerably less persuasive than they once were. It is not easy after 
 Said to believe fervently in the disinterestedness of scholarship, al¬ 
 though a mild persuasion along these lines may be desirable in order 
 to continue with these pages. Ronald Inden's important study, Imag¬ 
 ining India, provides little ground for reaffirming scholarly impar¬ 
 tiality. 8 The various scholarly disciplines, as they apply themselves 
 to India, consistently devalue it, and they all eventually do so by 
 subscribing to the Active dispositions they might be expected to re¬ 
 sist. They provide diAerent scholarly names for India's femininity. 
 
 India is the anima and the id. It is a proliferating jungle where 
 the garden of civilization must be maintained with great difAculty 
 against the invading undergrowth. It is prolixity instead of order, 
 wayward passion and wild extravagance instead of purposive rea- 
 
 120 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
son, and serpentine Oriental deceitfulness instead of straightfor¬ 
 ward Western candor. It is tribal and inherently fragmented. It is 
 the primitive feminine, masculinized too late. It is the Aryan ship 
 foundering in the Dravidian ocean. It is tropical rather than tem¬ 
 perate; the very wordplay in this contrast underlines the nature of 
 Indian irresponsibility. 9 
 
 A common rhetoric sustained by metaphors both explicit and 
 buried percolates through the discourse formation of religious, phi¬ 
 losophical, socioeconomic, anthropological, and psychoanalytical 
 scholarship. There is an impressive homogeneity in the findings, 
 which may mean that the truth identifies itself by remaining the 
 same irrespective of the approach to it or simply that one usually 
 finds what one is looking for and that the Western gaze looks only 
 in one direction. But, of course, in a hegemonic era, it is the cumula¬ 
 tive concurrence that counts and not the cautionary skepticism that 
 is becoming audible only with the passing of territorial empires. 
 
 The solidarity of the discourse formation facilitates migration 
 from one discipline to another and increases the coercive force of 
 each discipline. Investigations can lead to vigorously disputed con¬ 
 clusions that seem to bear witness to the integrity of scholarship, 
 but there is no real disagreement on how the investigations are to 
 be channeled. India is a stage on which the feminine can be enacted 
 and given its full range of representations with a luxuriance of ren¬ 
 dering that is itself feminine in its elaborations. The elaborations 
 feed back into the originating principle, so that the relationship be¬ 
 tween gender, culture, and race becomes symbiotic rather than over¬ 
 lapping. When Inden tells us that Mill and Hegel are hegemonic in 
 Indology, 10 we have to recognize that Indology is not just the study 
 of the history and culture of a specific geographical area. If India is 
 thought of as the theater of the other, Indology can appropriately be¬ 
 come the didactic productions mounted in that theater. 
 
 The completeness of envisaging that characterizes feminine India, 
 the comprehensiveness and the interlocking nature of its rhetoric, 
 makes escape from its constraints remarkably difficult. The direct¬ 
 ing strength of discourse, its writing of the self that writes the novel, 
 and the heavy investment of identity in the assumptions of em¬ 
 pire are particularly to be borne in mind when we consider women 
 writers on India. A subjected femininity might be expected to reach 
 out to a subjected India, defined as meriting subjection because it is 
 feminine. But Benita Parry finds very little of this empathizing in her 
 chapter on women novelists of the Kipling era. 11 Brantlinger's fine 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 121 
 
chapter on 1857 suggests that the rhetoric enveloping those tragic 
 events remained much the same irrespective of the sex of the au¬ 
 thor. 12 In the most recent and probably the most thoughtful consider¬ 
 ation of this problem, Jenny Sharpe recognizes that "a rejection of 
 the gender hierarchy the domestic ideal enforces does not similarly 
 negate the racial superiority it implies. It may, in fact, reinforce it." 13 
 
 These findings should not surprise us. The sacrifice of family life 
 and the self-effacing exile in an ungrateful land that were needed to 
 maintain British supervision of a wayward and potentially vicious 
 India enshrined Victorian domesticity by immolating it on the altar 
 of empire. The Englishwoman in India was thus captured and some¬ 
 times captivated by a discourse that offered her both heroic dignity 
 and limited empowerment. A double seduction was held out in re¬ 
 turn for the compliance with the script that the discourse expected 
 from participants in its theater. The reward was more than suffi¬ 
 cient to contain and render insubstantial any potential generosities 
 of gender. 14 
 
 To study the feminine view of India's femininity under condi¬ 
 tions less warped by the pressures of discourse, we must return to 
 an earlier phase of Britain's relationship with the subcontinent. The 
 sudden elevation of India's past in the first wave of Oriental scholar¬ 
 ship opened a moment of opportunity for understanding between 
 peoples. The moment passed almost before it had articulated itself. 
 The years 1785 and 1810 might be said to mark its limits, and even 
 during that brief period, the view from the window was clouded. Tig 
 literary attractiveness of the Jones perception of India merely meant 
 that for the time being, literature would be one step behind in the 
 imperial march. It was the swiftly changing power relationship be¬ 
 tween England and India that mattered, and that relationship was 
 obliged to place out of bounds the mutual respect that is a condition 
 of dialogue. Subject peoples are to be educated, not listened to. In¬ 
 deed, the very decisiveness with which the moment was sealed off 
 makes apparent the priorities it threatened. 
 
 The first novels in English about India began to be written during 
 this moment. The earliest may have been Hartley House, Calcutta 
 (1789). It was published anonymously, but because of the epistolary 
 form and because the letters are from Sophia Gildborne to a close 
 friend in England, we can conclude that the author was a woman. 
 Anne Mellor identifies her as Phoebe Gibbs. 15 A. L. Basham, who 
 draws attention to the novel, finds it of "small literary merit." 16 
 Nevertheless, it was of sufficient interest for a pirated edition to ap- 
 
 122 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
pear in Dublin during the year of its publication and for a German 
 translation to appear two years later. The novel seems to have at¬ 
 tracted a reading public that expanded notably for Hamilton's Trans¬ 
 lation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah, five editions of which were 
 published between 1796 and 1811. Owenson's Missionary, also pub¬ 
 lished in 1811 (the year after Southey's Curse of Kehama), was re¬ 
 printed no less than four times in the same year in three elegant 
 volumes with a portrait of the author, as the publisher, Stockwell, 
 enticingly chooses to put it. The title page also assures us that a por¬ 
 trait of the author will be among the reader's rewards for paying a 
 guinea. The novel's literary, as distinct from its commercial, success 
 was not restricted to the Shelley circle. Schwab notes that in France 
 the "stir regarding Sanskrit" began with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's 
 Chaumiere indienne in 1790 and also included The Missionary } 7 In¬ 
 deed, the currency of the novel was such that Owenson, at the time 
 of her death nearly half a century later, was working on a revised ver¬ 
 sion of it ( Luxima the Prophetess ) responding to the events of 1857. 
 
 The novel about India was originated by women. It found a sig¬ 
 nificant reading public before the genre (unfortunately including the 
 work of those women writers who practiced it) was made to col¬ 
 laborate in the masculine domination of a feminine Orient, now 
 stereotyped so as to make that domination desirable. Part of the at¬ 
 traction these early novels held for their public was the displacement 
 of gender relationships onto an intercultural plane where issues not 
 otherwise easily negotiable could be discussed through surrogate 
 representations. Sophia Gildborne's admiration (letter 12) for the 
 mildness, gentleness, and inoffensiveness of the Hindus (Mill, thirty 
 years later, is an instructive contrast) 18 recognizes not only a femi¬ 
 nine nature that has yet to be given its due but also the capacity of 
 that nature to engender a civilization worthy of respect. Suttee can 
 be taken as implying that a woman exists only as the wife of her hus¬ 
 band and that her life ends when that meaning is extinguished. Gild- 
 borne treats it as evidence that heroism of the highest order is not 
 excluded by gentleness. Her platonic attachment to a teacher at the 
 University of Benares foregrounds the idea of India rather than its 
 bizarre customs or exotic fascinations. In her conversion to Hindu¬ 
 ism (letter 26), she rejects not only the West but also the masculine 
 principle the West embodies in favor of a feminine alternative. When 
 her friend and teacher dies and she marries an official of the East 
 India Company, the highly artificial and almost peremptory closure 
 recognizes a fiction that one can entertain but that it is not as yet 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 123 
 
possible to inhabit. In an intercultural relationship, the questioning 
 of boundaries characteristic of the feminine affirmation in a mascu¬ 
 line culture is reconfigured as the choice of a different site. 
 
 Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah 19 is a more 
 sophisticated novel than Hartley House, Calcutta. Its ironic man¬ 
 ners are in striking contrast to the lush prose of The Missionary, 
 written fifteen years later. The novel is dedicated to Hastings and 
 is in memory of Hamilton's brother, whom Hastings had assisted 
 in gaining a position in the East India Company. He is not to be 
 confused with that more distinguished Alexander Hamilton who, 
 marooned in France during the Napoleonic Wars, whiled away the 
 tedium by cataloging the Indian contents of the Bibliotheque natio¬ 
 nal and by giving Friedrich Schlegel lessons in Sanskrit. 
 
 The word "translation" in the title is significant. Since the trans¬ 
 lator is also the author (and the editor), the multiple roles can sug¬ 
 gest that a part of the self is sufficiently alienated from the socially 
 constructed and acceptable self to be regarded as "foreign." It re¬ 
 quires translation, supplemented by editorial mediation, if its now 
 "strange" voice is to be understood. The copresence of the familiar 
 and the unrecognized is obviously appropriate to a feminine affir¬ 
 mation in a masculine environment. India provides the theater for 
 a narrative of that self-affirmation, which can be offered as history 
 and read for what history can teach us. 
 
 A "Preliminary Dissertation" by the "editor" emphasizes by its 
 length and care in exposition the distance that necessitates transla¬ 
 tion. As a setting for the rajah's letters, it acts in conjunction with 
 them by specifying in a manner that is highly individual a historical 
 and religiophilosophical context for their reading. Hamilton begins 
 by drawing attention not simply to the antiquity of Indian civili¬ 
 zation but also to its remarkable continuity (pp. vii-viii). She then 
 proceeds to argue (quite unlike others who take up this subject) that 
 this continuity must be due to the inherent stability of Indian insti¬ 
 tutions. The caste system, for instance, is perceived as socially cohe¬ 
 sive rather than paralyzing (pp. xv-xvi). A loose federation of rajahs 
 governed by a maharajah represents a monarchical structure that is 
 responsive to autonomy rather than one that is inflexibly totalitarian 
 (pp. viii-ix). This is a perception interestingly close to the "revised" 
 view now offered by the New Cambridge History of India series. 20 
 Monarchs in Hamilton's presentation are governed not by unregu¬ 
 lated caprice (the Hindu state in Hegel exists only for the freedom of 
 the single person at the head of it) but by inherited principles, laid 
 
 124 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
down in primary texts, that have gained authority by being practiced 
 through the centuries. 
 
 A further stabilizing characteristic of Hindu civilization is the 
 firmly marked identity that results from its being tenacious of its 
 own doctrines "in a degree that is unexampled in the history of any 
 other religion." This cultural cohesiveness is accompanied by an 
 "unbounded toleration" that enables it to live in peace with others 
 (pp. xvi-xvii). 
 
 Objections can be made to the view of Hindu India that Hamil¬ 
 ton offers, but it deserves consideration as much as the view that 
 overwhelmed it and that dominated discussions of India for over a 
 century. 21 In any case, our concern here is not with the accuracy of 
 the representation but with the forces that result in its being what it 
 is. Hamilton's unstated intention is to argue that a civilization built 
 on feminine principles can succeed in being just and enduring and 
 that to say so is not to voice a pious hope; a demonstration of the 
 proposition is to be found in India's history. When a society embody¬ 
 ing these principles is subjugated, it is by forces superior only in 
 strength and determined to use strength for the ends of subjugation. 
 
 Hindu India was conquered by Moslem invaders, about whom 
 Hamilton has nothing good to say. She is less than fair to Islam, but 
 her voice is in refreshing contrast to the chorus of voices denigrat¬ 
 ing Hindu civilization as weak, vicious, self-wounding, and largely 
 responsible for its own fate. This is an all too familiar characteriza¬ 
 tion of the feminine, and one can even argue that its export to India 
 enables it to be displayed with a clarity and invested with an oppro¬ 
 brium not altogether possible in more familiar settings. Hamilton 
 offers a different view of India as the site of an authentic femininity 
 that calls out to be heard from rather than sequestered. Subjected to 
 a power of oppression that is both unjustified and unrelieved, India 
 is also presented within a theater of gender, with Islam installed as 
 the male force. Disinterestedness may be deflected by the require¬ 
 ments of this theater, but the moral made available for domestica¬ 
 tion would not have been lost on an English audience. 
 
 The British, in Hamilton's scenario, cannot be successors of the 
 Mughals. Their contribution is to produce a hero capable of playing 
 St. George to the Moslem dragon. He must liberate an imprisoned 
 femininity and restore it to the status it once occupied and deserves 
 to occupy in other countries as well as India. Hastings's role in India 
 was, to put it gently, more complex, but Hamilton takes a straight¬ 
 forward view of how the obligation of benevolence is to be exercised. 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 125 
 
Her political naivete may be in the end a reproof to those who did 
 things differently in India and in the theater of gender in nineteenth- 
 century England. 
 
 Hastings as liberator and dragon slayer is too much a part of the 
 golden world to be credible in the bronze one where Philip Sidney 
 placed the fictions that mediate our understanding of history. Like 
 Rushdie, who blithely alters the date of Gandhi's death, 22 Hamilton 
 places the logic of fiction and perhaps the form of romance on a 
 higher plane than the awkwardness of fact. The correct date would 
 not have affected Rushdie's fiction. He makes an issue of his right 
 to be wrong simply to remind us that chronological accuracy is not 
 the most important responsibility of a writer. With Hamilton, the 
 investment in refusing to see what is embarrassing is heavier, and 
 the Hastings she invents is essential to the integrity of her fiction. 
 Her book, published the year after the impeachment ended, must 
 proceed as if it never took place. 
 
 Hastings's treatment of the Rohillas was a prominent feature in 
 the impeachment. Macaulay's dramatic account of the injustices 
 perpetrated in "Rohilkund" has been found too severe by some his¬ 
 torians, and it is true that Macaulay tends to write as if the darkest 
 hour came before Macaulay. In Hamilton's novel, the rajah, passing 
 through Rohilkund, finds it a place of almost idyllic bliss. The author 
 (as editor) concedes that the account differs strikingly "from that 
 tale of horrors which has been generally received." Eyewitnesses of 
 the scene can best determine, she adds confidently, "which account 
 comes closest to the truth" (i:202-3n). 
 
 The passage through Rohilkund, with its living proof of the benefi¬ 
 cence of British administration, is a prelude to the rajah's meet¬ 
 ing with Hamilton's idealized Hastings. It is preceded significantly 
 by a description of an exemplary Indian monarch taken from the 
 Hitopadesa, which Wilkins had translated nine years earlier. Hast¬ 
 ings, needless to say, conforms fully to the description. The "pure 
 and blessed spirit of humanity . . . has distinguished every act of his 
 administration" (1:219-20). The rajah is confirmed in his desire to 
 visit an England that can provide India with such flawless exempli¬ 
 fications of its own ancient texts. He undertakes the perilous voy¬ 
 age, arriving in an England where the impeachment ought to be in 
 progress. No trace of it is to be found in his letters. Instead, a far less 
 troubling event is used to establish the fictional reality of the rajah's 
 presence in England. He attends a performance of Zingis: A Tragedy, 
 which the historian Alexander Dow had published in 1769 (2:124) 23 
 
 126 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Cultures, precisely because of their distinctiveness, cannot be 
 transparent to other cultures, but the vantage point of another cul¬ 
 ture can generate a critique not easily created from within the cul¬ 
 ture being viewed. As in Montesquieu's Letties persanes, Hamilton's 
 letter writer is nominally a "foreigner" but a foreigner listened to as 
 a voice in a contested self, the exclusions of which are questioned 
 by that foreignness, the partition of the self between two sites. Both 
 difference and similarity are implied by the circumstances of the act 
 of composition. Opportunities even exist for a two-way traffic that 
 Hamilton must ignore because her vantage point is presented as an 
 unwavering idealization, positing not only praiseworthy principles 
 but also an implausible congruence between principles and prac¬ 
 tice. Distancing this vantage point by locating it in India allows the 
 implausibility to be fictively entertained. Feminizing it provides an 
 indication of the extent to which England has marginalized and psy¬ 
 chically distanced forces that should remain important within itself. 
 
 The rajah cannot conceive of any cleavage between social philoso¬ 
 phy and its implementation. Fortified in his innocence by the unim¬ 
 peachable integrity displayed by Hastings, he proceeds on the basis 
 that if English social behavior seems inconsistent to him, it can only 
 be because he has not read it with sufficient care. There must be hid¬ 
 den significances and patterns of cohesiveness with which he, as a 
 foreigner, cannot be familiar. If people's lives do not follow the texts 
 of their religion, it can only be because those texts are modified by 
 other texts that at this moment are not known to the rajah. 
 
 There is a caste system in England, but instead of being func¬ 
 tionally aligned, it consists of people of family, people of no family, 
 and people of style. The last category is the highest, but the prin¬ 
 ciples of election to it are unclear. Nevertheless, it is more than 
 self-proclaiming. The validity of the entire caste system, including 
 its indeterminate upper tier, is attested to by the consensus that sup¬ 
 ports it and that must have a foundation in hidden understandings. 
 
 Poojahs exist in England, the most important among them being 
 the poojah of cards. Its mystic dimensions are evident from the con¬ 
 centration and intensity of commitment displayed by participants 
 in the poojah and by the manner in which all other concerns are put 
 aside in deference to its imperative. 
 
 The Bible calls for equality between the sexes (the rajah's read¬ 
 ing seems politically correct rather than textually indisputable), but 
 this is apparently not the case in England. The inference should 
 not be that sacred texts are being disregarded but that a secondary 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 127 
 
revelation is in place that provisionally tolerates inequality and also 
 makes poverty not a matter for compassion but the most heinous of 
 offenses (2:161). 
 
 The rajah's hermeneutic procedures are throughout designed to 
 deny the existence of fissures in the social fabric of a country as ex¬ 
 emplary as England and to see that fabric as a seamless rendering 
 of the doctrinal patterns that are woven into it. If the procedures 
 are extreme to the point of being comic, that is a comment on the 
 "strangeness" of England to the idealized integrity that Hindu India 
 has been constructed to represent. India's return to itself under Hast¬ 
 ings is an augury of what can happen in England but only if those 
 seeking liberation live according to standards instead of according 
 to the casteism of style or the frivolity of the poojah of cards. 
 
 The important feature of the novel for our purposes is that Hindu¬ 
 ism is treated as capable of yielding the paradigms of ideal behavior; 
 that it is regarded as an oppressed and silenced voice, liberated so as 
 to be listened to once more in the counsels of understanding; and 
 that its restoration argues for the restoration of other voices that are 
 in harmony with it and are not being heard. On the other hand, the 
 contrast between Moslem tyranny and British benevolence is insen¬ 
 sitive to the realities of dominance; the stain of power is not materi¬ 
 ally altered by the moral pretensions of those who enjoy the use of 
 it. Even as a fable of the maiden in distress rescued from the Moslem 
 dragon's clutches, the book is not appropriate to a more realistic 
 era, where rescue has to be earned by the inner strength and perse¬ 
 verance of the oppressed. One has to read the novel to recognize that 
 these failings are not fatal. From a vantage point that is uncontami¬ 
 nated, much can be seen that is quietly comic, suggesting how being 
 uncontaminated is itself comic in an up-to-date world. There is a 
 need for integrity, and Hindu India as the site of its realization is per¬ 
 ceived with a sympathy and insight that are important correctives 
 to the hostile perceptions of it that are beginning to gather force. 
 
 Both Hartley House, Calcutta and Translation of the Letters of a 
 Hindu Rajah are cast in the epistolary form, which Owenson also 
 uses in the best known of her novels, The Wild Irish Girl . 14 It is a 
 form that is naturally conversational and indefinitely extensible. Al¬ 
 though it can sustain a narrative and be brought to closure by it, it is 
 not necessarily dominated by narrative requirements. Multiple cor¬ 
 respondents can generate a crisscross of interpretations, with each 
 interpretation weighed and sifted by the necessity of committing it 
 to writing. The relationships between the author, the editor, a pos- 
 
 128 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
sible translator, and the writer or writers of the letters can introduce 
 layers of commentary that do not have to culminate in judgment 
 by a fixed standard. If our aim is a thoughtful open-mindedness, the 
 form has advantages not easily dismissed. 
 
 It cannot be said that the authors being discussed make anything 
 like full use of these opportunities. Owenson's novel has only one 
 letter writer. Hamilton's has two, but the second disappears as the 
 novel proceeds. The editorial role is used by Hamilton largely to pro¬ 
 vide us with the “Preliminary Dissertation." Owenson furnishes us 
 with ample notes, sometimes speaking in the first person as the au¬ 
 thor and more frequently signing herself as the editor. Both figures 
 provide documentation for what is said in the text, but the editor 
 can sometimes differ from the text on scholarly grounds or be criti¬ 
 cal of its extravagance of style (pp. 57, 61,100,17s). 
 
 In her introduction to The Wild Irish Girl, Brigid Brophy com¬ 
 ments that "the epistolary convention, which in the course of the 
 eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson had used with extreme emo¬ 
 tional power and Chaderlos de Laclos had made into an ironic gal¬ 
 lery where correspondent flashes ironic light on correspondent, is 
 here flattened into a ribbon of first person narrative, chopped into 
 roughly letter lengths" (p. viii). The peripheral maneuvers of editor 
 and author make this judgment a trifle harsh, but it is true that 
 Owenson is either unable to engage or not interested in engaging the 
 more serious possibilities of the form. In The Missionary, she turned 
 to an impetuous narrative. 25 She could have done this because the 
 epistolary form no longer appealed to her. Alternatively, she could 
 have made her decision because a form that may have suited the re¬ 
 lationship between Ireland and England did not seem to her to suit 
 the relationship between England and India. With its emphasis on 
 closure and containment and on a dominant narrative order that its 
 divergent constituents must not only accept but also promote, the 
 narrative form is closer than the epistolary to the form of empire and 
 more receptive to collaboration with the latter's coercive forces. 26 
 
 In The Wild Irish Girl, a hoped-for marriage that cannot material¬ 
 ize is taken to be "prophetically typical of a national unity of inter¬ 
 ests and affections between those who may be factitiously severed, 
 but who are naturally allied." In this unity, "the distinctions of En¬ 
 glish and Irish, of Protestant and Catholic," will be "for ever buried" 
 (p. 253). The union here is between equals or at least functions as an 
 equalizing force. Although Glorvina (cum Ireland) is seen through 
 the eyes of a male correspondent, the male correspondent is con- 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 129 
 
structed by a female author, and Glorvina is the center of attention 
 of the novel as well as of her suitor. The marriage is presented not as 
 the acceptance of differences that enrich each other but as the bury¬ 
 ing of distinctions. Its "unity" arises from the binding force of what 
 is held in common. 27 
 
 In The Missionary, Hilarion, who combines total dedication to 
 his calling with an appropriately majestic Western presence, meets 
 Luxima (a corruption of Lakshmi, significant in its elision of luxury 
 and light) in the Kashmiri valley that ever since Bernier had been 
 the fashionable site of Paradise. The occasion is momentous. It is the 
 meeting of East and West, and Owenson depicts it so that its sym¬ 
 bolic significance cannot escape even the most casual of readers: 
 
 Silently gazing, in wonder, upon each other, they stood, 
 finely opposed, the noblest specimens of the human species 
 as it appears in the most opposite regions of the earth; she 
 like the East, lovely and luxuriant; he, like the West, lofty 
 and commanding: the one radiant in all the lustre, attrac¬ 
 tive in all the softness which distinguishes her native re¬ 
 gions: the other, towering in all the energy, imposing in all 
 the vigour, which marks his ruder latitudes: she, looking 
 like a creature formed to feel and to submit; he like a being 
 created to resist and to command: while both appeared as 
 the ministers and representatives of the two most powerful 
 religions of the earth; the one no less enthusiastic in her 
 brilliant errors, than the other confident in his immutable 
 truth. (1:149-50) 
 
 This is not simply the meeting of East and West. It is also the 
 meeting of Adam and Eve and a meeting arranged under Miltonic 
 auspices. In The Wild Irish Girl, Owenson quotes Milton frequently 
 (pp. 39, 40, 42, 52, 82, 195), although Tasso is the poet she most 
 often cites. In The Missionary, she quotes Milton almost to the ex¬ 
 clusion of everyone else. The tableau she devises for us here vividly 
 recalls Satan's (and the reader's) first sight of Adam and Eve in Para¬ 
 dise (4.288-301). In particular, it circulates obsessively around two 
 lines delineating the difference between them: "For contemplation 
 he and valour formed, / For softness she and sweet attractive grace." 
 The Eastern Eve in Owenson's tableau is lovely, luxuriant, radiant in 
 her luster, and attractive in her softness. The Western Adam is lofty, 
 commanding, towering, and imposing. All of the epithets surround¬ 
 ing Hilarion are evocative of a natural right to dominance, and all 
 of the epithets surrounding Luxima evoke a natural propensity to 
 
 130 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
subjection. Owenson does not shrink from the conclusion that fol¬ 
 lows: "she, looking like a creature formed to feel and to submit; he 
 like a being created to resist and to command." To describe Hilarion 
 as a "being" and Luxima as a "creature" is to go beyond any hierar¬ 
 chical principle that Milton may have espoused. Milton, moreover, 
 makes poetry of the principle only in a prelapsarian world. The re¬ 
 lationship between Adam and Eve in the world we inherit from 
 them is dialogic rather than hierarchical. In the Kashmiri Paradise, 
 the relationship, as Owenson here formulates it, seems to proclaim 
 itself as the engendered prologue to the imperial theme. Although 
 Hilarion and Luxima are placed before us as "the noblest specimens 
 of the human species" (a reminiscence of PL 4.321-24), the best that 
 the East can offer seems created only to yield to the "towering" su¬ 
 periority of the West. It can come as no surprise that Christianity 
 is presented as a religion of "immutable truth" and Hinduism as a 
 religion of "brilliant errors," to which commitment is enthusiastic 
 rather than rational. 
 
 Enthusiasm is not limited to Luxima, and Owenson can be the 
 willing victim of her own prose, as some of her editorial comments 
 in The Wild Irish Girl suggest. More persuasively, we can argue that 
 Owenson writes for an audience (as her publisher's advertisements 
 of her book make clear) that can be tentatively characterized as liter¬ 
 ate, affluent, and given to the fashionable. She is writing, in fact, for 
 those people of style whom Hamilton's Hindu rajah places in the top 
 tier of the English caste system. The set piece invokes a discourse 
 then making its claim to dominance, endowing it with the finish of 
 style and the blessing of voguishness. Having met the expectations 
 of the salon, which she continues to regale with a love story, Owen¬ 
 son is then free to follow a route that, fortunately for the real worth 
 of the novel, complicates as well as confirms the original tableau. 
 
 Enthusiastic cooperation with a discourse humbly endorses its fic¬ 
 tions of self-justification, but it also offers an irreproachable way 
 of subverting those fictions, a possibility appealing in its potential 
 for mimicry as mockery to women writers and to subject peoples. 
 It appears, moreover, that Owenson read The Missionary, as it pro¬ 
 gressed, repeatedly after dinner to "distinguished guests," who in¬ 
 sisted on making their own contribution. 28 Subversive surrender may 
 have been the only way to cope with the unwanted views of experts. 
 Owenson's novel can and perhaps should be read along these lines, 
 although, as will be suggested later, she is drawn into and does not 
 merely adopt the discourse she both affirms and interrogates. 
 
 Compliance with the discourse is foregrounded in the emphasis 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 131 
 
on Hilarion's invincibility that is strongly announced not only in 
 the set piece but also throughout the early pages of the novel. He 
 displays "the heroic fortitude of the martyr" (1:28) and combines the 
 "piety of the saint with the energy of the hero" (1:52). Yet the doc¬ 
 trines he preaches are later described as "rigid" (2:29). The "chill 
 hand of religion" checks the rise of "human feelings" in him (2:7— 
 8). Reluctant even to touch a wreath that Luxima has made part of 
 an "idolatrous ceremony," he finds within himself "a fastidiousness 
 which almost resembled bigotry" (1:154). He is prepared to perceive 
 that "a pure system of natural religion" is innate in Luxima's "sub¬ 
 lime and contemplative mind" (1:227), but he refuses to build on 
 the common ground that this perception uncovers. Instead, he con¬ 
 centrates obsessively on Luxima's idolatrous practices. It becomes 
 apparent that his repudiation of the priestess is in proportion to his 
 attraction to the woman: 
 
 When the Priestess disappeared, the woman stood too much 
 confessed; and a feminine reserve, a lovely timidity, so char¬ 
 acteristic of her sex overwhelmed the Missionary with con¬ 
 fusion. (1:151) 
 
 He would not submit to the analysis of his feelings, and 
 he was determined to conquer, without understanding their 
 nature or tendency. Entombed and chained within the most 
 remote depths of his heart, he was deaf to their murmurs 
 and resisted their pleadings with all the despotism of a great 
 and lofty mind, created equally to command others and 
 itself. (2:4; italics added) 
 
 Hilarion undertook to win over Luxima to Christianity because 
 a Kashmiri pandit, displaying the opportunism that is all too char¬ 
 acteristic of the clerisy, had assured him that Luxima's conversion 
 would bring about mass defections from the Hindu faith. Conversion 
 now becomes the conversion of the other within himself. Listening 
 to Luxima is "dangerous." On the other hand, arguing with her is im¬ 
 possible because there is "an incoherence in her ideas" that is "not 
 to be reconciled or replied to" (1:220). 
 
 Significantly, this finding comes after a perfectly cogent passage 
 in which Luxima has expatiated on the difficulty of seeing God face 
 to face and on the desirability of knowing him in his works. This is 
 standard Christian thinking, except that it is in India, with Paradise 
 Lost 5.507-12 providing the most convenient locus. Hilarion's re- 
 
 132 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
fusal of a dialogue based on the common ground that Luxima's state¬ 
 ment uncovers is one more erosion of the dramatic contrasts pro¬ 
 claimed in their original encounter. Luxima's enthusiasm includes 
 more than a hint of rational understanding, and Hilarion is consider¬ 
 ably less than dispassionate in protecting his immutable truths from 
 an other who seems well on her way to sharing them. 
 
 Unfortunately, conversion is not usually a matter of building on 
 common ground. Its drama and justification can be more compelling 
 if common ground is minimized, if Christianity is exhibited not as 
 the final step in a ladder being ascended but as the only means of de¬ 
 liverance from continuing incarceration in a prison house of error. 
 When cultural differences are widened to this degree by the refusal 
 to recognize shared understandings, the two cultures involved can 
 only meet in a pattern of dominance and tutelage. That fact returns 
 into and forces apart the gender differences with which cultural dif¬ 
 ferences are intertwined. 
 
 Hilarion's invincibility is now under duress because of his "en¬ 
 tombment" in himself in a manner ironically reminiscent of Mill- 
 Hegel perceptions of India. It is time to turn to the lovely and luxuri¬ 
 ant Luxima, a character truly designed to excite the wrath of Hegel. 
 A. M. D. Hughes points to her as Shelley's archetypal heroine, 29 but 
 at least in her interrogation of Demogorgon, Asia seems made of 
 sterner stuff. 30 Luxima professes a religion that, as with Hamilton's 
 Hindu India, "unites the most boundless toleration to the most ob¬ 
 stinate faith" (1:213). She may abandon the name of Hinduism, but 
 she clings tenaciously to its essence. Nevertheless, abandoning the 
 name in a world largely constituted by naming is sufficient to en¬ 
 sure her ruin. 
 
 In a capacious generalization, the pandit tells Hilarion that "in all 
 the religions of the East, woman has held a decided influence, either 
 as priestess or as victim" (1:9s). This is a statement as erroneous as 
 it is comprehensive, but it defines the alternatives before Luxima, 
 making it clear that to renounce one role is inexorably to choose 
 the other. When she accepts Christianity and prefers a platonic life 
 with Hilarion to a fuller one with Suleiman Shikoh (with whom she 
 would not have done any better), she surrenders herself to victimiza¬ 
 tion. Once made, the choice is irreversible. To have second thoughts 
 is only to be placed in double jeopardy: "The unfortunate Indian was 
 now alike condemned by the religion of truth and the superstition of 
 error. Driven with shame and obloquy from the altar of Brahma, her 
 life had become forfeit, by the laws of the Inquisition as a relapsed 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 133 
 
Christian" (3:162). When truth and error concur so felicitously in 
 their consequences, we can legitimately ask what the difference is 
 between them. 
 
 Meanwhile, Hilarion has himself become a prisoner of the Inquisi¬ 
 tion as a result of charges brought against him by a Franciscan monk 
 whom he had dismissed from office in an excess of "fastidiousness." 31 
 In an unexpected flurry of action, Luxima escapes from prison with 
 the assistance of the pandit and audaciously rescues Hilarion from 
 the stake. She is dangerously injured in the process, but the two 
 are able to flee to a rocky peninsula (3:194), where Luxima expires 
 (3:215), mistakenly believing Hilarion to be dead. 
 
 After Luxima's death, Hilarion no longer finds himself "a being 
 created to resist and to command." He retires to an icy grotto in 
 the fastnesses of Kashmir. His life as a sanyasi duly comes to a self- 
 effacing end but not before Aurangzeb has "waded through carnage 
 and destruction to the throne of India," seizing "a sceptre stained 
 with a brother's blood" and wearing "the diadem tom from a priest's 
 brow" (3:217). The destructiveness of history contrasts with the se¬ 
 clusion of the missionary's cave. Hilarion's dead body is discovered 
 there by a "European Philosopher," a member of Aurangzeb's retinue 
 (3:219). Beside the body is an urn holding some ashes, a significantly 
 blood-stained crucifix, and the sacred thread of a Brahman (3:220- 
 21). 
 
 Luxima's dying injunction to Hilarion was: 
 
 Thou wilt say "that having gathered a dark spotted flower in 
 the garden of love, she expiates her error by the loss of her 
 life; that her disobedience to the forms of her religion and 
 the laws of her country was punished by days of suffering 
 and by an untimely death; yet that her soul was pure from 
 sin, as when clothed in transcendent brightness, she out¬ 
 shone in faith, in virtue, all women of her nation!" (3:213) 
 
 Few writers remember Milton as vividly and thoughtfully as 
 Owenson. Her response to Paradise Lost is consistently both an in¬ 
 vocation and a critique. In her opening set piece, already discussed, 
 she not only proclaims the hierarchical principle but also extends 
 it to a point where it can be brought under interrogation by the 
 rest of the novel. Her description of the banyan tree (2:8-10) washes 
 away the Satanic propensities with which Milton's ambivalences 
 continued to invest it and makes it resplendently emblematic of cre¬ 
 ated order. 32 In using descriptions of Satan to characterize Hilarion 
 
 134 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
(e.g., 3:157, 158), she locates her novel deftly in the cross play be¬ 
 tween romantic revaluations of Satan and Milton's not altogether 
 decisive treatment of the imperial-commercial mission as Satanic. 
 In particular, she places Hilarion's capacity for heroic resistance, his 
 “courage never to submit or yield," in telling proximity to the closed 
 mind of imperial self-righteousness and its inability to respond to 
 difference. Her final statement remembers the Ludlow masque and 
 its identification of the unspotted soul with virtue, but it also ques¬ 
 tions the exclusions of that identification by adding the contrast 
 with the “dark spotted flower" gathered in "the garden of love." 
 Hegel took up that last phrase with contempt. 33 Luxima puts it in 
 tragic opposition to the forms of her religion, the laws of her coun¬ 
 try, and the womanhood of her nation. 
 
 Although the Ludlow masque is recalled in Luxima's final state¬ 
 ment, it is Satan's recollection of Beelzebub in his unfallen glory 
 that her last words summon most strongly into life: 
 
 If thou beest he ; but O how fallen! how changed 
 From him who in the happy realms of light 
 Clothed with transcendent brightness didst outshine 
 Myriads though bright. 
 
 [PL 1.85-88) 
 
 Luxima is a name written in light. Her disobedience consigned her 
 to ruin, but it was disobedience only to forms and to laws. She turned 
 away from her religion not to self-love but to the love of another. 
 Her final statement forms an ironic end to the missionary's mission. 
 He has, in effect, become what he beheld. 
 
 Owenson's dramatic unraveling of her novel's beginning raises 
 troubling questions about the possibilities of relationships between 
 cultures. Those possibilities could be considered more carefully if 
 they were not deflected and indeed overwhelmed by a love story in 
 which religious institutions are too readily foregrounded as the main 
 obstacles to human relatedness. The main obstacle remains the sym¬ 
 biotic alliance between dominance and discourse, with gender added 
 to the imperial family. 
 
 Owenson's tribute to this family is not without significant reser¬ 
 vations. Like Shelley and Southey, whose work we shall discuss later, 
 her novel is both fissured and enriched by its participation in two 
 discourses: a literary discourse of world humanism, for which Wil¬ 
 liam Jones provides an Indian scholarly foundation, and an imperial 
 discourse gendered so as to offer India the enlightenments of femi- 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 135 
 
nine submission to Western overlordship. Her conspicuously enthu¬ 
 siastic cooperation with the second discourse is partly so that she 
 can seek out the openings in it and make use of those openings to let 
 in the possibilities of the first discourse. But she also endorses what 
 she resists and carries forward what she moves against. Her subver¬ 
 sive surrender is a surrender despite its subversiveness and testifies, 
 not for the only time, to the coercive strength of a way of viewing 
 India that it is not possible to bypass and that must hereafter be pro¬ 
 pitiated. 
 
 The propitiation can be deemed more than sufficient in Owen- 
 son's remarkable rendering of the first meeting between Hilarion 
 and Luxima—an encounter that the Edenic and Miltonic setting 
 endows with an almost ancestral authority. Her styling of this en¬ 
 counter is extraordinarily and eloquently representative, but the very 
 success of her composition of two essences that can only be fitted 
 to each other hierarchically makes her the hostage of a characteriza¬ 
 tion from which she must thereafter struggle to ransom herself. The 
 sculptured antitheses so vividly prominent in her tableau rule out 
 the possibility of any equitable relationship between their "finely 
 opposed" polarities. An East that is totally feeling and a West that is 
 totally intelligence can only meet on a basis that projects the regu¬ 
 lative ordering of the psyche onto an intercultural stage. 
 
 Owenson does make evident in Hilarion the disabilities of an in¬ 
 telligence that shuts out feeling. Luxima is not subjected to the same 
 critique, and her languid passivity fits a regrettable stereotype that 
 licenses domination of the East by the West. The stereotype is also 
 precisely that image of the feminine against which feminine protest 
 has been consistently directed. It is striking that Owenson should 
 choose to lavish on it so much of her undoubted skill in writing the 
 wrong kind of prose. One might almost conclude that the stereo¬ 
 type is exported to India so that an identification with it can be both 
 allowed and resisted, leaving Europe free for the emergence of a dif¬ 
 ferent model of womanhood. Unfortunately, several of Luxima's at¬ 
 tributes are shipped back to England after appropriate enrichments 
 to become incorporated into Victorian imaginings of the feminine. 
 
 A gendered relationship between cultures might be more easily 
 negotiable if our perception of the genders were changed. The time 
 can be judged as propitious for such changes. The recuperation 
 of India's femininity has been attempted in nationalist counter¬ 
 constructions of its history. Those in the West who have come to see 
 its past as predatory rather than masterful may find it desirable to 
 
 136 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
recognize a different tradition on a site that has been differently gen¬ 
 dered. The question is whether the many injustices of appropriation 
 can be successfully barred from entering the future by reenvisaging 
 the very figures that functioned as the vehicles of those injustices. 
 We can argue that the figures are too contaminated to serve as a basis 
 for the difficult task of understanding between peoples. We can also 
 argue not for a cleansing, which may no longer be possible, but for 
 a radical reappropriation based on the distinctive ontological status 
 that Indian philosophy gives to the feminine principle. 34 
 
 India is not Ireland in Owenson's imagination, and if the Celt 
 knew the Indian, as Shelley advises us, 3s that understanding is not 
 easily to be found in her work. Glorvina has little in common with 
 Luxima. Much is said in The Wild Irish Girl about British injustices 
 in Ireland, but with The Missionary set in a period nearly a cen¬ 
 tury prior to the battle of Plassey, not a word needs to be said about 
 British injustices in India. England's prophetic marriage to Ireland 
 was envisaged as a marriage between equals on the shared ground of 
 what those equals held in common. India's marriage to England is 
 projected as an adoring discipleship, a union of sensibility with the 
 West's towering intelligence. India is not a real country but a con¬ 
 trivance, seen through the spectacles of Orientalist books that are 
 actually projected back into an era more tolerant than the evangeli¬ 
 cals of Hindu religious practices. 
 
 One might argue that Owenson distances evangelical construc¬ 
 tions so that they can be disowned as Portuguese mistakes. We can 
 allow this defense some weight. The historicizing of a current dis¬ 
 course is one way of suggesting that it may no longer be current. But 
 the novel subscribes and perhaps subscribes heavily to the discourse 
 it also interrogates. The inequality of the relationship it enshrines is 
 not clearly seen as the root of the intercultural failure. 
 
 This is a necessary finding but need not be a final one. There is 
 another side to it that must be taken into account and that we may 
 even be persuaded to foreground in our engagement with the com¬ 
 plexities of reading. If Owenson's novel falls short of what needs to 
 be said, we can still argue that it says what circumstances permit 
 and, in fact, strains instructively against those circumstances. Even 
 the hierarchizing of India's femininity rescues it from more con¬ 
 temptuous versions of the feminine that were beginning to prevail 
 in the dispositions of power. Questioning hierarchization is a move 
 that the novel can only place at its horizon. Owenson's not incon¬ 
 siderable achievement is to have opened the way to this placement, 
 
 Feminizing the Feminine 137 
 
to have weakened the hegemonies that she herself has proclaimed 
 so that future generations can find the real depth of the novel lying 
 in the weakening rather than in the proclamation. 
 
 Read metafictionally, Owenson's narrative can be seen as tracking 
 with extraordinary accuracy the narrative of the breakdown of the 
 imperial statement. The novel's rhetorical self-entrapment, its grow¬ 
 ing anxiety with itself, its reluctance to relinquish its own inaugu¬ 
 ration, and even the use of Milton for invocations that are consis¬ 
 tently critiques suggest more than a superficial allegory of empire. 
 Viewed in relation to the undermining forces within imperial dis¬ 
 course, many of the novel's self-perplexities that might be evaluated 
 as literary shortcomings become eloquent in mapping the disarticu¬ 
 lation of the metafiction that they both resist and sustain. 
 
 138 
 
 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
7 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies: 
 Southey and The Curse of Kehama 
 o& 
 
 The extent to which Southey goes to distance himself from The 
 Curse of Kehama is the most striking feature of the poem. His anx¬ 
 ious commitment to damage control is evident from nearly every¬ 
 thing he says about the work both formally and in the apprehensive 
 comments of which there is no lack in his correspondence. Southey's 
 uneasiness is particularly evident in the 1810 preface to the first edi¬ 
 tion, where proximity seems to lend vigor to the assault on what is 
 to follow. The preface begins with a resounding dismissal of the very 
 mythology on which the poem is based, proclaiming Hinduism to 
 be, of all religions, "the most monstrous in its fables and the most 
 fatal in its effects." 1 
 
 In the history of invective against colonial peoples, monstrosity 
 occupies an honorable place. Its origins go back to Pliny and his 
 inheritors, who located it first at the fringes of civilization and sub¬ 
 sequently in the margins of books. 2 The placing acknowledges both 
 a boundary and a seepage. Using spatial distance as a response to 
 psychological proximity, it reminds us of the monstrosity cum mar- 
 ginality into which we could lapse, the Circean transformations that 
 could be our unraveling if we were to venture incautiously outside 
 the text's borders. Readers of anti-Hindu tirades would soon find the 
 word reassuring in its familiarity, but in 1810, it still had to be fully 
 established in the lexicon of abuse. 
 
 "Fatal" is a less familiar word. Evoking Hinduism as a terminal 
 ailment, it also suggests that the insidious destructiveness of the 
 ailment lies in the nature of Hinduism's "fabling," in the quality of 
 its religious imagination. Here Hinduism is unlike the religion of 
 the Mexicans, which apparently surpasses the worst that India can 
 offer. Southey finds it "beyond all doubt . . . the most diabolical that 
 has ever existed." But the Mexican religion has been taken over by 
 
a system of priestcraft that can be eliminated, presumably without 
 prejudice to the religion. "The Mexicans were rapidly advancing," 
 whereas "the Brahminical system of caste . . . wherever it exists has 
 put a total stop to the amelioration of society." 3 
 
 Southey slips here into a convenient confusion between the in¬ 
 stitutional and the inherent, refusing to treat caste as a device of 
 priestcraft even though he concedes that probability to the human 
 sacrifices of the Aztecs. Possession shapes the perception of an India 
 that cannot be redeemed and can only be converted. The problem 
 remains of why one should write a poem of some length and ambi¬ 
 tiousness on a subject apparently to be despised. "No figures can be 
 imagined," Southey declares, "more anti-picturesque, and less poeti¬ 
 cal, than the mythological personages of the Bramins" (1810 preface, 
 117). Why, we might ask, should Southey labor at a poem on the 
 antipoetic in which the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon 
 do not merely "supply fit machinery for an English poem" but also 
 proceed to participate in the action instead of controlling it from an 
 Olympian remove? 
 
 The answer to this question comprises various possibilities, not all 
 of which are necessarily concurrent. We can begin with the proposi¬ 
 tion that the preface dismisses the poem because Southey was anx¬ 
 ious about its reception. He had reason to be anxious. Thalaba had 
 not sold well and Madoc had done worse, earning less than £4 in the 
 year following its publication. Francis Jeffrey had not been kind to 
 either poem. Southey met Jeffrey in October 1805 and was encour¬ 
 aged to find him lacking in stature: "Even if my temper had been 
 more irascible, the sight of a thing not above five feet two would have 
 quieted me." 4 A month later, Jeffrey's height had shrunk by an inch 
 (New Letters, 1:407), but his stature as a critic was not to be disposed 
 of as easily. It could be argued that Thalaba and Madoc had not sold 
 well because they were difficult to access, but Madoc was about the 
 Welsh as much as about the New World and Thalaba' s Orientalism 
 was ornamental rather than structural. There were grounds for being 
 concerned about Kehama. Shrouded in a mythology remote from 
 Christianity, it could be formidably forbidding to the English reader. 
 
 The "strangeness" of Kehama and the difficulty of "sympathizing" 
 with its characters became matters to which Southey returned re¬ 
 peatedly and apprehensively in his correspondence ( L and C, 3:147, 
 180, 268, 286; New Letters, 1:384, 486, 527). His anxieties may have 
 been compounded by the mixed views his friends offered on the 
 poem. Charles Wynn may have been particularly disturbing in point- 
 
 140 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ing out that although exotic machinery might be an "excellent orna¬ 
 ment" for a poem, its function in Kehama seemed to be integral 
 rather than decorative. In these circumstances, its exoticism became 
 a handicap. Southey had to reply lamely that different valuations of 
 the poem had been given him but that his friend Walter Savage Lan- 
 dor "turned the scale in its favour" [New Letters, 1:486). 
 
 Southey's misgivings about his poem ran deep enough to be appar¬ 
 ent even in his remarks about its versification: "It gains by rhyme 
 which is to passages of no inherent merit what rouge and candle¬ 
 light are to ordinary faces" ( L and C, 3:44). He was more emphatic 
 later on the tawdriness of rhyming: "There must be quicker, wilder 
 movements,- there must be a gorgeousness of ornament also—east¬ 
 ern gemwork and sometimes rhyme must be rattled upon rhyme till 
 the reader is half dizzy with the thundering echo" ( L and C, 3:145). 
 The harlotry of prosody fits the standard image of the Orient as cour¬ 
 tesan, but it is not an image Kehama would indubitably convey if we 
 did not have the correspondence to guide us. Southey belittles not 
 only the poem but also his own motives in writing it, reducing it to 
 a foray into the Oriental in which no literary capital is invested. 
 
 The phrasing of these anxieties suggests not that there was no 
 market for writing about India but rather that Southey may have 
 misjudged the nature of the appropriate commodity for that market. 
 Hamilton's novel was in its fourth edition at the time Kehama was 
 completed, and Owenson was about to publish a novel that would 
 achieve both popular and literary status. Still to come was the spec¬ 
 tacular success of Lalla Rookh. William Taylor made his estimate 
 correctly in advising Southey that if he took "the Hindu supersti¬ 
 tions" for his "machinery," the celebrity of his poem would "grow 
 with the empire." 5 
 
 The course of empire has indeed proceeded apace when even 
 Hindu superstitions become commercial offerings. Perhaps Madame 
 de Stael put the same thought more suavely in telling Byron that 
 the public was "orientalizing" and that sticking to the East was "the 
 only poetical policy." The policy was likely to be all the more lucra¬ 
 tive since the East so far had nothing to offer but "Southey's unsale- 
 ables." 6 In these circumstances, it must have disturbed Southey to 
 be advised by Taylor to "let it drop" when shown the completed text 
 of Kehama [New Letters, 1:486). Southey's choice had responded to 
 the literary climate, but making the wrong choice can be less frus¬ 
 trating than dealing with the right choice in the wrong way. 
 
 In any event, Kehama fared moderately well. It did not, like By- 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 141 
 
ron's Corsair, have 10,000 copies taken up on the first day of publi¬ 
 cation, but four editions in ten years is a respectable record. Shelley 
 recommended it to Elizabeth Hitchener as his "favourite poem" and 
 visited Keswick to "pay homage" to its author. 7 Newman read Ke- 
 hama as a boy and "got it well nigh by heart." 8 Coleridge described 
 the poem as "a gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy 
 piece," in which "the moral grandeur rises gradually above the bril¬ 
 liance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the ma¬ 
 chinery." 9 One might think that twenty-five years into his laureate- 
 ship, and in the autumn of a collected edition, Southey's attitude to 
 Kehama would relax. On the contrary, the new preface he published 
 in the ten-volume 1837-38 edition of his poems is at war with the 
 Indian misadventure even more aggressively than the old dismissal. 
 Anxiety about one's literary future cannot be the reason for a hos¬ 
 tility in which self-and-other relationships are reincarnated almost 
 as if the poem were the other of the prefaces. 
 
 Another line of explanation might be found in the compulsions of 
 Southey's oeuvre, as he himself chose to delineate it. The romantic 
 oeuvre, like love in Marvell's definition of that passion, is begot¬ 
 ten by desire upon impossibility. For Southey, the child of impossi¬ 
 bility is an unprecedented exercise in comparative mythology, set¬ 
 ting scholarship, historical knowledge, and imaginative power amid 
 the widening horizons of romantic thought. It is an academic poet's 
 dream of empire, nurtured in a library of 10,000 books. 10 A letter of 
 March 24, 1805, to Wynn provides the details of the grand design: 
 "You know my plan to exhibit all the fit mythologies in this form 
 [that of Kehama ]. After this there will remain the Runic, the old Per¬ 
 sian, the classical—which may be considered almost as new ground 
 so little have its recondite parts been brought forward, and perhaps 
 the Japanese, the Jewish as romancefied by the Rabbies, and the 
 Catholic in all its glory" [New Letters, 1:378). In a subsequent letter 
 (November 4,1812), Southey attributes the inspiration for his project 
 to his reading, at age fifteen, Picart's Ceremonies et coutumes de 
 tous les peuples du monde. Picart's book led him "to conceive a de¬ 
 sign of rendering every mythology which had ever extended itself 
 widely, and powerfully influenced the human mind, the basis of a 
 narrative poem" (I and C, 3:351; see also 1838 preface 11 and New 
 Letters, 1:676). 
 
 We could argue that the necessities of his project obliged Southey 
 to compose Kehama, even in the face of the distaste for Hindu my¬ 
 thology that the two prefaces declare so emphatically. However, ro- 
 
 142 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
mantic oeuvres are designed to welcome deferral, and gaps in their 
 structures can sometimes be as eloquent as the poems that might 
 conceivably fill those gaps. Moreover, the original prefaces to Tha- 
 laba, Madoc, and Kehama say nothing of their place in Southey's 
 vast design. It is only in the second preface to Kehama, published 
 twenty-eight years later, that Southey encourages us to think of the 
 poem as written in deference to a larger commitment. "No poem," 
 he adds, in what should be recognized by now as his favorite turn 
 of language, "could have been more deliberately planned or care¬ 
 fully composed." In fact, Madoc took just as long to write, but the 
 time taken is less important than how heavily the time weighed on 
 the poet. 
 
 It is hard to escape the impression that an additional defense of 
 the poem is being constructed. Puzzlingly, it is put into place when 
 it no longer seems to be needed. The mythological project was very 
 much a matter of the past by 1837, and the anticipated hostility to 
 Kehama had not materialized. "I must have been very unreason¬ 
 able," Southey himself tells us, "if I had not been satisfied with its 
 reception" (1838 preface). 
 
 In seeking enlightenment from this confusion, we must hold onto 
 a crucial fact: Southey continued to reprint Kehama even while re¬ 
 peatedly berating it. There is clearly a struggle here between the lit¬ 
 erary and the ideological selves in which neither can be allowed pos¬ 
 session of the field. The poem can be denounced but noc renounced. 
 Southey's ambivalence toward it is not only admitted but also fore¬ 
 grounded in the stubborn enmity between Kehama and its prefaces. 
 To subdue the contention is to slight the ambivalence. It runs too 
 deep for facile minimization. 
 
 If we are to consider the contest between ideology and literature 
 as it bears on Southey's poem about India, we must turn to his rela¬ 
 tionship to imperial discourse. Taylor's view that the mythology of 
 a subjected people should be converted into cultural capital encour¬ 
 ages such a turn. The difficulty is that the literary transaction must 
 maximize what the imperial transaction devalues. Southey's project 
 runs afoul of this difficulty so that the relationships between the 
 two transactions, between the literary and the political, between the 
 Indian other and the English self, and even between resistance and 
 domination are written inescapably into the engagement between 
 the delinquent poem and the disciplinary behavior of its prefaces. 
 
 Southey's troubles are compounded because even in the years of 
 pantisocracy and Wat Tyler, when Southey might have been ex- 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 143 
 
pected to know better, his commitment was to a view of the England- 
 India relationship that was to come to fruition in the work of Mill 
 and Hegel rather than to the more benign view represented by Wil¬ 
 liam Jones. The picture can be confusing because Southey some¬ 
 times makes statements that seem critical of imperialism, but these 
 are meant to suggest not that imperialism is morally suspect but 
 that it is liable to abuse when it is not practiced by the British. 
 
 "Afric's wrong and Europe's guilt" points the finger of reproach 
 at other nations. A more gentle and docile race than the Hotten¬ 
 tots does not exist, but it is the Boers who cruelly oppress them. 
 Southey's next sentence starkly uncovers his rampant ethnocen- 
 trism. Since the Boers would not be easy to educate to British stan¬ 
 dards, the only practical measure he can suggest would be an im¬ 
 portation of hangmen "for their especial benefit." 12 Hangmen were 
 notably absent when a Hottentot woman was exhibited in a cage in 
 London a few years after Southey's recommendation. 
 
 Southey read The Lusiads in Mickle's translation when he was 
 twelve and reviewed Lord Strangford's translation in 1803. He found 
 da Gama more atrocious than Pizarro, who is apparently a bench¬ 
 mark in these matters {NewLetters, 1:337). The Portuguese conquest 
 had "barbarised the Mahommedans." These misdeeds would be put 
 in order when Madoc sang the ancestral right of the British (or more 
 precisely the Welsh) to the New World and proclaimed the glories 
 of colonizing in the English way. 13 The Napoleonic danger drives 
 Southey into a frenzy of preemptive imperialism: "We ought to take 
 the Cape and to take Egypt, for unless we have both France will. We 
 ought to colonize both with Sepoys and Chinese—and to garrison 
 the West Indies with Sepoys also" [New Letters, 1:380). 
 
 Southey is certainly in advance of others in perceiving the possi¬ 
 bilities of Asiatic manpower in protecting the British empire from 
 its competitors. The reference to Egypt is doubly interesting since 
 Southey's friend, Landor, had published Gebir in 1798, which deals 
 with the failure of a previous attempt to take Egypt. In 1803, after the 
 battle of the Nile, Landor added twenty lines to the seventh book. 
 These lines, according to him, "describe the equality which nature 
 teaches, the absurdity of colonizing a country which is peopled, and 
 the superior advantages of cultivating those which remain unoccu¬ 
 pied." 14 The 1803 preface similarly refers to "the calamities which 
 must ever attend the superfluous colonization of a peopled country." 
 
 Landor's clarification is necessary since his verse is anything but 
 pellucid. Southey himself found it "so obscure" that he "suspected 
 
 144 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
the author to be hardly sane," but he claims to have understood it 
 "after repeated study." He cited it as "the only contemporary poem" 
 to which he was, "as a poet, in the slightest degree indebted" (New 
 Letters, 1:476). 
 
 As we have seen, the distinction between peopled and unpeopled 
 territories owes its origin to the imagined emptiness of the New 
 World and to the rights of occupancy that emptiness created in the 
 minds of those determined to perceive it. It remains a distinction to 
 be drawn only by imperialist nations according to their convenience 
 and in keeping with standards not open to debate. Its repeated use 
 to justify colonization makes it apparent that the "equality which 
 nature teaches" can be much less important than the superiority 
 that power confers. The consequence to be noted here is that the dis¬ 
 tinction, indefensible as it is, applies to India as much as it does to 
 Egypt. Landor, writing during the Hastings impeachment, does not 
 take the further step that British territorial expansion in India seems 
 to invite. There is no evidence that Southey would have considered 
 taking it. 
 
 Southey's imperialism is given its moral sustenance by a strong 
 and persistent evangelical strain. "My own firm belief," he tells us, 
 "is that there are but two methods of extending civilization—con¬ 
 quest and conversion" (L and C, 3:281). His preference at this stage is 
 for conversion, but there is no evidence that he would have shrunk 
 from conquest. It facilitates conversion, and conversion, in its turn, 
 can protect and ennoble conquest: "In India the want of an estab¬ 
 lished church is a crying evil. Nothing but missionaries can secure 
 in that country what we have won" (L and C, 3:37). This is a note 
 struck more than once in Southey's writing. He told Wynn, for in¬ 
 stance, that unless a vigorous policy of introducing Christianity into 
 India was adopted, there would be "more remains of the Portugueze 
 than of the English Empire in the East." 15 "When will the East India 
 Company be convinced," he asks in 1803, "that it is in their ultimate 
 interest as well as their immediate duty to convert their subjects?" 16 
 By 1814, he is more resigned: if "we had served God with half the 
 zeal [of the Roman Catholic Church] . . . the tree of life would long 
 ere this have struck deep roots in Hindostan." 17 Chaos, in Southey's 
 imagination, rages threateningly outside the frail walls of a cosmos 
 that can only be Christian: "It is only the institutions of Christianity 
 and the vicinity of better regulated States which prevent kingdoms, 
 under such circumstances of misrule [as, for example, Naples], from 
 sinking into a barbarism like that of Turkey." 18 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 145 
 
The main bond of companionship between conquest and conver¬ 
 sion is the double devaluation they impose on subject peoples. Hu¬ 
 miliation can be a fertile soil in which to plant the desire to be 
 otherwise. It is easier to persuade a defeated nation that not just its 
 institutions but the premises on which those institutions depend are 
 radically at fault, that revisionary solutions will not be sufficient, 
 that its religion and the culture that religion nourishes must be not 
 simply modified but abandoned. This alliance of dismissive forces 
 takes over the stage on which representations of India are paraded, 
 coming to a climax in the work of Mill and Hegel. Southey can be 
 seen as an early contributor to a rhetoric that the dynamics of power 
 were to make inevitable, however differently we may choose to view 
 it amid the retrospective realities of judgment. 
 
 Southey assigns Hinduism a distinctive place in the catalog of 
 false religions. Islamic tales may be "metaphorical rubbish," 19 but 
 they are not, like those of Hinduism, monstrous, grotesque, and 
 dangerous. The Asiatic fables may be "full of resemblances to Chris¬ 
 tianity" (L and C, 3:37), but as far as India is concerned, there is to 
 be no building on those resemblances. The true method of convert¬ 
 ing Native Americans "is by showing them like the old blind man 
 in Madoc, how little difference there is in the basis of our faith." 20 
 Hinduism similarly argues that all rivers of belief end in the same 
 sea of understanding, but Southey, although agreeing to the proposi¬ 
 tion, apparently feels that this particular river is not to be traversed. 
 
 Hinduism is unique in its inability to sustain a society capable 
 of progress. The Islamic world stagnated while the West advanced, 
 even though "at one period the Mahommedan courts were the most 
 enlightened of Europe." Southey's explanation for this stagnation is 
 curious: "Perhaps Polygamy is the radical evil" [New Letters, 1:216). 
 Fortunately, polygamy is permitted but not demanded by Islam, 
 whereas caste ("class" is considered a more accurate translation) is a 
 constituent of the creation fable as recounted in the laws of Manu. 
 "Perhaps no religion is hostile to improvement except the Hindoo" 
 (New Letters, 1:217), Southey concludes, putting Hinduism not at 
 the bottom of the ladder but in a place where no ladder is available. 
 He can be vitriolic on the evils of the caste system: "I prefer the 
 Devil to Seeva the Destroyer. . . . The Hindu system of caste is the 
 worst ever devised for cramping human intellect, and anything to 
 destroy it were desirable. There are diseases where arsenic becomes 
 medicine" [New Letters, 1:292-93). 
 
 The collective tirade against caste by Mill, Hegel, the evangelists, 
 
 146 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
and Southey is remarkable in its ferocity. One has to wonder whether 
 misgivings about English class structures and social exclusions are 
 not being conveniently transferred to an Indian other, which can 
 then be deafeningly upbraided. The Warrant of Precedence, which 
 governed British protocol in India and which lays down with ap¬ 
 palling minuteness the niceties of rank to be observed on official 
 occasions, makes interesting reading in this context. 21 Be that as it 
 may, the result is to define Hinduism as a religion and perhaps the 
 only religion that the will to progress may have to eradicate. For the 
 gathering anti-Jones majority, this conclusion cannot be less than 
 helpful. 
 
 Unimprovable India meets its match in an England with an ex¬ 
 traordinary capacity for improving the lot of its subjects. Christianity 
 lays the ground for the advancement of civilization,- it also lays the 
 ground for the natural corollary of that advancement, namely, for 
 becoming more like the English: "The converts would immediately 
 become English in their feelings, for, like Mahomet, we ought to 
 make our language go with our religion" [L and C, 3:37). 
 
 Macaulay's minute is on the horizon here, and Southey's anticipa¬ 
 tion of it helps direct our attention to the relationship between lan¬ 
 guage and identity that is crucial in Macaulay's implicit agenda. De¬ 
 fenses of the minute have almost always been utilitarian defenses, 
 leaving this relationship untouched or circumspectly minimized. 
 Commonwealth literature, as an institution drawing together the 
 English-speaking world and substituting cultural for imperial cohe¬ 
 sion, returns to the submerged purpose behind the emphasis on the 
 practical advantages of learning English. As the commonwealth era 
 passes into the postcolonial, this implicit agenda will have to be 
 heavily modified. The relationships between English-inheriting cul¬ 
 tures will have to be dialogic rather than guided by a single cen¬ 
 trality, and inheritances other than English will have to be crucial in 
 the dialogue. A network of relationships will need to be rethought. 
 
 "We are indeed slandered about the East Indies," John Rickman 
 wrote in correspondence with Southey. "Can anybody think," he 
 went on to ask complacently, that "the people there are not infi¬ 
 nitely benefited by our preponderance? ... I see no chance of abuse 
 of our power—when it is established." Southey concurred, adding 
 that he was "ardent for making the world English." He was eager to 
 review a book on military policy by C. W. Pasley that endorsed "a 
 sort of political Islam—which teaches us to propagate freedom and 
 good laws by the sword." 22 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 147 
 
"Making the world English" is a proposition that should dismiss 
 itself by its ethnocentric absurdity. Yet it is really Hinduism's resis¬ 
 tance to that proposition, its perception of itself as a radically dif¬ 
 ferent cultural site, that results in its being defined as monstrous. 
 The monstrous is a companion to the hybrid, which, as Bacon says 
 of the imagination, joins what nature has severed and severs what 
 nature has joined, making unlawful matches and divorces of things. 
 The hybrid conspires with the monstrous to change both relation¬ 
 ships and dimensions, creating a combined excess too powerful and 
 threatening to be brought back to the normality it ruptures. Yet both 
 are constituents of the self, refusing to be either owned or disowned, 
 to be safely inside or securely outside. Their violations congeal in 
 an outrageousness that gathers to assert the double menace of their 
 alienness and kinship. If a religion is monstrous to another religion, 
 it is because it is the child of the other religion's exclusions. 
 
 A decade of hostile thinking about India, steadily maintained in 
 Southey's correspondence, lies behind the opening diatribe of his 
 preface to Kehama. It instructs us vehemently on how to read or per¬ 
 haps how to avoid the poem. Instructions become necessary because 
 the poem lacks them and because the reader, deprived of their guid¬ 
 ance, may well come to an unconscionable sympathy with the mon¬ 
 strous. Fortitude and perseverance in the face of apparently irresist¬ 
 ible power and the destruction of evil by the canker within itself are 
 understandings that the poem nourishes and that are not repellent to 
 Christianity. Indeed, Southey's enactment of that favorite romantic 
 theme of individual goodness struggling against institutional corrup¬ 
 tion is an all-too-convincing demonstration of East-West affinities. 23 
 
 For Southey and many of his contemporaries, Kehama was a more 
 monstrous Napoleon, threatening not merely Europe but also the 
 cosmos in a fantasy acclimatized to the much-proclaimed extrava¬ 
 gances of Asia. Looking beyond the immediate parallel and back to 
 its Western roots, we can see in Kehama's desire to be master of the 
 universe a displacement of the Faustian urge, proclaiming a kinship 
 between Faust and Tamburlaine of which Marlowe was decidedly 
 conscious. A mythology that can sustain these enlightenments is 
 not self-evidently an invention of the Devil, as Southey claims pagan 
 mythologies to be in his second preface. He is drawing here on a 
 tradition fathered by Augustine that comes to a climax in Milton's 
 resounding catalog of false gods [PL 1.396-521) and his collective dis¬ 
 missal of them as abominations. 
 
 Since the Devil was having one of his best days when he invented 
 
 148 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Hindu mythology, special precautions are needed to advise the 
 reader on how to approach the dangerous construction that follows 
 the preface. Vigilance is all the more important because warning de¬ 
 vices that might have been installed in the poem seem conspicuous 
 by their absence. A built-in European point of view might have given 
 the reader a familiar footing in the infernal regions of the poem's 
 mythology. A narrative voice could have provided the reader with 
 the appropriate reorientation in the event of the reader's being sur¬ 
 prised by sin. The very substantial body of notes that Southey pro¬ 
 vides might have addressed and placed the poem from its margins 
 even while testifying to the authenticity of its details. 
 
 In any event, none of these safeguards are adapted. Madoc builds a 
 European point of view into itself, but the poem on India is enclosed 
 by India. The narrative voice avoids the Western intrusion that is 
 occasionally to be found in Thalaba: 
 
 So, one day may the Crescent from thy Mosques 
 Be plucked by Wisdom, when the enlighten'd Arm 
 
 Of Europe conquers to redeem the East! 
 
 (Thalaba 5.6) 
 
 Indeed, on more than one occasion (e.g., 5.16, 7.4, 10.24), the narra¬ 
 tive voice assimilates the poem to Western understandings instead 
 of pointing reproachfully to its alienness. 
 
 Finally, the notes, drawing equally on evangelicals and on the 
 school of Jones, do so mainly to document the poem's authenticity 
 and to argue that when the author resorts to invention, he is no more 
 extravagant in his inventiveness than the mythology within which 
 he works. Condemnatory conclusions do not abound in the notes, 
 and one can occasionally find statements that seek to moderate the 
 revulsion against Hinduism that Southey shares with an increasing 
 number of his countrymen. One such example is the note pointing 
 out that suttee, although not disallowed, is not demanded by Hindu 
 religion |8:552n). 24 
 
 For the missionary conscience and the Mill aficionado, Kehama 
 may be a poem sadly lacking in monstrosity. There is something to 
 be said for a contemporary reviewer's suggestion that it should have 
 been translated into Hindustani to find its proper audience. 25 It is out 
 of synchronization with an emerging discourse to which Southey 
 subscribed and that he may even have anticipated. The juggernaut 
 episode may be the only part of the poem that fully satisfies the re¬ 
 quirements of this discourse. Southey devotes a whole canto (14) to 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 149 
 
it, as if struggling to make up for lost time. It is structurally gratu¬ 
 itous and remains in precarious balance with a serene description of 
 the celestial regions that relies heavily on Kalidasa (canto 7) and an 
 account of the birth of the Ganges (canto 10) that may be the high- 
 water mark of Southey's accomplishment as a mythological poet. 
 "Fitter for the dotage dreams of Sir William Jones than the vision of 
 the poet" is Southey's scathing judgment on the Hindu pantheon, 26 
 a judgment embarrassingly undone by the Ganges narration. 
 
 Both the celestial ascent and the descent of the Ganges are epi¬ 
 sodes that resist rather than assist imperialist devaluations of India. 
 The same can be said of Southey's banyan tree passage (13.5), even 
 though the writing here is routine in contrast to the elan displayed 
 in Owenson's brilliantly flamboyant implementation of that topos. 27 
 The climax in Padalon, the submarine realm of Yama, god of death 
 and judgment, is a demonstration of poetic justice, asserting the cen¬ 
 tral presence of Western norms in Hindu mythology rather than an 
 essay in an alien grotesque. Evil is incarcerated in itself in a man¬ 
 ner that recalls the tenth book of Paradise Lost as well as Beckford's 
 Vathek, and virtue, armed with fortitude, is given its just reward. 28 
 
 Perhaps the principal safeguard for the errant reader of Kehama is 
 the "remarkable peculiarity" of Hinduism on which its fable is built. 
 According to Southey, 
 
 Prayers, penances, and sacrifices are supposed to possess an 
 inherent and actual value, in no degree depending on the 
 disposition or motive of the person who performs them. 
 They are drafts upon Heaven, for which the Gods cannot 
 refuse payment. The worst men, bent upon the worst de¬ 
 signs, have in this manner obtained power which has made 
 them formidable to the Supreme Deities. (1810 preface) 
 
 This is a crassly commercial trivialization, confusing the gods of 
 Hinduism with the Bank of England and assigning cash values in 
 some celestial ledger to "prayers, penances, and sacrifices." Yet to 
 be fair to Southey, his interpretation can be justified, given a reso¬ 
 lutely literal reading of some of the Puranas and Vedas. To discour¬ 
 age such a reading, it should be sufficient merely to point to the 
 creation hymn in the Rigveda (10.129), a supreme accomplishment 
 in meditative poetry, which, as befits a meditative poem, is in the 
 end a reading of its readers. The Vedas call for a reading that is liter¬ 
 ary rather than literal, but literal readings are less difficult and more 
 persuasive for those seeking to devalue Hindu civilization. 29 
 
 150 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
If we consider the religious texts of Hinduism as parts of a world 
 rather than in isolation, the contrast between a proliferative my¬ 
 thology and a philosophy moving steadily in the direction of scho¬ 
 lastic rigor culturally internalizes the self-and-other relationship in 
 a contestation in which neither term can be privileged and in which 
 the self can only be the other of its otherness. Here again, the read¬ 
 ings called for by the more expansive terrain that the contestation 
 opens have to be literary rather than literal. 
 
 In any religion mindful of its seriousness, external austerities can 
 only be significant as the evidence of an inner purification that 
 allows the divine selfhood within each individual to shine forth free 
 of encumbrances. If one is "by merit more than birthright son of 
 God" [PL 3.309), then acts of self-purification that are sufficiently 
 sustained and resolute will enable one to be "formidable" to those 
 gods whose possession of their places is largely titular. Power thus 
 attained can be abused since it is in the nature of power to be abused. 
 There is a limit to the abuse, beyond which a restorative force can 
 and must intervene in order to keep the cosmos in being. There 
 is also a point, according to Hindu thinking, at which the cosmos 
 ceases to remain in being and is dissolved and withdrawn into the 
 infinite potential. 
 
 Kehama becomes formidable to the gods not by practicing any 
 austerity but by sacrificing as many horses as money can buy with 
 the blessings of as many priests as he can intimidate. His career, 
 if we insist on reading it literally, makes Hindu religion ridiculous 
 rather than monstrous. It does say something in passing about the 
 methods and motives of empire builders. 30 The gods who cope with 
 Kehama by doing nothing until it is too late to do anything and who 
 then complain that nothing can be done (7.2) also have lessons to 
 teach us and themselves. 
 
 Southey may have felt that the "remarkable peculiarity" on which 
 his fiction was founded was sufficient to cause loathing in the reader 
 or at least an incredulity that would assign Hinduism to an outra¬ 
 geous otherness. As already indicated, he took no further steps to 
 make his poem repellent to his audience. It would have been a para¬ 
 dox if he had done so, and there may be something to be gained from 
 studying the paradox. 
 
 In an almost casual remark in the original preface, Southey tells 
 us that the deformities in the mythological personages of the Brah¬ 
 mans were "easily kept out of sight." By 1838, the task of conceal¬ 
 ment had become considerably more formidable: 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 151 
 
It appears to me that here, neither the tone of morals, nor 
 the strain of poetry, could be pitched too high: that nothing 
 but moral sublimity could compensate for the extravagance 
 of the fictions, and that all the skill I might possess in the 
 art of poetry was required to counterbalance the disadvan¬ 
 tages of a mythology with which few readers were likely to 
 be well acquainted, and which would appear monstrous if 
 its deformities were not kept out of sight. (1838 preface) 
 
 To dissociate the "moral sublimity" of Kehama and the loftiness 
 of its "strain of poetry" from the extravagance of its fiction and the 
 monstrousness of the mythology through which the fiction is ar¬ 
 ticulated is indeed a heroic undertaking. If accomplished, it would 
 decisively fracture the poem. That the effort should be made at all 
 warns us that the contamination of the Indian is to be resisted at 
 all costs. Even the versification, once treated as ornamental, is now 
 called on to hold the infection at bay: "The spirit of the poem was 
 Indian but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the 
 language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets 
 of antiquity" (1838 preface). 
 
 A poem that quarantines a poem's language from its fiction and its 
 mythology is indeed a singular construction. It also proposes a way 
 of dealing with India that became more popular after 1857. More im¬ 
 portant, it is not clear how a poem now characterized as Indian in 
 spirit can have its moral sublimity totally given to it by a style free 
 of Indian infiltrations and formed exclusively on Western models. 
 
 Southey's contortions amount to saying that the poem has been 
 Westernized to make it acceptable to a Western audience, although 
 without prejudice to its monstrous heart. This is a difficult under¬ 
 taking and one that can be called gravely misleading within the con¬ 
 tainment of the Mill-Hegel discourse. Southey is, in fact, making his 
 apologies to that discourse by taking refuge in the proposition that 
 the poem must give aesthetic pleasure to its readers. Unfortunately, 
 the remainder of that Horatian tag requires the poem to instruct its 
 readers in the course of pleasing them. Southey can only please his 
 readers by covering up an instructional content that the Mill-Hegel 
 discourse requires him to underline. On the other hand, not cover¬ 
 ing it up would result in a diatribe instead of a poem, designed to 
 excite disgust rather than bring about pleasure. 31 
 
 By 1838, the Mill-Hegel discourse, fortified by Macaulay's minute 
 on education, was about to achieve a dominance in British percep- 
 
 152 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
tions of India that was to last for nearly a century. Southey had been 
 a steady subscriber to that discourse from the inception of his career 
 as a writer. His deference to it is entirely understandable. Unfortu¬ 
 nately, a poem that Southey in 1810 could have passed off as a flawed 
 experiment in an arcane mythology was now a persisting embar¬ 
 rassment. Part of himself had always been invested in constructions 
 now close to attaining a monopoly of the ways in which India might 
 be viewed. That part was waylaid by a poem he could not disown. 
 
 Retrieving the poem from the Indian contamination had also been 
 made unnecessarily difficult. As has already been pointed out, the 
 design could have incorporated a Western point of view. We do not 
 know if Southey pondered this possibility. We do know that, influ¬ 
 enced by William Jones's example, he chose a completely different 
 approach: "I soon perceived that the best mode of treating it would 
 be to construct a story altogether mythological" (1838 preface; ital¬ 
 ics added). 
 
 Jones's way of treating Indian mythology was admissible in a 
 power relationship in which Indian culture was allowed a minor de¬ 
 gree of attention and respect. It could be regarded as en route to 
 Christian understanding and not as a horrifying otherness that called 
 for root-and-branch erasure or at best for transformation rather than 
 reform. The Mill-Hegel discourse was considerably less tolerant. Its 
 argument was that the Indian way of imagining India condemned it 
 to confinement within itself, to a petrifying observance of restric¬ 
 tions that regulated every detail of the self's response to the world. 
 Progress called for the dismantling not only of specific institutions 
 but also of the habits of construction that had led to them. A poem 
 written within this discourse could not be "altogether mythologi¬ 
 cal." It had to speak to Indian mythology rather than speak out of it. 
 
 In fact, Kehama is inside its mythology to such an extent that 
 nearly everything it says can be said only through the mythologi¬ 
 cal envelope. It is difficult under these circumstances to argue that 
 the moral sublimity is not native to the envelopment and that it is 
 an exterior finish laid on by the style. To make such an observation 
 is to trivialize moral sublimity and to give style an importance it 
 cannot possess. England's appropriation of India was not a matter of 
 restyling it but of placing its economy in a state of dependence that 
 included cultural accomplishments as well as physical resources. 
 The aesthetic claim, implausible in itself, is out of alignment with 
 the power relationship. 
 
 That power relationship, as we know, changed swiftly and drasti- 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 153 
 
cally during the first decades of the nineteenth century, opening up 
 huge possibilities that called out to be seized by an articulate and 
 assertive imperial discourse. The rapidity with which political and 
 economic discourse attached itself to the rhetoric and ideology of su¬ 
 premacy, formulated so tellingly by Mill and Hegel, left the develop¬ 
 ment of the attendant literary discourse behind. Romantic thought 
 had moved in the direction of a world humanism that Schwab in¬ 
 deed sees as the essence of the romantic project. To convert a world 
 of thought into an empire of thought in which philosophical and 
 poetic excellence would walk in companionship with military and 
 political supremacy was not an enterprise for which literature was 
 as yet ready. 
 
 The differential development of discourses that Louis Althusser 
 has made important may provide a way of anatomizing the confu¬ 
 sions of Kehama. Southey's commitment to an imperial discourse, 
 underlined in the prose and in the two prefaces, is impeded by his 
 involvement in a literary discourse of world humanism not yet ad¬ 
 justed to the imperial claim. The poem, as a result, is overdetermined 
 by its loyalties, an overdetermination expressed at the aesthetic level 
 by its self-troubling attempt to provide pleasure while promoting 
 disgust. We can expect such a poem to be uneasy in its ambivalences 
 and vacillating in its sense of priorities. 
 
 The most eloquent substantiation of the discourse of world hu¬ 
 manism is Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Southey's poem is better 
 tuned to the imperial future. Shelley's poem can be read as if des¬ 
 tined to speak to a more distant future, beyond that of imperialism 
 itself. Yet Shelley's poem about the end of empires is in a relation¬ 
 ship with the language of empire that, despite a self-awareness and 
 a readiness to continue negotiations with its problem that Southey's 
 poem lacks, can also be thought of as uneasily overdetermined. 
 
 Shelley's perception of India as a political actuality rather than as 
 a site for the imagination is similar to Mill's and Southey's, even in 
 those niceties of language that describe India as "straightjacketed" 
 and "cramped." His simile of Asia as a golden chalice that receives 
 the "bright wine" of Prometheus's overflowing being (1.1.809-10) is 
 uncomfortably close to the gendered imperialism of a set piece by 
 Owenson, discussed in chapter 6. Using the imagery of empire to as¬ 
 sure us that empires can become irrelevant may point to the creative 
 appropriation of an unavoidable legacy; it also points to the troubles 
 of a poem that is written on the fault line between two discourses. 
 Shelley and Southey locate their poems differently in relation to this 
 
 154 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
fault line, but both writers are responsive to its stresses. The uneasy 
 transcendentalism of the one and the irresolute imperialism of the 
 other are different strategies of accommodation and avoidance. 
 
 Southey's world-mythological project is in keeping with the ro¬ 
 mantic involvement, but world projects are also designed with im¬ 
 perial aims in view. Knowledge and power are alike impatient of 
 limits. Kehama's quest for dominance takes in both the celestial 
 and the submarine. Endymion's quest for understanding explores 
 the same expansiveness, even to the extent of following Southey's 
 sequence. Keats's journey is, of course, by far the most probing. Wis¬ 
 dom is not possible without the taste of sorrow, and in the powerful 
 blockages of the two Hyperions, the taste of sorrow can be no more 
 than the promise of wisdom. 
 
 In its humanist version, a world-mythological project would pro¬ 
 ceed on the basis that every mythology that has "extended itself 
 widely and powerfully influenced the human mind" has something 
 to say to world understanding. In its imperialist version, such a 
 project would seek to demonstrate that no mythology has anything 
 significant to offer the general wisdom until it is placed in relation¬ 
 ship to a Euro-Christian understanding that may either dismiss it al¬ 
 together or raise it into acceptability by purging it of its perversions 
 and deformities. Southey may endorse the second view officially, but 
 his poem remains subject to the persuasions of the first one. As the 
 discourse of empire consolidated itself, powerfully marginalizing 
 even its imperial alternatives, his discomfort with Kehama became 
 more intense. The poem on India too clearly sees "the end of the 
 difference" and the domestication of the "wild, savage, and prepos¬ 
 terous," to quote Emerson on the aims of historical study. 32 By 1838, 
 Kehama was an embarrassment to its prefaces. Perspectives change, 
 and a more modern reading might well find the prefaces an embar¬ 
 rassment to what we now make of the poem. 
 
 The Curse of Kehama is yet another instance (among several in 
 this volume) of the capacity of literature to circumvent ideologies 
 and to speak with a generosity that brings understanding closer to 
 justice. The relationship between the rebellious poem and the repri¬ 
 manding prefaces is remarkable for the subversive eloquence that it 
 not only confesses to but also formalizes. It lays bare with a clarity 
 that may be unique the quarrel between the ideological and poetic 
 selves, between containment and proliferation, between regulatory 
 reason and inventive fancy. 
 
 The struggle between the poem and its prefaces offers itself to 
 
 Monstrous Mythologies 155 
 
many translations. The most important in this context is its transla¬ 
 tion of the England-India relationship, which takes into its imperial 
 scope and dismissive diagramming all of the other translations that 
 have been outlined. In its individual episodes and, more persistently, 
 in the universality of its fable, Southey's refractory undertaking both 
 proclaims a classic imperial contrast and brings it to the verge of its 
 humiliation. 
 
 156 
 
 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
8 
 
 Understanding Asia: 
 Shelley's Prometheus Unbound 
 
 At the opening of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus wishes to have 
 his curse of Jupiter recited. It is not easy to find someone for this 
 task. Everyone remembers the curse, preserves it as a "treasured 
 spell," and meditates on its fulfillment in "secret joy" (1.1.210, 179- 
 85)/ but no one is so reckless as to pronounce it. Under a totalitarian 
 regime, it is not wise to intone in prominent places or even in Cau¬ 
 casian ravines prophecies envisaging the death of the tyrant. Jupiter 
 is the ultimate dictator, or to put it in Demogorgon's language, he is 
 "the supreme of living things" (2.2.114) in an order by which every¬ 
 thing living is encompassed. Hence, no one living can recite the 
 curse, and although those who are dead can conceivably recite it, 
 they cannot do so in the language of the living. 
 
 Fortunately, there is a third world of phantasms and shadows. 
 Joined with their living counterparts only in death, they continue 
 meanwhile their wraithlike existence. This is not a widely known 
 fact. The magus Zoroaster is actually the "sole of men" to have met 
 "his own image walking in the garden" (1.1.191—94). A denizen of the 
 shadow world can safely recite the curse since Jupiter's vengeance 
 would then waste itself on air, sweeping like "rainy wind through 
 the abandoned gate / Of a fallen palace" (1.1.2x7-18). Earth proposes 
 a variety of phantasms for this task, including Prometheus's own 
 shadow (1.1.210-15). From these possibilities, the phantasm of Jupiter 
 is chosen. 
 
 The preliminaries are complicated indeed, and more than a quar¬ 
 ter of the first act has passed before we reach the end of the selec¬ 
 tion process. It is not easy and it should not be easy to find a voice 
 that will foretell Jove's downfall, even in the words of someone else. 
 But more significant than this admission of the fully inclusive grasp 
 of the Jovian dictatorship is Prometheus's refusal to recite a curse 
 
that he intends to disown or even to have his phantasm recite it. 
 The power of discourse and the extreme difficulty of avoiding its 
 contamination are strikingly evident in these preliminaries. If the 
 phantasm of Jupiter is eventually selected, it is not simply because 
 of the nice irony of this choice or because power is destroyed by 
 what grows in its shadow or because wreaking vengeance on one's 
 phantasm is uncomfortably close to cutting one's nose off in order to 
 spite one's face. Prometheus's underlying and necessarily inarticu¬ 
 late intention is more fundamental. It is not simply Jove who must 
 be deposed. The Jovian discourse and the subtle knot of our partici¬ 
 pation in it have to be unraveled. We can resist the application of 
 this discourse and still remain entangled in the proliferations of its 
 growth not simply around but within ourselves. We can overthrow 
 tyrants, but it is another matter to achieve the overthrow of tyranny. 
 Jupiter's phantasm has to voice the curse because the curse itself is 
 Jupiterian. To insist on it is only to maintain an endless will to ven¬ 
 geance against a power of dominance that feeds on that will. 
 
 The curse is then to be withdrawn. But there is a subtlety to its 
 withdrawal that goes to the heart of the poem and its strikingly 
 lucid perception of the relationship between dominance and its dis¬ 
 course. When the curse has been recited, Prometheus disowns it in 
 the words "It doth repent me" (i.1.303). He might have been ex¬ 
 pected to say "I do repent it." The words fit the metrical pattern as 
 well as those actually used, and in any case, euphony should not be 
 the consideration foremost in Prometheus's mind at this moment. 
 His inversion is carefully, indeed exquisitely, designed. It is not a 
 wild exaggeration to call it the fulcrum on which the leverage of the 
 poem, its future capacity to relocate our understandings, rests. The 
 evident effect is to objectify the curse, to distance it from Prome¬ 
 theus so that it is no longer part of him. The subtler effect is to put 
 tellingly before us the primacy of discourse and the extent to which 
 it is constitutive of those whom it contains. 2 
 
 The place of agency in a discourse whose hegemonic nature writes 
 its agents has to remain profoundly problematic. Post-Reformation 
 religious thought wrestles long and indecisively with this problem. 
 Calvinism eliminates indeterminacy by eradicating agency, but less 
 extreme solutions that open the divine poem to the subversive po¬ 
 tential of free will have to find religious (and aesthetic) ways of con¬ 
 taining and redirecting that subversiveness. 
 
 Shelley postulates a discourse sufficiently hegemonic to shape 
 even the forms of resistance to itself. His inversion recognizes this 
 
 158 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
enforced collusiveness, but it also treads on the brink of represent¬ 
 ing a totalitarian world order as consenting to its suicide by making 
 it possible for resistance to disavow the forms of thought that have 
 hitherto contained it. A tightrope has to be walked between hege¬ 
 mony and agency. Shelley's poem brings out not merely the precari¬ 
 ousness of the tightrope but also the difficulty and the importance 
 of finding it. 
 
 A reading based on the primacy and the constitutive power of dis¬ 
 course could be dismissed as highly exploitative if it had no more 
 to work on than the relative position of four words. It is partly for 
 this reason that the prolonged process of selecting a voice to utter 
 the curse has been carefully gone through; the preliminaries are ap¬ 
 propriate and called for by the climactic moment. But if no more 
 remained to be added, the argument so far could be called only in¬ 
 genious. There is, of course, more to be said. In fact, there is a 
 series of cruxes that seem to fall into order and to open a route 
 to our understanding of the poem if we proceed along the reading 
 being used. 
 
 The site chosen for Prometheus's ordeal supports this reading. 
 Aeschylus's Prometheus is pinned to a rock in a gorge in Scythia, 
 the embodiment of barbarism in the Greek lexicon of dismissal. 
 Shelley's Prometheus is bound to icy rocks in a ravine in the Indian 
 Caucasus, a place where civilization may have begun rather than a 
 place where a deep-seated barbarism lies in proximity to that abyss 
 of Tartarus into which Prometheus is plunged to be tormented by the 
 Furies. Shelley's insistence that we locate our minds in the Indian 
 part of the vaguely demarcated Caucasus promises a role for Prome¬ 
 theus that is redemptive rather than heroically defiant. In doing so, 
 it also responds imaginatively to the scholarship of his day. Never¬ 
 theless, it was not until 1963 that his choice became a matter of 
 interest to our own day's scholarship. 3 
 
 Shelley may have been encouraged in his choice by Owenson's 
 influential novel, The Missionary, which he seems to have read at 
 least three times in six months and which describes Bernier's Para¬ 
 dise of Kashmir as "confined within the majestic girdle of the Indian 
 Caucasus." 4 The enclosed garden, protected by apparently impass¬ 
 able mountain defenses, is securely in the Miltonic tradition; that 
 connection, taken in conjunction with the work of Jones and his 
 colleagues, bestows on the presentation of the Indian Caucasus as a 
 place of origins a status both scholarly and mythic. "Everything, yes, 
 everything without exception has its origin in India" is Schlegel's 
 
 Understanding Asia 159 
 
excited claim, made in a letter of September 15, 1803, to Ludwig 
 Tieck. 5 Origins include linguistic origins. If we admit the possibility 
 that discourse began here, then Shelley's relocation of Prometheus's 
 ordeal can be seen to go further, opening our minds to the repercus¬ 
 sions of having discourse and dominance originate on the same site. 
 
 As Shelley composed his work, Mill's History of British India was 
 coming off the presses. 6 Two years after Prometheus Unbound was 
 published, Hegel was to begin his lectures on history in Berlin. The 
 advance of humanity was an undertaking now reserved for the West. 
 Meanwhile, the pace of territorial acquisition in India quickened. 
 By 1818, the East India Company directly controlled 553,000 square 
 miles of Indian territory, with an estimated population of 87 mil¬ 
 lion. 7 An empire of unprecedented size was being assembled as Shel¬ 
 ley wrote prophetically of the end of kingdoms. Prometheus Un¬ 
 bound asks to be read as a work distinctively fitted to the moment, 
 singular in its synchronization of the ancestral and the contempo¬ 
 rary, the primal forms of power and the prescriptive force of their 
 continuing presence. 
 
 Aeschylus's hero claims that "all human arts are from Prome¬ 
 theus." In Shelley's work, it is Asia addressing Demogorgon who 
 enumerates the gifts that Prometheus has bestowed on humanity. 
 Aeschylus's Prometheus speaks of having taught mankind "the 
 grouping of letters, to be a memorial and record of the past, the mis¬ 
 tress of the arts and mother of the muses." 8 Asia, in keeping with 
 her role as Prometheus's voice, defines the gift as speech rather than 
 writing and endows speech with an extraordinary precedence: "He 
 gave man speech and speech created thought / Which is the measure 
 of the universe" (2.4.72-73). 
 
 Classical rhetoric habitually regarded language as contingent on 
 thought, the most popular metaphor being that of a garment that 
 thought wore in order to announce itself. When Longinus tells us 
 that words are the pure light of thought, he is putting forward a 
 highly refined version of this metaphor and, in doing so, moving 
 toward the possibility that language may also illuminate what it an¬ 
 nounces. Shelley goes further and comes remarkably close to the 
 proposition that human understanding is irretrievably linguistic, 
 that our perceptions of the universe fall within patterns of thought 
 that are brought into being by the dispositions and within the con¬ 
 tainment of language. 
 
 Indian religious philosophy has argued that both the cosmos and 
 the differentiations of the language of knowing the cosmos devolved 
 
 160 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
together out of the primal sound. Shelley may have been unaware of 
 this proximity of origins, but the Caucasus in his presentation is not 
 simply the place where language began. It becomes the site of the 
 recognition that everything may have begun in language. 
 
 We live among representations that we make what they are and 
 that contribute heavily to making us what we are even in our efforts 
 to deny them. It must therefore repent us if it is to be authentically 
 transformed. If speech created thought, thought cannot change un¬ 
 less discourse also changes. It can only shuffle relationships and play 
 musical chairs within a continuing confinement. 
 
 There is a problem, and Shelley has come close to its heart. If he 
 does not confidently proceed to a solution, it is because indetermi¬ 
 nacy in coping with the problem lies in the nature of the problem 
 itself. Shelley does make steadily and impressively evident the poli¬ 
 tics of representation and the extreme difficulty of emancipation 
 from those politics. 
 
 Shelley's Asia is one of the felicities of naming, bringing her to the 
 rescue of a nineteenth-century Asia falling increasingly under Jupi- 
 terian dominance. Mary Shelley points out that Asia is the wife of 
 Prometheus, as she is indeed in Herodotus, although not in Hesiod. 9 
 Absent throughout the first act, she awaits the news of Prometheus's 
 transformation in a "far Indian vale, / The scene of her sad exile" 
 (1.1.826-27). It would be rash to conclude that India is perceived here 
 as the place of exile it later became to generation after generation of 
 raj administrators. Asia's exile is from a Jovian world to which she 
 is alien and that must remain as it is until the curse repents Pro¬ 
 metheus. Despite this alienation, the vale of Asia's loneliness, once 
 desolate and frozen like the gorge in which Prometheus is impris¬ 
 oned, is now "invested with fair flowers and herbs" by her "trans¬ 
 forming presence" (1.1.828-32). 
 
 Asia's delayed appearance only after Prometheus has been 
 cleansed of his curse ushers us into a politically charged environ¬ 
 ment. In that environment, we can imagine a captive subcontinent 
 as awaiting the news that the principles of its liberation, retrieved 
 from their perversion by Jovian discourse, have been made capable 
 of entering and not simply resisting history. Critics inevitably as¬ 
 sociate Asia with the feminine 10 but not necessarily with the colo¬ 
 nial feminine that the montage of the name, the continent, and the 
 pointedly chosen locale of the play's action bring to the foreground 
 of a contemporary reading. Asia's mission, significantly, is to save 
 more than Asia. The "Celt knew the Indian" (2.4.94) before Jupiter 
 
 Understanding Asia 161 
 
and before the politics of divide and rule. Asia's joining of two con¬ 
 tinents is evident in her striking resemblance to Botticelli's Venus 
 (2.4.156-60, 2.5.20-30, 3.3.64-84), 11 and as Venus-Urania, transported 
 to a world that imperialism had made the continent of Circe, she 
 represents a principle common to all cultures at their heart: 
 
 Love he sent to bind 
 The disunited tendrils of that vine 
 Which bears the wine of life, the human heart. 
 
 (2.4.63-65) 
 
 Love is not among the gifts of the Aeschylean Prometheus, and Asia 
 is not mentioned in that play. Aeschylus is concerned not with revo¬ 
 lution but with synthesis, and love is not relevant to his stark de¬ 
 piction of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Shelley 
 is concerned not with accommodation within a discourse shaped 
 by two polarities (the serpent and the eagle in his metaphors) but 
 with the possible abolition of that discourse and of the principle of 
 polarity that sustains it. 
 
 Feminine Asia, the object of Macaulay's contempt, is an inter¬ 
 rogator of some sternness in Demogorgon's cave, the voice of a con¬ 
 science not easily to be evaded. The interrogation is perplexing be¬ 
 cause Asia, far from seeking to pass beyond polarities, seems intent 
 on inscribing them with a ferocious commitment to a rhetorical 
 game being almost compulsively played. Some of the conventions 
 of that game become evident when Asia, having thrice demanded 
 that Jupiter be named, names him three times herself, after Demo- 
 gorgon has thrice evaded an answer. The exchange suggests that Asia 
 already knows what she needs to know and that verification rather 
 than information may be the purpose of this baffling dialogue. If 
 the bafflement persists, it is because the dialogue remains couched 
 in a language that Asia's own self-knowledge might be expected to 
 have made obsolete. Masters and slaves, tyrants and victims, an idyl¬ 
 lic past set against a ravaged present, move commandingly through 
 her angry rhetoric. Demogorgon's "I spoke but as ye speak" (2.4.112) 
 sounds like a wearied invitation to his questioner to try a differ¬ 
 ent discourse, an invitation that she sweeps aside to brandish yet 
 once more her favorite antithesis: "Who is the master of the slave?" 
 
 (2.4-114). 
 
 Yet when Demogorgon replies that the world is a passing parade, 
 that the deep truth is imageless, and that everything except eter¬ 
 nal love is subject to "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change," 
 
 162 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Asia affirms that her heart has already known this and that "each to 
 itself" must be the oracle of such truths (2.4.119-23). Her dialogue 
 with Panthea has indeed made the interrogation redundant, but it 
 remains accented by a moving authenticity. Asia represents a femi¬ 
 ninity ancestral and renascent and later to be made renascent in an 
 India where femininity was to engender the paradigms and the phi¬ 
 losophy of resistance. It is right that this femininity should be stern 
 in anger against what must not be endured and gentle in sharing 
 with Panthea the truths of the heart of which each must be the 
 oracle. Asia speaks in two discourses that must continue to coexist 
 uncomfortably in a world struggling not merely to inscribe but also 
 to embed as a foundation those "beautiful idealisms of moral excel¬ 
 lence" that become clear to Prometheus through his ordeal. It is not 
 unfitting that she should be a different person in each of the worlds 
 for which she speaks. 
 
 As for Demogorgon, it may be little consolation to point out 
 that his answers are more enlightening than the "Bourn, Bourn" 
 that greets the Western seeker in Forster's Marabar Caves. He is 
 commented on almost ad infinitum, with Stuart Curran's and John 
 Drew's remarks 12 possibly the most helpful in this context. In a 
 world of representations, Demogorgon appears as the Maya of the 
 moment, the representation called for by human awareness of the 
 point it has reached in its history. Beyond these representations, 
 the deep truth is imageless, an infinite, formless potentiality ready 
 to flow into and animate the historically contingent forms of under¬ 
 standing. Shelley is aware of the relativities of representation, and 
 if Demogorgon names himself eternity in the dethroning of Jupiter 
 (3.1.52) and points to eternity as an ancient and tottering mother in 
 the final lines of the poem, it is not necessarily because he does not 
 know who he is in addition to not knowing what to say. Demogorgon 
 represents (and to use that term is to undermine unavoidably the 
 proposition being made) an ultimacy that is formless but that can 
 be cognized only through forms, including the form of speech itself. 
 In defining himself, he does so through the contingency that makes 
 him what he momentarily is. If he names himself as eternity (and 
 also as Jupiter's son immediately thereafter), it is to delineate the site 
 of the naming as paradigmatic rather than historical. Shelley is not 
 bereft of consistency in these matters. His difficulty lies in having 
 to maintain the visionary compulsion to image finality against his 
 own keen awareness that finality cannot be imaged. 
 
 Promethean heroism falls within a feminine gender pattern and is 
 
 Understanding Asia 163 
 
thus fully consonant with the choice of Asia as the emissary of that 
 heroism. Its parent, Christian heroism as characterized by Milton, is 
 set against the traditional masculinity of the classical heroism it re¬ 
 places with its "better fortitude" [PL 9.31-33). Other relationships in 
 Paradise Lost between gender patterns—between the Father and the 
 Son in the third book and between Adam and Eve throughout the 
 course of the poem—have their parts to play in Milton's overall view 
 of gender relationships, which is thus too inclusive and too complex 
 to be arranged along any single axis. In Shelley's imperial world, 
 resistance (which, unlike rebellion, falls naturally into a feminine 
 gender pattern) is the only recourse after the force of dominance has 
 strengthened sufficiently to make insurrection impossible. This was 
 not the situation in the India of Shelley's time, although it may be 
 held to have become so after 1857. His poetry is prophetic in ways 
 that there is no reason to believe he anticipated. 
 
 If discourse authorizes its authors and if it must repent us in order 
 that we may repent ourselves fully, a world free of Jupiter must 
 also be free of his discourse. The Spirit of the Hour is careful to set 
 boundaries to that freedom by telling us that Jupiterian forms of 
 understanding have not been destroyed; they have merely ceased to 
 be pertinent to our identities: 
 
 The tools 
 
 And emblems of its last captivity 
 Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth, 
 
 Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now. 
 
 (3.4.176-79) 
 
 The word "last" is nicely ambiguous, and the passage must rank 
 as a remarkable simulation of the status of imperial institutions in 
 a postcolonial era. "Not o'erthrown" is a necessary reminder that 
 the constituents of dominance remain in being, ready to be uttered 
 once more into a discourse that must be vigilant in refusing to re¬ 
 inscribe them. 
 
 The Saturnian state, Asia tells us, was a state of "calm joy" but 
 was deprived of its birthright of knowledge, power, thought, "self¬ 
 empire and the majesty of love" (2.4.36-42). The imperial era is al¬ 
 ready nascent in the language or perhaps is betrayingly not erased 
 from Asia's retrospective depiction of the Saturnian state. Prome¬ 
 theus gave "wisdom, which is strength to Jupiter," with the sole 
 stipulation that "man be free" (2.4.44-45). The stipulation was pre¬ 
 dictably disregarded, and a world of dominance and subjection is the 
 
 164 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
result. A return to the Saturnian state is no longer possible. We must 
 have a new world in which the constituents of understanding are no 
 longer centralized and thereby opened to dictatorial seizure, a world 
 that is multivocal rather than hierarchical. 
 
 In seeking a language that does not reinscribe or at least ade¬ 
 quately undermines what the new order repudiates, the Spirit of the 
 Hour follows a secular via negativa . 13 The human identity is defined 
 through the systematic dismissal of imperial attributes: 
 
 The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains 
 Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man 
 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, 
 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
 Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man. 
 
 (3.4.193-97) 
 
 In a multivocal world, not all differences can be eliminated. We 
 need a language of community, not homogeneity. The latter might 
 let Jupiter in by the backdoor. This is a difficulty that the language 
 of erasure cannot be expected to address. Its task is to clear away 
 the Jupiterian debris that obscures our perception of the essentially 
 human. Yet despite the exultation of erasure that is heard trium¬ 
 phantly in the Spirit of the Hour's manifesto, latent perils remain 
 inscribed in the language. ''Uncircumscribed" is a word that God in 
 Paradise Lost (7.170) uses to describe himself and that has been his¬ 
 torically secularized in the boundless scope of imperial ambition. 
 "King / Over himself" is an idea that Paradise Regained made in¬ 
 fluential, but the interior hierarchization may have exterior conse¬ 
 quences. Humanity's birthright was "self-empire"; its fate, brought 
 on by Prometheus, was Jupiterian dominance. 
 
 An alternative to postcolonialism's via negativa is to use the em¬ 
 blems of empire to affirm the end of empire in poetry's persistent 
 language of paradox. The icons, far from being "unregarded," are re¬ 
 garded in a sharply different light. Language as "a perpetual Orphic 
 song" (4.415) in the final act has begun to threaten us with its unend¬ 
 ingness. Demogorgon returns us to reality and the insistent claim 
 of events. For Shelley's contemporaries, those events would have in¬ 
 cluded the Peterloo massacre, which took place between the writing 
 of the third and fourth acts of Prometheus Unbound. 
 
 The unbinding of Prometheus was a narrative offered in a para¬ 
 digmatic realm that the human future was called on to translate. In 
 Shelley's Philosophical View of Reform, developments in Spain, Ger- 
 
 Understanding Asia 165 
 
many, the United States, and France (notwithstanding the aftermath 
 of the French Revolution) are read as indicating that this translation 
 is beginning. With the slave uprisings in the West Indies, "the deepest 
 stain upon civilized man is fading away." 14 Events such as Peterloo 
 arrested the translation and threatened the emerging text of liberty 
 with the renascence of the Jupiterian. "Gentleness, virtue, wisdom 
 and endurance" (4.562) are addressed to a contemporary danger as 
 well as to a paradigmatic arrangement. 
 
 Demogorgon's speech is rife with images of empire, which unex¬ 
 pectedly delineate not a renascent threat but the ways in which that 
 threat is to be overcome. "Conquest is dragged captive through the 
 deep" (4.556). Love sits on an awful throne of power, transformed 
 only because the power is that of patience. If the serpent should 
 make its way out of the bottomless pit from which exit is barred by 
 the Promethean virtues, an empire is to be reassumed over the dis¬ 
 entangled doom of a previous empire. Neither to change nor falter 
 nor repent is the Titan's glory, even though his transformation began 
 with "It doth repent me." Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory join together 
 in a final concatenation that may be as appropriate for Tamburlaine 
 as it is for Prometheus. 
 
 The accumulations of the imperial are too methodical to be pur¬ 
 poseless. Perhaps a postcolonial language should confront the dis¬ 
 course of empire, appropriating it, as with Demogorgon, or disman¬ 
 tling it, as with the Spirit of the Hour. The language of play that 
 Michael Scrivener sees at work in the final act up to Demogorgon's 
 entrance is another, although intermittent, possibility. 15 The "irre¬ 
 sponsibility" of play impedes and undermines the encodings that the 
 usages of political and economic power entrench. Such entrench¬ 
 ments would reduce play to frivolity. In displaying these possibili¬ 
 ties, Shelley may be sketching the varieties of a liberated language 
 and may be multivocal even in his sketchings. 
 
 As Shelley's sketchings expose the possibilities and weaknesses of 
 differing postcolonial languages, it becomes apparent that none of 
 them are inherently free from contamination. All of them have to be 
 safeguarded, and that safeguarding must rest on a firm connection to 
 a subtler language more resistant to conceptualization and therefore 
 less likely to become encoded, to petrify into the fixed positionings 
 of discourse. The law is the letter, the book, the dogma, the insti¬ 
 tution. The gospel lives in human hearts, of which "each to itself" 
 is the oracle [PR 1.460-64). To be uncircumscribed, to be free of di¬ 
 visive differentiations, is to liberate what has always been shared 
 by the natural relatedness of the human community. The reinstate- 
 
 166 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ment of that relatedness, once overlaid by the directing pressures of 
 Jupiterian discourse, does not dispense with the need for language, 
 but it humanizes and validates that language, holding in check its 
 propensity to tyranny. 
 
 Panthea's dream, searchingly discussed by Tilottama Rajan, 16 ex¬ 
 plores the recesses of this deeper language "orb within orb" in the 
 depths of the eyes of the heart. "Dream" is a misnomer since, 
 as Curran points out, there are three different dreams: "The first, 
 narrated by Panthea, is reinterpreted by Asia, then interrupted by 
 Panthea's account of a second dream, the interpretation of which 
 prompts Asia's remembrance of her own corroborative dream. . . . 
 The dream world is like Panthea's eyes into which Asia searches: 
 'dark, far, and measureless: / Orb within orb and line through line 
 interwoven.'" 17 One might add that Asia does not ask that the first 
 dream be narrated. She asks Panthea to "lift up" her eyes so that her 
 dream can be "read" in them. Panthea's account of how she lifted up 
 her own eyes to the "overpowering light" (2.1.67-71) of Prometheus's 
 presence is a mirroring and validation of Asia's request. Asia's re¬ 
 newal of her request that Panthea lift up her eyes so that Prome¬ 
 theus's "written soul" can be read in them then becomes a demand 
 for a more authentic language in comparison with which Panthea's 
 words are "as the air," evanescent and insubstantial. 
 
 The insistence that the eyes reveal more than the "fairest shadow" 
 (2.1.113) of the person looking into them and the persistent percep¬ 
 tion of the depth of understanding as beyond textuality yet irretriev¬ 
 ably imaged as textuality ("read," "written") are further evidence of 
 Shelley's extraordinary awareness of the constitutive power of lan¬ 
 guage, an awareness displayed everywhere in Prometheus Unbound. 
 That awareness is consistent with the knowledge that language itself 
 may be the shadow of an understanding that can bypass it but by 
 which it must consent to be sustained. The deep truth may be image¬ 
 less, but since all perception must be imaged, the most authentic 
 imaging is in the eyes of the dreamer "beyond their inmost depths" 
 (2.1.119). 18 The space of that "beyond" reveals to us not merely what 
 we are (which amounts to no more than seeing our fairest shadows) 
 but also what we are by virtue of what we share. There is a commu¬ 
 nity of feeling on which language rests and that must be read into as 
 well as entered through the languages it nourishes and makes stable. 
 If a text is to be protected from appropriation, it must remain an¬ 
 chored in the fundamental text of our humanity that all of us must 
 learn to find and to know. 
 
 A language beyond language is desirable because Prometheus Un- 
 
 Understanding Asia 167 
 
bound, beginning as a study of the discourse of dominance, evolves 
 into a study of the dominance of discourse. The question of how dis¬ 
 course is to be freed from its own nature is one for which there can 
 be no answer, only safeguards. Eternal vigilance is undoubtedly one 
 of the safeguards, but even eternal vigilance can be aimless if it is 
 unable to refer to any source beyond its own entrapment, if it can 
 find no ground to stand on that is not penetrated by the very con¬ 
 tamination from which it seeks to deliver itself. Shelley addresses 
 these problems with a perceptiveness from which discourse analy¬ 
 sis today can profit. The substratum of imaginative understanding 
 that he posits may not be the most reassuring of deliverances, but it 
 is preferable to the potential tyranny of an absolute or to that of its 
 secular alternative, the progressive materialization in world history 
 of a final cause by which history is driven forward. 
 
 Prometheus Unbound is a work that circumvents closure not be¬ 
 cause of Demogorgon's incantations over the bottomless pit but 
 because it remains resistant to a final reading, displaying that re¬ 
 sistance even in the diversity of its languages. Its possibilities and 
 problematizations open it to a reading future that can stabilize its 
 indeterminacies not simply in different ways but also in ways that 
 can speak with the eloquence of a beginning to the place in the 
 future from which they are viewed. To the postcolonial world, Pro¬ 
 metheus Unbound is not simply a liberation text but a liberation 
 text that richly adumbrates the opportunities and encumbrances of a 
 liberated language. It lays down the character and technique of non¬ 
 violent resistance—"gentleness, virtue, wisdom and endurance"—in 
 a manner that strikingly anticipates the historical development of 
 nationalist resistance in India. It also calls on us to ensure that the 
 revolution, when it does take place, is a revolution and not a sub¬ 
 stitution. If the true enemy is not Jupiter but Jupiterian discourse, 
 much can remain to be done even after the elations of independence. 
 
 If we emphasize the extent to which Prometheus Unbound at¬ 
 taches itself to a contemporary, postcolonial reading, it is so that we 
 can return less disturbingly to the knowledge that this is not how 
 Shelley's contemporaries would have read it. Romantics, even radi¬ 
 cal romantics, were not particularly sensitive to the expansion of 
 empire in India under their noses at a time when paradigms of lib¬ 
 erty were in the air. Misgivings about India were voiced far less fre¬ 
 quently than those voiced in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen¬ 
 tury, already quoted in chapter 4. These misgivings came to a head 
 in the impeachment of Hastings. Macaulay's vivid account makes 
 
 168 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
clear that the impeachment was treated as the theatrical event of the 
 decade, with ballads circulating in the street, Lady Hastings osten¬ 
 tatiously wearing the gaudy tiara of her ill-gotten gains, and grandes 
 dames from high society ceremonially swooning in the aisles to the 
 melodious thunder of Burke's periods. 19 
 
 As Conor Cruise O'Brien convincingly argues, the impeachment 
 needs to be seen as shifting the responsibility for managing India 
 from the boardrooms of a private company to the more public forum 
 of a nation's conscience. Concurring surprisingly in this shift is 
 Adam Smith, the patron saint of free enterprise. 20 The change does 
 not eliminate the problem of accountability; it merely elevates it, 
 opening the way to the self-justifying fictions that characterize Vic¬ 
 torian imperialism and that owe their origin and entanglements to 
 that imperialism's distant yet tenaciously influential Reformation 
 roots. Grant's atonement, Jones's restoration of India to its classical 
 self, and the imperially assisted march of a backward people from 
 the Saturnian to the Apollonian are competing fictions in which 
 the final one can only prevail by overwriting rather than erasing its 
 alternatives. It remains troubled and even fissured by residues that 
 it cannot completely eliminate or assimilate. 
 
 Answerability to the nation may have been achieved by the im¬ 
 peachment, but the impeachment itself, as a highly theatrical ren¬ 
 dering of that answerability, had a cathartic effect that diverted at¬ 
 tention from the continuing growth of the company's possessions 
 in India. Wellesley's talent for territorial acquisition comfortably 
 exceeded that of his predecessors. Brian Gardner even goes to the 
 extent of characterizing that talent as "an insatiable, unabashed, al¬ 
 most frenetic lust." 21 He adds that the directors of the East India 
 Company "wrung their hands in horror" at Wellesley's conquests, 
 but if they did so it was because of economic doubts rather than 
 moral misgivings. It was not as yet clear to them how territory could 
 be transformed into profits and how company dividends could sur¬ 
 vive the considerable costs of indefinitely maintaining in India a 
 standing army larger than any in Europe. To say this is not to criti¬ 
 cize the company's directorate but rather to point to the apparent 
 extinction after the Hastings trial of any national conscience that 
 might oversee that directorate. More specifically, it is difficult to find 
 poets of the day who concerned themselves about what was happen¬ 
 ing in India, even for reasons of unenlightened self-interest. 
 
 In the earlier phase of the British attainment of dominance, the 
 work of Jones and the members of the Asiatic Society was an impor- 
 
 Understanding Asia 169 
 
tant element in the perception of India. In the later phase, that per¬ 
 ception was increasingly controlled by a utilitarian-evangelist coali¬ 
 tion that methodically devalued India, first to create an implicit right 
 to exploit it and then to create an explicit responsibility to take it 
 over in the name of "improving" it or of atoning for previous ex¬ 
 cesses. With foreign competitors eliminated (the battle of the Nile 
 in 1798 had extinguished the last possibility of a French threat to 
 British supremacy in India), the Mahrattas remained the only power 
 by whom this objective could be seriously contested. The Treaty 
 of Poona marked the elimination of the Mahratta challenge. It was 
 signed in June 1817, the year in which Shelley began Prometheus 
 Unbound. 
 
 Shelley was less than responsive to the swift growth of a domi¬ 
 nance that, despite its professed benevolence, might have been per¬ 
 ceived as containing the germ of the Jupiterian. He was also less than 
 sympathetic to the counterclaims of a culture that dominance was 
 propelled into devaluing. Read in proximity to Shelley's statements, 
 Elizabeth Hamilton's novel, discussed in chapter 6, starkly delin¬ 
 eates the difference a decade can make to the politics of perception. 
 
 In A Refutation of Deism, Shelley is prepared to concede that there 
 are "a few axioms of morality which Christianity borrowed from the 
 philosophers of India." 22 Much of the concession is taken back by 
 "borrowed" and "axioms." What is lent can be returned, having been 
 improved on, and if what is lent is axiomatic, it can also be indepen¬ 
 dently acquired by the natural operations of intelligence. 
 
 In Queen Mab, Shelley puts "Buddh" and "Seeva" on the same 
 plane as Jehovah, as evidence that God is "Himself the creature of 
 his worshippers" (7.28). We could take this as an example of Shelley's 
 skepticism regarding the world's religions, an ironic reversal of the 
 image of God in man, remaking God not simply in the image of 
 human needs but, more coercively, in the self-justifying image of 
 institutionalized power, with its constraints and impositions. The 
 proposition may seek to undermine Hindu religious imagings (along 
 with those of other religions), but it is not unfamiliar in the religion 
 it undermines. Yeats put it to use in one of his early poems on India. 23 
 
 Given the relativity of human forms of relationship with the di¬ 
 vine, the saving power of a religion may well lie in the variety of 
 constructions it is able to accommodate and among which it can 
 continue its search for understanding. Unfortunately, Shelley was 
 not in a position to attend to the distinctiveness of a culture that 
 could be treated as bringing together forms of relationship as appar- 
 
 170 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
ently divergent as "Buddh" and "Seeva." It was not until 1836, nearly 
 a quarter of a century after Queen Mab, that India was established 
 as the birthplace of Buddhism in a manner satisfactory to the West. 24 
 
 Hinduism goes well beyond other religions in conceding the un¬ 
 avoidably of constructions and the provisionality of all construc¬ 
 tions. "Maya" is the term in Hindu thought that registers this perva¬ 
 sive recognition and supplies it as a background for the forms of the 
 mind. This radical skepticism is joined to a mysticism that, because 
 of the substantial exchanges between East and West in the world 
 of classical thought, can sometimes seem like Neoplatonism's twin 
 sister. But the skepticism is not the ground of world abandonment, 
 a recoil from the wilderness of forms that Hegel sees as a delirious 
 multiplicity to be set antithetically against a transcendental nullity. 
 The skepticism seeks not the relinquishment of all constructions or 
 the transcendental guaranteeing of a specific construction but the 
 principles of responsible living among constructions as they are put 
 into place by the human project. The human project is, of course, 
 itself a construction, but one that may be deemed necessary for 
 human survival. 
 
 There can be more than one combination of the skeptical and the 
 mystical, but this combination is a significant possibility among the 
 heterogeneities of Indian thought. It raises problems that Shelley's 
 poetry, in the development of its self-examination, seems to be 
 equipping itself to engage. It is also distinctively Shelleyan. Shelley 
 was not situated to recognize this overall affinity, but it deserves ex¬ 
 ploration by those who, in our time, examine Shelley's Indianness. 
 
 The passage from Queen Mab is followed by a brief reference 
 to the juggernaut, which remembers the unnecessary canto that 
 Southey gave to that "grim idol" and perhaps looks forward to Shel¬ 
 ley's own chariot of life. Schopenhauer, engaged in a determined 
 segregation of a Jupiterian Old Testament from a New Testament he 
 reads as deeply informed by Indian thought, views the juggernaut, 
 not at all disapprovingly, as a dramatic demonstration of contemp- 
 tus mundi , 2S More typically, it was an icon for evangelical horror, the 
 monstrous sign of an inveterate otherness. 
 
 In A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley finds the country of 
 the juggernaut so backward that even the missionaries he despises 
 are capable of improving it. Missionary activities were legalized in 
 India at this time, so Shelley's recommendation is not reached in 
 the abstract. It is a finding disturbingly at odds with a novel Shelley 
 had read and greatly admired dealing with the havoc missionaries 
 
 Understanding Asia 171 
 
could wreak in India. "It cannot be doubted," Shelley assures us with 
 dismaying confidence, that "the zeal of the missionaries of what is 
 called the Christian faith will produce beneficial results there [i.e., 
 in India]." These benefits can be secured "even by the application of 
 dogmas and forms of what is here an outworn incumbrance." 26 
 
 Shelley's pages show no concern over the rapacious growth of 
 the empire in India and register no suspicion that the intentions of 
 empire might be other than benevolent. "The Indians," he avers in 
 language discouragingly reminiscent of Mill, "have been enslaved 
 and cramped in the most severe and paralysing forms which were 
 ever devised by man." Even if "the doctrines of Jesus do not pene¬ 
 trate through the darkness of that which those who profess to be his 
 followers call Christianity," a "number of social forms" modeled on 
 "European feelings" can be substituted for the existing straitjackets. 
 These substitutions can make future progress "less imperceptibly 
 slow" and will facilitate "complete emancipation" when the time 
 comes. 27 
 
 The Eurocentric disposition is prominent here and becomes nearly 
 overbearing in the following sentence: "Many native Indians have 
 acquired, it is said, a competent knowledge in the arts and philoso¬ 
 phy of Europe, and Locke and Hume and Rousseau are familiarly 
 talked of in Brahminical society." 28 The next sentence is only just in 
 time for the Indian reader: "But the thing to be sought is that they 
 should as they would if they were free, attain to a system of arts and 
 literature of their own." 29 
 
 Little can be said in defense of this effortless digestion of the Mill- 
 Hegel perception of India, saved only by the touch of Asiatic Society 
 Orientalism at the end. Shelley's many affinities with Indian phi¬ 
 losophy place themselves here in distressing contrast to his view of 
 India's actuality, an actuality so corrupt that, at least for the mo¬ 
 ment, there can be no question of redeeming it by bringing it back 
 to its roots in that world of thought by which Shelley's own imagina¬ 
 tion was kindled. The two levels of perception and the unbridgeable 
 distance between them seem to point to the compulsions of a dis¬ 
 course so pervasive that it can be dealt with only by surrendering 
 India to it as a historical reality in order to preserve it as a transcen¬ 
 dental site. 
 
 "India is magnetic to Shelley," Wilson Knight tells us. 30 It is in the 
 Indian Caucasus that Prometheus learns wisdom. It is in the Para¬ 
 dise of Kashmir that Asia apparently begins her redemptive action 
 and the visionary in Alastoi begins his self-destructive quest. India 
 
 172 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
is important to Shelley but important as a territory of the imagina¬ 
 tion, a hospitable place for situating paradigms. It is not important 
 as a place of profit and empire that rival armies fought bitterly over, 
 as a place that the stoic and enduring figure whom Shelley placed 
 prophetically in the Indian Caucasus was symbolically destined to 
 free from imperial rule. The reading that liberates Prometheus Un¬ 
 bound is not quite the reading Shelley offered his contemporaries. It 
 is the reading we learn as we look into Panthea's eyes. 
 
 Understanding Asia 
 
 173 
 
9 
 
 Macaulay: 
 
 The Moment and the Minute 
 
 Macaulay left for India in 1834. In the previous year, as the mem¬ 
 ber of Parliament for Leeds, he had risen to deliver a memorable 
 speech not simply on the reorganization of the East India Com¬ 
 pany (the nominal topic of the debate) but also on the future of the 
 empire in India. Shelley, in a sentence struggling with itself hesi¬ 
 tantly constructed fourteen years earlier, had written of India even¬ 
 tually attaining a system of laws and literature of its own. William 
 Jones had envisaged a speedier restoration of India's cultural dis¬ 
 tinctiveness, but Shelley's embarrassments reflected the tightening 
 grip of the Mill-Hegel view of India, even on minds with progressive 
 dispositions. Macaulay's peroration erased even Shelley's faltering 
 hopes. It was a resounding prophecy of the imperishable empire of 
 England's arts and letters, to which India hereafter would inalien¬ 
 ably belong. The cultural empire would endure even after the politi¬ 
 cal one had run its course as a self-consuming artifact. 1 Macaulay's 
 prophecy rings uncomfortably true when, fifty years after India's in¬ 
 dependence, Wordsworth is taught in the fastnesses of Gilgit, as a 
 documentary film by David Suzuki indicates. 2 
 
 Macaulay set sail for India as the law member of the company's 
 governing board. Like others who departed to that country, he re¬ 
 garded his new position not as an opportunity but as an exile. For a 
 writer whose historical imagination was caught up in the drama of 
 parliamentary politics, an assignment in India could scarcely have 
 been anything else. Macaulay accepted the appointment because he 
 hoped he could set aside enough from his earnings to make him 
 financially secure for his lifetime. He could then devote himself to 
 concerns more important than India—most notably, the writing of 
 his history of England. 
 
 Jones had gone to India a generation earlier as the company's chief 
 
justice. He too planned to live in India as modestly as the extrava¬ 
 gances of Calcutta would permit and to save enough to sustain a life 
 of scholarship when he returned. He remained in India until the day 
 of his death. Macaulay stayed for no more than four years. During 
 that brief interval, he penned the minute that is remembered as de¬ 
 ciding India's educational future and was responsible for all of the 
 language and nearly all of the substance of the Indian penal code. 
 The decisions in which he was a principal participant continue to 
 affect the lives of Indians even today far more powerfully than they 
 seem to have affected Macaulay. 
 
 Macaulay wrote two essays on Indian history after his return, one 
 on Clive (January 1840) and the other on Hastings (October 1841). 
 He was secretary of war in the Melbourne administration at the 
 time, an appointment that may account for some of his obvious rel¬ 
 ish in Clive's victories. The Indian experience may have been of no 
 great consequence to Macaulay, 3 and Owen Edwards, in allowing it 
 five pages in a generally admirable book, 4 could be displaying a dis¬ 
 concerting sense of proportion. Jane Millgate's quietly enlightening 
 study is more generous, 5 and of course, there is a distinction to be 
 made between what mattered to Macaulay and what in Macaulay 
 matters to us. John Clive responds to that distinction in the 137 
 pages that his thorough and judicious study devotes to the minute 
 and the Indian penal code. 
 
 The essays on Clive and Hastings appeared in the Edinburgh Re¬ 
 view. Macaulay had been an established voice in that periodical from 
 the time it published his essay on Milton, written when he was no 
 more than twenty-five. The occasion was the unexpected discovery 
 of De Doctrina Christiana in the recesses of the Public Records 
 Office. A steady succession of essays on historical subjects followed 
 during the next twenty years. In 1828, an essay on history appeared 
 that would have invited reading as a preface to the other essays if 
 Macaulay had not omitted it from the 1843 collection. In the essay, 
 Macaulay observed that it could be "laid down as a general rule 
 though subject to considerable exceptions and qualifications, that 
 history begins in novel and ends in essay" (1:181). 
 
 Macaulay tells us more than once that history resembles litera¬ 
 ture, but he is usually only suggesting that the pleasures of reading 
 history ought to be comparable to those of reading literature or that 
 characterization and narration in the writing of histories should 
 model themselves on literary practice. Another way of putting this 
 proposition is offered at the outset of his essay on Henry Hallam. The 
 
 Macaulay 175 
 
province of history, we are told, has been deprived of part of itself, 
 with literature providing the scenery and the life, while history is 
 reduced to providing the map. The historian's task is to reunite the 
 partitioned territory. In making these statements, Macaulay seems 
 in no danger of approaching the more drastic recognition that the 
 historical imagination is unavoidably Active. 
 
 The passage quoted from the essay on history is unusual not only 
 because it suggests two specific genres for history but also because it 
 suggests that the very process of writing history converts one genre 
 into another. The conversion is not a shrinkage of intentions since 
 an essay is not a collapsed novel. It is a different form and a form, 
 moreover, with which we do not usually associate the novel. One can 
 understand the proposition that what begins as an epic may end as 
 a novel. Literary history can be argued to have taken that direction, 
 and that direction can even be discerned in the more earth-bound 
 books of Paradise Lost. But the movement from the novel to the 
 essay seems almost like the undoing of a hard-won multivocality, 
 substituting argument for plot and the reflective for the dramatic. 
 
 In the end, Macaulay may only be saying that history is a mixed 
 genre, programmed in one direction and pulled in another, a hybrid 
 of the sort that purists locate in India. He can even be perceived as 
 reading his own finding backward since his historical work began 
 with a series of essays and proceeded to The History of England, 
 which is more akin to a novel. 
 
 A more prosaic relationship between histories and novels can be 
 found in Macaulay's review of Sir James Mackintosh's incomplete 
 History of the Revolution. "We find in it," he says, "the diligence, 
 the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the vivacity and 
 colouring of Southey." He adds that "a history of England, written 
 throughout in this manner, would be the most fascinating book in 
 the language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries 
 than the last novel" (3:339). 
 
 The same note is heard in a letter Macaulay wrote on Novem¬ 
 ber 17, 1848, to his brother, Charles, when The History of England 
 was close to publication: "Everybody who has seen the book, that 
 is to say, Lord Jeffrey, Ellis, Trevelyan, Hannah, and Longman, pre¬ 
 dict complete success and say that it is as entertaining as a novel." 6 
 On November 5, 1841, he had written to McVey Napier: "I shall not 
 be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days 
 supersede the last novel on the tables of young ladies." 7 
 
 In any event, Macaulay's history was as successful as any novel 
 
 176 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
of the time. It was devoured by subscribers to circulating libraries, 
 appeared on innumerable coffee tables, and helped to compose the 
 Victorian frame of mind. In 1856 alone, the history earned Macaulay 
 £20,000. 
 
 Macaulay called Mackintosh's history a fragment, providing what 
 may be the best clue to the genre of his own work. It populates 
 a limited space within a considerably larger space that is present 
 to the reader but only in outline. One might say that this is the 
 nature of writing about history—to compose fragments within ap¬ 
 parent wholes that in turn will be perceived as fragments. It is to 
 devise micronarratives that exemplify or seek the macronarratives 
 with which they must be consistent. 
 
 This familiar view of coherence achieved within wider and wider 
 boundaries and of a final inclusiveness from which nothing is shut 
 out may carry within it the seeds of its own dismantling. If the frag¬ 
 ment seeks the whole, if it carries the sign of the whole at its heart, 
 the whole in turn includes and may not contain the separatist energy 
 of the fragment. The novel splinters into the essay. The essay at¬ 
 tempts but cannot quite attain the novel. "I cannot make it cohere" 
 is Pound's conclusion after two generations of writing the Cantos, 
 in which the will to coherence has been indefatigably exercised. 
 
 Macaulay's history, considered as a fragment, occupies a space be¬ 
 tween two great events: the Revolution of 1688, which brought the 
 Crown into harmony with Parliament, and the Act of 1832, which 
 brought Parliament into harmony with the nation. Not everyone 
 saw the two events in this way, but this way of seeing them became 
 immensely influential not simply as the initiation and conclusion of 
 a narrative but also as a claim for progress in the popular sense or, 
 in Hegelian terminology, for the self-realization of the idea. If a line 
 is drawn through these two events, it can be read as pointing to a 
 third phase in which the nation is brought not exactly into harmony 
 with its empire but into a relationship that enables it to perceive its 
 destiny in the image of empire it places before itself. One need not 
 emphasize how much Victorian thinking seems to take the presence 
 of this line for granted. 
 
 As a historian, Macaulay was in the privileged position of being 
 able to write history into events and not merely distill it into lan¬ 
 guage. He was singularly placed to contrive a text that would be 
 seamless, that would make the future the fulfillment of the past. If 
 we textualize power as the power to write in contrast to the helpless¬ 
 ness of having to be written, we can see how the imperial historian 
 
 Macaulay 177 
 
is drawn irresistibly to the thematic narrative, how he can prescribe 
 a congruence between idea and text and rely on the persuasions of 
 uncontested power to overcome the propensities of any text to devi¬ 
 ance. The resultant harmony offers a satisfaction that is imperially 
 aesthetic. Other forms of history can be pleasing, including, par¬ 
 ticularly in our time, the ironic and the indeterminate; they do not 
 solicit the imperial imagination. 
 
 India could be said to have provided Macaulay with an opportu¬ 
 nity to extend the scope of the harmonious vision by bringing the 
 idea of empire into relationship with the idea of progress as it was 
 inscribed so far in the march of England. That march began at the 
 outset of the twelfth century, when England was "in a state more 
 miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the 
 East now are" (3:358). From this discouraging starting point, England 
 rose to heights repeatedly acclaimed in Macaulay's recitals. The per¬ 
 oration to the Southey essay is probably the most famous of these 
 triumphant surveys. 
 
 Like Macaulay's essay on Bacon, the essay on Mackintosh, from 
 which this quotation comes, was written in India. The inference 
 waiting to be drawn was that India, with the blessing of English 
 guidance, could be helped to proceed along the route that England 
 had pioneered. Unfortunately, the march of progress in England was 
 moving forward to the drumbeat of institutional change and political 
 liberalization. It was the movement from the England "of crusaders, 
 monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, outlaws" to "the England we 
 know and love—the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the 
 school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade." The milestones on 
 this march were 
 
 the Charter of Henry Beauclerc,—the great charter, —the 
 first assembling of the House of Commons,—the extinc¬ 
 tion of personal slavery,—the separation from the See of 
 Rome,—the Petition of Right, —the Habeas Corpus Act,— 
 the Revolution,—the establishment of the liberty of un¬ 
 licensed printers,—the abolition of religious disabilities— 
 the reform of the representative system. 
 
 All of these events seemed to Macaulay "the successive stages of one 
 great revolution," and the struggle to write them into history was "a 
 struggle on the results of which were staked the dearest interests of 
 the human race" (3:358-59). 
 
 Establishing English as the language of advanced understanding in 
 
 178 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
India had to be the first step in this majestic agenda, but it remained 
 the only step as well as the first one. Beyond the removal of certain 
 social abuses (the abolition of thuggery, suttee, and child betrothal 
 were regularly announced to grateful Indian gatherings as typical of 
 the lavishness of England's gifts to India), no further movement to 
 put into effect "the dearest interests of the human race" was contem¬ 
 plated by Macaulay or anyone else. Regulations requiring printing 
 presses to be licensed, introduced in Bengal in 1823, were indeed re¬ 
 pealed in 1835, but the right to print remained subject to emergency 
 powers. Clive finds these powers such that "five persons who may 
 be brought together in half an hour, whose deliberations are secret, 
 who are not shocked by any of those forms which elsewhere delay 
 legislative measures, can in a single sitting, make a law for stopping 
 every press in India." 8 
 
 As for habeas corpus, preventive detention would in due course 
 provide an antidote to the inconvenience of having to lay specific 
 charges against those whom one would like to imprison. The "reform 
 of the representative system" may have been the result of teaching 
 English to Indians, but it was a consummation not devoutly sought 
 but doggedly resisted. As one might anticipate, the history of the 
 other has to be otherwise. 
 
 India's otherness makes it a place of exile where self-understand¬ 
 ing is to be defended and not extended. Macaulay, in treating it as 
 such, joins a tradition that goes back to Camoes and that Shelley 
 uses in a revolutionary version. Max Muller both recognizes and 
 contests this tradition in imploring a group of prospective civil ser¬ 
 vants assembled at Cambridge in 1883 to treat India not as an exile 
 but as a homecoming, a rediscovery of the West's Aryan roots: 
 
 The ancient literature of India is not to be regarded simply 
 as a curiosity and to be handed over to the good pleasure of 
 Oriental scholars. ... It can teach us lessons which nothing 
 else can teach, as to the origin of our own language, the first 
 formation of our own concepts, and the true natural germs 
 of all that is comprehended under the name of civilization, 
 at least the civilization of the Aryan race. 9 
 
 The rampant ethnocentrism would call for underlining in another 
 context, but here the point to be made is that Macaulay, unlike 
 Muller, was not interested in Indian opportunities for ancestral wis¬ 
 dom, whether as a historian or as an ethnocentrist. His nearly total 
 ignorance of the Indian past was not at all unavoidable in the 1830s. 
 
 Macaulay 179 
 
It was put on and worn as a constituent of the imperial blindness 
 that now seemed to have become obligatory if the imperial gaze was 
 to attain its proper intensity. 
 
 The essays on Clive and Hastings concede very little to India that 
 would make it worth the trouble of "Englishing" or justify the hand¬ 
 some intentions of the peroration to the 1833 speech. The remarks 
 on Bengal are particularly severe. Edwards attributes Macaulay's ad¬ 
 verse comments on Bacon (in an essay written during his stay in 
 India) to "the hard intolerant heat" of the subcontinent/ 0 but the 
 Bengali psyche might be more respectable to Macaulay if it were in¬ 
 deed hard and intolerant. He treats it instead (characteristically and 
 influentially) as formed by persistent wallowing in a vapor bath: 
 
 Bengal was known through the East as the garden of Eden, 
 as the rich kingdom. Its population multiplied exceedingly. 
 Other provinces were nourished from the overflowing of its 
 granaries; and the ladies of London and Paris were clothed 
 in the delicate produce of its looms. The race by which this 
 rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft climate and ac¬ 
 customed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation 
 to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the 
 bold and energetic children of Europe. The Castilians have 
 a proverb, that in Valencia the earth is water and the men 
 women; and the description is at least equally applicable to 
 the vast plain of the lower Ganges. Whatever the Bengalee 
 does he does languidly. His favourite pursuits are sedentary. 
 
 He shrinks from bodily exertion; and though voluble in dis¬ 
 pute and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane, he 
 seldom engages in personal conflict and hardly ever enlists 
 as a soldier. 
 
 "There never, perhaps, existed a people," Macaulay concludes, "so 
 thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke" (pp. 328- 
 29). 
 
 These comments, which Brantlinger aptly characterizes as "Whig 
 history at its most self-indulgent," 11 come from the essay on Clive. 
 However, it is not until the companion essay on Hastings that Ma¬ 
 caulay allows himself to be fully carried away by the intoxications 
 of Bengali bashing: 
 
 What the Italian is to Englishmen, what the Hindoo is to 
 the Italian, what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was 
 
 180 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
Nuncomar to other Bengalees. The physical organisation of 
 the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a con¬ 
 stant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs deli¬ 
 cate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been 
 trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. 
 
 The weakling Macaulay presents is not altogether lacking in integ¬ 
 rity. "His mind," we are informed, "bears a singular relationship to 
 his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly re¬ 
 sistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner 
 climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt" (pp. 385-86). 
 
 Ethnocentrism, gendered and compounded, is a device lavishly 
 used in the preceding passages. Valencia is distanced from Castile, 
 Italy is further distanced spatially and ethnically from England, Asia 
 is yet more remote from "the bold and energetic children of Europe" 
 (including presumably Italians), India stands at a still further remove, 
 and, in an internal differentiation matching the initial distancing be¬ 
 tween Castile and Valencia, Bengal becomes the ultimate effeminacy 
 of effeminate India, with "Nuncomar" as the embodiment of quali¬ 
 ties that can only prevail on the most marginal of peripheries. The 
 pervasive conflation of spatial, moral, and gender distances sustains 
 the invective and indeed drives it to its climax: "What the horns are 
 to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting is to the 
 bee, what beauty according to the old Greek song, is to women, de¬ 
 ceit is to the Bengalee" (p. 386). 
 
 It was in vain that Muller spent a whole lecture endeavoring to 
 show his students that deceit, among all vices, was the one most 
 sternly forbidden in the Hindu scriptures. The evidence for that as¬ 
 sertion lay in a shelf of dusty books contemptuously swept aside by 
 Macaulay's minute on education. Future members of the Indian civil 
 service read Macaulay rather than Muller. Alternatively, they read 
 Mill, who said the same thing in less flamboyant language. 
 
 Outside the imperial discourse, Macaulay can seem more progres¬ 
 sive in his views on the status and accomplishments of women. At 
 the end of the essay on Madame d'Arblay (Fanny Burney), for in¬ 
 stance, he commends her for removing the stigma that had become 
 attached to novels and for vindicating "the right of her sex to an 
 equal share in a fair and noble province of letters. . . . The novels 
 which we owe to English ladies form no small part of our literary 
 glory" (6:75). The statement works hard to be generous, but there 
 are restrictions surrounding it, focused in the indefinite article. En- 
 
 Macaulay 181 
 
glish ladies are entitled to an equal share of only a single "fair and 
 noble province," in which their "fine observation," "delicate wit," 
 and "pure moral feeling" can be effectively displayed. Such commen¬ 
 dations confer literary recognition on the "sweet attractive grace" of 
 Milton's Eve, leaving the great game to an Adam heroically formed 
 for contemplation and the valorous deeds of empire. 
 
 More forthright is Macaulay's rejoinder to Mill's proposal for a 
 franchise including "all males of mature age, rich and poor, edu¬ 
 cated and ignorant." Mill stops short of extending this proposal to 
 women, and Macaulay, in an accusation strikingly in advance of its 
 time, charges him with placidly dogmatizing away "the interest of 
 one half of the human race" (p. 597). 
 
 Macaulay withdrew this essay later not because he regretted his 
 findings but because he felt he "should have refrained from using 
 contemptuous language regarding the historian of British India." 12 
 The definite article defers to a discourse as well as to the author who 
 is its sign. Within that discourse, elaborations of the feminine re¬ 
 main determined by the imperative of establishing and repudiating 
 India's otherness. The hierarchical complementarity so prominent 
 in Owenson's styling of the East-West encounter is not appropriate 
 to that imperative. It must be moved back from the intercultural 
 realm it insidiously interrogates to the safer confines of English do¬ 
 mesticity. A more dismissive view of the feminine needs to be nur¬ 
 tured in the rich earth of Bengal. 
 
 A Bengali Renaissance was under way when Macaulay arrived in 
 India and adds another layer of insensitivity to his remarks. They are 
 of little profit to his narrative. Clive's achievement would be more 
 heroic if a less pusillanimous people were subdued. But Macaulay 
 has already set the stage for an achievement worthy of a second Lu- 
 siads, a poem he read twice on the voyage from Madras to Calcutta. 13 
 The heroic deeds he is about to celebrate are not only unsung but 
 also largely unknown. Every schoolboy has learned about the con¬ 
 quest of Mexico, but few have been told about the conquest of India, 
 a far more impressive feat of arms (p. 306). Ignorance about India 
 seems unlikely in a Europe where the Orient was in vogue, where 
 best-selling poems and novels about India were being printed, and 
 where Queen Victoria was sitting up at night reading the galleys of 
 Confessions of a Thug because she could not wait for publication. 14 
 Nevertheless, there can be ignorance not of the chronicle of events 
 but of the true dimensions of a story yet to be told. 
 
 To add to the obstacles Clive faced, the British footholds in India 
 
 182 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
are reduced to a toehold—"a few acres for purposes of commerce" 
 (p. 315). The precariousness of the British position is contrasted with 
 the exaggerated dominance of the French, expressed in the person 
 of the "subtle and ambitious" Joseph-Franqois Dupleix (p. 317). The 
 enemy is a European nation, not a primitive people armed largely 
 with bows and arrows, as Macaulay took the Aztecs to be until he 
 read William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico ten years 
 later. 15 Dupleix "ruled thirty millions of people" in India "with al¬ 
 most absolute power" (p. 318). 
 
 Clive served three times in India. On the first occasion, he dis¬ 
 posed of the French threat. During the second term, he won the 
 battle "which was to decide the fate of India" (p. 338). On the third 
 occasion, he returned as a statesman, rather than as an accountant 
 turned soldier, to curb the excesses brought about by his conquest 
 of Bengal. His reforms were in the right direction but did not go far 
 enough. The nabobs became the ostentatious symbol of everything 
 that was amiss in India: "If any of our readers will take the trouble 
 to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel 
 published sixty years ago, the chance is that the villain or subvillain 
 of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense 
 fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver and a worse heart" (p. 363). 
 
 In 1770, the rains failed in Bengal and the valley of the Ganges 
 was filled with "misery and death. . . . The Hoogley every day rolled 
 down thousands of corpses close to the porticoes and gardens of the 
 English conquerors." We can gauge the dimensions of this tragedy 
 from the sentence that innocently or ironically follows: "The propri¬ 
 etors of East India Stock were uneasy about their dividends" (p. 365). 
 The storm broke around Clive's head, as it was to break later around 
 that of Hastings. The mixed verdict of the House of Commons found 
 him guilty of certain offenses but also commended him for render¬ 
 ing "great and meritorious services to his country" (p. 370). 
 
 In Macaulay's neatly discriminated narrative, Clive's first visit 
 established "the renown of the English arms in the East." The sec¬ 
 ond visit cemented "the political ascendancy of the English in that 
 country." The third laid the foundations for "the purity of the ad¬ 
 ministration of our Eastern Empire” (p. 372). Attached to this trium¬ 
 phant text is a curious subtext. In his first term at Madras, Clive 
 twice attempted suicide. He failed and felt himself set aside for better 
 things. In 1774, harassed by several ailments, victimized by opium, 
 and wounded by the censure of the Commons, he tried suicide for a 
 third time and was successful. "The pattern is almost too perfect," 
 
 Macaulay 183 
 
Millgate writes, and "Macaulay wisely allows it to speak for itself ." 16 
 It does not speak very loudly. The triumphant text is not meant to 
 be undone by the almost sotto voce counterpointing of the subtext. 
 
 If Clive laid the foundations for administrative purity, Hastings 
 can be perceived as undermining those foundations. His life in India, 
 as Macaulay records it, suggests not that power corrupts but that 
 profit is the mortal enemy of principle. Apart from the vindictive 
 pursuit of Nandakumar to his death on the gallows, all of Hast¬ 
 ings's actions—his mercenary onslaught on the Rohillas, his relent¬ 
 less mulcting of Chait Singh, and his stripping away of the wealth 
 of the Begum of Oudh—are condemned by Macaulay and then ex¬ 
 tenuated on the grounds that they were necessary to maintain the 
 company's dividends. More than one justification has been offered 
 for the acquisition of India. It was acquired in the service of "honour, 
 dominion, glory and renown," because the French or the Mahrattas 
 would have acquired it otherwise, or simply because it was available 
 for acquisition. It may even have been acquired absentmindedly by 
 gifted amateurs intent on the pursuit of something more important. 
 In the face of these fictions, Macaulay's demystifying candor can 
 seem refreshingly informative, but its underlying purpose is to pro¬ 
 vide the basis for another fiction, a richer mystification in which the 
 felix culpa will be reenacted, light will emerge from darkness, and 
 a subcontinent not altogether creditably obtained will hereafter be 
 magnanimously governed. To confess one's failings is to put them 
 behind one, and if profit was regrettably the motive, principle can 
 still be the felicitous result. 
 
 It has been pointed out more than once in this book that the East 
 India Company was a business organization and that the history 
 and tactics of the British presence in India can only be adequately 
 understood by bearing in mind the state of the company's balance 
 sheets. Macaulay's deeper intention may be to sever the stubborn 
 link between commerce and empire and to place them on different 
 trajectories, one directed by individual self-interest and the other 
 by imperialism's emerging moral philosophy. Yet in continuing to 
 paint Hastings as the company's loyal and therefore unscrupulous 
 servant, Macaulay by no means places in moral doubt the huge ter¬ 
 ritorial gains that unscrupulousness brought about. Those gains are, 
 after all, essential to his agenda. 
 
 In weighing Hastings's achievement against his failings, Macaulay 
 finds it entirely fitting to say that Hastings added considerably to 
 British possessions in India at a time when those possessions were 
 
 184 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
shrinking elsewhere (pp. 434-35). Hastings's founding of the Asiatic 
 Society and his encouragement of Oriental scholarship are briefly 
 mentioned (pp. 437-38), but we can scarcely expect Macaulay to 
 underline Hastings's attention to a culture he himself despised. 
 
 A modern scholar might make more of the curiously ambivalent 
 relationship between possession and an understanding both opened 
 up and closed down by possession, by the ventriloquized voice that 
 the dominant voice creates and with which it then proceeds to place 
 itself in dialogue. The pleasures of imperialism and of enlightened 
 pride in marvelous possessions (which Southey found so subtly dis¬ 
 turbing) are clearly part of Hastings's makeup but so are the satisfac¬ 
 tions and the guilt of conquest, reassuringly contained and atoned 
 for by the uses to which conquest is put. 
 
 It is too early in the history of understanding for us to expect 
 exploration of such subtleties from Macaulay, and in any case, his 
 literary temperament leans to the tale well told rather than to the 
 tale searchingly analyzed. Nevertheless, it remains disappointing to 
 find his estimate of Hastings's accomplishment so resolutely limited 
 to balancing the company's books and to enlarging its holdings in 
 real estate. We are at a less than thoughtful stage of self-glorification 
 when the significance of a civilization is taken to be reflected in the 
 size of its empire. Macaulay is never reluctant to make this con¬ 
 junction, and military supremacy is never absent from his recitals 
 of the splendors that make England preeminent. Walter Houghton 
 may seem excessive in suggesting that Macaulay worshiped force, 
 but he certainly rejoiced in the advantages that force can confer on a 
 people. 17 Linda Colley's view that Britain was a nation whose culture 
 largely defined itself through fighting 18 finds ample substantiation 
 in Macaulay's essays. 
 
 It cannot be said that Macaulay's history of "British India," as 
 recounted in the essays on Clive and Hastings, shows any sign of 
 progress at work in that history, let alone a progress sufficiently ar¬ 
 ticulate to urge its own extension into the future. Apart from Clive's 
 alleged purifying of the company's administration, conquest is seen 
 to have brought with it only the catastrophic concomitants of con¬ 
 quest. A different "turn" can be given to imperial history (by those 
 enabled to write it into events) only when conquest is perceived as 
 bringing responsibility in its train. Unchallengeable power cannot 
 effectively be questioned from below. That invulnerability makes 
 it all the more important that it should open itself to questioning 
 from within. The acceptance and weighing of this answerability set 
 
 Macaulay 185 
 
the British empire apart from others. This is Grant's atonement put 
 in less fervent language. We have to remember that the decision¬ 
 making cluster—Bentinck, Mill, Trevelyan, and Macaulay—was not 
 without an evangelical strain in its background. 
 
 The rhythm of progress at work in Macaulay's view of history is 
 typically one step back for every two steps forward. We are not look¬ 
 ing at a pause while the gains achieved are consolidated but at a 
 regression resulting from the vulnerabilities brought into being by 
 the nature of the advance. With lesser civilizations, there may be no 
 recovery from the step back. Recovery depends on a capacity for self¬ 
 scrutiny and the will to put the lessons learned from that scrutiny 
 into effect. 
 
 The present is predictably the point at which the regression has 
 ended and the requisite conditions are in place for the next advance. 
 Frankness in admitting past errors or excesses becomes evidence 
 that the task of self-examination has been sternly carried out. "It 
 is true," Macaulay says in his 1833 speech on India, that "the early 
 history of this great revolution is chequered with guilt and shame." 
 "How should it be otherwise?," he asks. Men bom in humble sta¬ 
 tions and raised rapidly to dizzy eminences are likely to be "profuse 
 and rapacious, imperious and corrupt" (p. 704). 
 
 That situation had now been transformed. Looking at the India 
 that in the following year would be named as the place of his exile, 
 Macaulay saw "peace studiously preserved," "confidence gradually 
 infused," "moderation and clemency" not to be found "in the annals 
 of any other victorious and dominant nation," and a government 
 "anxiously bent on the public good" (p. 705). 
 
 With the preconditions in place for India to move ahead, the next 
 step would depend on where it stood in the march of civilization. In 
 the year following his arrival on the subcontinent, Macaulay pub¬ 
 lished an essay on Bacon that may seem as distant as possible from 
 his Indian concerns until we remember that India's position on the 
 Mill curve might well be on the threshold of the Baconian era. In 
 fact, this positioning had been helpfully provided in a letter written 
 by Rammohun Roy to Lord Amherst ten years before Macaulay's 
 essay. Roy was protesting against the proposed establishment of a 
 Sanskrit school in Calcutta "similar in character to those which 
 existed in Europe before the time of Lord Bacon." 19 Such a seminary 
 would succeed only in loading the minds of students with "gram¬ 
 matical niceties" and "vain and empty subtleties," adding nothing to 
 what was known 2,000 years ago. The pre-Baconian system of the 
 
 l86 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
schoolmen had kept the British nation in ignorance. The Sanskrit 
 system of education was similarly designed to keep India "in dark¬ 
 ness." 20 
 
 Roy can seem like a preliminary advertisement for Macaulay, but 
 unlike Macaulay, his criticism is not directed at the Indian past. Like 
 others in the Bengali Renaissance, he is a heavily overdetermined 
 figure who can sometimes seem more important symptomatically 
 than intrinsically as we thread our way among the determinations. 
 He stands not only at the intersection of two contesting imperial 
 discourses but also at the point of their convergence with a Hindu 
 Renaissance, uncertainly endeavoring to take in the West without 
 thereby assisting the West to take over India. Since the Renaissance 
 itself is largely authorized by the status momentarily conferred on 
 Hinduism following the West's discovery of its ancient greatness, the 
 reform movement finds itself in the awkward position of accepting 
 a gift that both establishes its credentials and underwrites its depen¬ 
 dence and of making use of that gift to advance its own autonomy 
 while at the same time implementing much of the donor's agenda. 
 
 In a theater so variously peopled, the balance of forces is indeed 
 precarious, and the particular issues that are brought to the fore¬ 
 ground in constituting that balance are likely to be much more than 
 themselves. Lata Mani, in an influential article, has shown the im¬ 
 portance of suttee as a staging ground for a debate between tradition 
 and modernity in which both terms were given some of their cru¬ 
 cial inflections by the site that was constructed to display them. If, 
 in accepting this persuasive argument, we agree to treat tradition 
 and modernity contextually rather than conceptually, we must then 
 take account of the singularity of a context that associated moder¬ 
 nity with dominance and tradition with failure to an extent not seen 
 in previous stylings of this debate. 21 
 
 Roy, who has become identified with Indian "reformist" objec¬ 
 tions to suttee, was obliged in the course of his critique 22 to respond 
 to this situation by devaluing tradition and reinstating origins, by 
 privileging foundational texts over subsequent interpretation, and 
 by circumventing an alleged history of corruption in order to ap¬ 
 peal to a pristine purity behind it. The move, irresistibly familiar 
 to students of seventeenth-century England, reactivates within an 
 imperial context the paradoxes of a Puritanism disabled by its own 
 empowerment, by its endeavor to found itself upon and yet also con¬ 
 tain the antiauthoritarian potential of the Edenic. 
 
 Colonial discourse may have flirted briefly with the figure of a 
 
 Macaulay 187 
 
contemporary India fallen from its Edenic-classical past and of Para¬ 
 dise regained through British intervention, 23 as in Elizabeth Hamil¬ 
 ton's novel. But one cannot unrestrictedly license the building of 
 progressive potentialities into the founding texts of a subject nation. 
 A discourse that is heavily interpretative cannot sanction moves 
 that are directed against interpretation except as a temporary tac¬ 
 tic to secure collaboration on a highly limited agenda. The perils of 
 such permissiveness become more evident when we recognize that 
 the anti-interpretative move is itself deeply interpretative, embed¬ 
 ding progressive imperatives in pristineness and bestowing on those 
 imperatives the overriding authority of origins. In the end, it had 
 to be argued that the failure of India lay in inherent flaws rather 
 than historical accretions and that those flaws were entrenched not 
 simply in a "tradition" that could be circumvented but in originating 
 texts that it was impossible to delegitimate. V. G. Kiernan defines the 
 Western position in one remarkable sentence that carries within it 
 more than one metaphor this book should have made familiar: "The 
 Indian mind had walled itself up in such a prison that only a new 
 language could give it a ladder of escape." 24 This is another way of 
 evoking those repeated impasses of Oriental civilizations set out so 
 strikingly by Hegel. The Indian mind had to transcend, not reinvent, 
 itself. It had to offer itself to an epistemological rupture, a seismic 
 shift in the conditions of thought, for which the slow accumulation 
 of preliminary circumstances might normally be charted over cen¬ 
 turies. In an imperial world, a stroke of the pen could be all that was 
 needed to initiate the work of change at this depth. 
 
 With India looking into the prospect of a new world of learning but 
 fatally constrained from reaching forward to grasp it by the strait- 
 jacket of scholastic thought, Macaulay's essay on Bacon acquires a 
 new relevance. Moreover, the essay is as notable for its denigration 
 of Plato as it is for its endorsement of Bacon. Bacon's ire had been 
 directed against the schoolmen, who are usually treated as post- 
 Aristotelian. Macaulay prefers Plato as a negative example, osten¬ 
 sibly because Plato "did more than any other person towards giving 
 the minds of speculative men that bent which they retained till they 
 received from Bacon, a new impulse in a diametrically opposed di¬ 
 rection" (4:117). Another reason for Macaulay's choice might be that 
 Plato, of all Western philosophers, is the one most at home in an¬ 
 cient India and that his "bent" is therefore the Indian predisposition. 
 
 Given Roy's letter and Macaulay's essay, it would be easy to read 
 the minute expansively as rejecting Plato for Bacon, particularly 
 
 l88 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
since so much in the minute lends itself to the contrast drawn in 
 the essay. The minute is both less and more than such a replace¬ 
 ment. David Kopf is on the right road in arguing that the competing 
 proposals by Orientalists and Anglicists should be viewed not in the 
 abstract but in the context of a cultural encounter. To proceed fur¬ 
 ther along that road, we have to reflect on the suitability of the term 
 "encounter." 25 
 
 We are not here considering a quest for mutual enlightenment 
 based stimulatingly on the surprise of difference but the manner 
 in which a dominant culture puts itself into relationship with a 
 subjected one. Understanding the subjected culture or even laying 
 down the basis for a dialogue with it is not the primary objective 
 of such a relationship. The dominant culture is concerned with de¬ 
 vising managerial strategies that will maximize collaboration and 
 minimize resistance. Making use of the subjected culture's propen¬ 
 sities enables these strategies to be implanted in native soil. The 
 subjected culture is concerned with placing the dynamics of reform 
 (to use Kopf's title) in the best possible location within the varieties 
 of acquiescence. Both can participate in and dramatize the contrast 
 between Hinduism's golden age and its present plight, but the fic¬ 
 tions erected on that contrast begin by being different and end by 
 being incompatible. The indigenous narrative must be a story of the 
 betrayal of origins. The dominant narrative may accept some of the 
 episodes in that story, but in the end, it will have to argue that the be¬ 
 trayal lay in the nature of the origins. As the dominant fiction shifts 
 into complete rejection of the indigenous version (which at one time 
 it ambivalently sponsored), it becomes apparent that the Orientalist 
 and Anglicist alternatives are different managerial strategies based 
 on different evaluations of what is to be managed. The Orientalist 
 alternative, with its reluctance to recognize that a culture once noble 
 can be wholly beyond redemption, offers itself for elevation into the 
 realm of the literary and the humanistic. The Anglicist view, based 
 on imperial assumptions of superiority that in their nature cannot 
 be dialogic, is less concerned with world understanding than with 
 remaking the world in the Western image. Nevertheless, it cannot 
 wholly eliminate from itself propositions that were once not with¬ 
 out power in both Enlightenment and romantic thought. 
 
 When we speak of the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, we think 
 of it as a confrontation with a substantial history—a debate between 
 alternatives that exposure over time had made familiar. This may 
 not be an adequate representation. With three successive governors- 
 
 Macaulay 189 
 
general supporting and encouraging Oriental studies, the Orientalist 
 alternative was entrenched in India. Kopf speaks of the Orientalist 
 as "the man of the hour" in 1800, and by 1830, his position in India 
 was, if anything, stronger. Orientalist views were even reflected in 
 the Fort William curriculum, where six vernacular languages were 
 taught and proficiency in them encouraged by prizes. 26 
 
 After Macaulay, what remained of Fort William's functions was 
 transferred to Haileybury, where Malthus was to be a lecturer and 
 Mill's history a prescribed text. But in the years preceding Ma¬ 
 caulay's arrival, the prevailing philosophy was that one governed 
 India by becoming familiar with it and by modifying its existing in¬ 
 stitutions rather than by subjecting them to root-and-branch trans¬ 
 formations. Even Roy, who can be quoted as if he were Macaulay, is 
 asking for a shift in attention from the classics to the sciences and 
 not necessarily for higher education in English. 
 
 The Anglicist alternative was an import. It had no real roots in 
 Indian soil, not even the soil of the East India Company's premises. 
 Adopting it was an overt act of alienation, widening difference into 
 otherness and calling for conversion rather than cautious change. It 
 established a philosophy of guardianship, of national responsibility 
 for the conduct of empires until the ward came of age in the judg¬ 
 ment of the guardian. Passed by absentee rulers, it confirmed the 
 permanence and even the desirability of an aloofness that would 
 make evident to a subject people the distance it still had to travel. 
 
 Yet the Anglicists carried the day and may even have carried it be¬ 
 fore Macaulay's arrival. 27 Looking at the groupings on either side, we 
 can sagely opine that their triumph was predictable. Bentinck was 
 the governor-general, and Trevelyan, with his reforming zeal and a 
 dislike of the Orientalists that almost amounted to hatred, was the 
 person to whom Bentinck listened. Mill, Bentinck's gray eminence, 
 was not actually an Anglicist, 28 but his comprehensive devaluation 
 of India provided a firm basis for Anglicist recommendations. With 
 Macaulay's arrival and his appointment as chairman of the General 
 Committee on Public Instruction, the power to make educational 
 decisions was vested in an anti-Orientalist grouping whose local 
 strength was difficult to challenge. But to point this out is to offer 
 to write history as Macaulay does, building narrative suspense (as 
 he does brilliantly) into the shifting coalescences of parliamentary 
 power. For Macaulay to write thus is part of the literary presen¬ 
 tation, but our interest should be in the underlying propulsions as 
 much as in the excitements of the narrative of which individuals 
 and alliances are the dramatis personae. 
 
 190 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
The Orientalists may have been entrenched in India, but in En¬ 
 gland and Europe, they were without a constituency. Having roots 
 in the West mattered most in this dispute. Utilitarian and evan¬ 
 gelical energies gave the Anglicist movement its national momen¬ 
 tum. Behind that momentum were the enabling forces (European 
 rather than simply English) of that discourse spoken for by Mill and 
 Hegel, whose gathering cohesiveness we have traced in previous 
 chapters. The Orientalists had no answer to this array of empower¬ 
 ments. Their own roots may have lain, as Kopf suggests, in a uni- 
 versalism that treated otherness as no more than a cultural differen¬ 
 tiation and that emphasized the proximity in essence of the world's 
 major religions. But empires are based on privilege, not universality, 
 and on distinctive identities fashioned to claim that privilege. The 
 now dominant idea of a chosen people destined to lead the march of 
 civilization carried with it the imperial prerogative that is so often 
 the suppressed agenda of the elect. It was spoken for by Hegel, not 
 by Voltaire. The Orientalists failed because their moment was over, 
 because in Hegelian language they were no longer in touch with the 
 epic of the idea. The Anglicists succeeded because they rode the tide 
 of a much larger convergence of forces than the provincialism of 
 their name suggests. 
 
 The minute on education may well be the most important docu¬ 
 ment in India's cultural history but only if it is metonymically read 
 in proximity to an extensive complex of attitudes. There has been a 
 remarkable consensus about reading it in this way, a consensus so 
 effective that we need the insistences of scholarship to remind us 
 how limited the minute was in its scope. As Gerald and Natalie Sir- 
 kin have reminded us, 29 the choice to be pondered was not between 
 English and the Indian vernaculars but between English and San¬ 
 skrit. Moreover, the minute did not recommend that English should 
 replace Sanskrit as the medium of higher education; it merely rec¬ 
 ommended that higher education, subsidized by the East India Com¬ 
 pany, should be conducted hereafter in the English medium. 
 
 If we (justifiably) treat this modest proposal as making English the 
 language of all higher understanding, it is because we recognize the 
 extent of the British hegemony and the coercive force of an ideol¬ 
 ogy that has been articulated in the previous pages. The universal 
 disposition to read the minute in this way, to discern it as a cultural 
 watershed, to find its consequences still embedded in our attitudes, 
 is wildly disproportionate yet instinctively correct. The minute en¬ 
 dures in India's cultural history and haunts the aftermath of inde¬ 
 pendence as a persisting name for much more than itself. 
 
 Macaulay 191 
 
Macaulay's remarks on Indian culture have been quoted often and 
 stand as classics of vituperation. He is not inexpert with the rapier, 
 but in the ancient India he despised, his weapon of choice would 
 undoubtedly have been the mace. En route to India, Egypt receives 
 a preliminary drubbing, but India is, of course, the ideal theater for 
 the absurdly literal reading of mythology as including "medical doc¬ 
 trines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which 
 would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history 
 abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand 
 years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of but¬ 
 ter" (p. 723). 
 
 Some of this is natural in a man with no taste for Plato. Some of 
 it is understandable in a newly arrived Anglicist attacking an Orien¬ 
 talist faction that seemed solidly entrenched. But when every allow¬ 
 ance has been made for the preferences of the man and the pressures 
 of the moment, we are left with one of the most deplorable state¬ 
 ments made by a member of one civilization about the culture of 
 another. 
 
 Ridicule is a weapon Macaulay adds to the Mill armory, and the 
 temptation to retaliate is strong since Western myths are not in¬ 
 vulnerable to ridicule. But it is more useful and less unintelligent 
 to point to the systematic program of reading about India in which 
 Emerson was engaged and that gathered momentum as Macaulay 
 wrote his minute. Emerson's methodical studies, fully described by 
 Frederic Carpenter and Arthur Christy, 30 included not only the In¬ 
 dian texts that were available in translation but also works on India 
 by evangelicals and others and poems such as Southey's Curse of 
 Kehama. For Macaulay, "a single shelf of a good European library" 
 was "worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" (p. 722). 
 He added unconvincingly that he had never found an Orientalist to 
 deny that finding. Emerson was more generous, combining disap¬ 
 proval of India's current customs and practices with deep respect for 
 its foundational philosophical and religious texts. But Emerson was 
 seeking to understand India, whereas Macaulay was devising a way 
 to rule it. Possession in such cases is nine-tenths of contempt. 
 
 That the real aim of the minute on education was to construct an 
 efficient interface between India and the British administration is 
 apparent from Macaulay's text: "We must at present do our best to 
 form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions 
 who we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but 
 English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" (p. 729). This 
 class was to act not only as a cadre of "interpreters" but also as a 
 
 192 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
conduit for what Macaulay scholars like to call "filtration": "To that 
 class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the coun¬ 
 try, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from 
 the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit ve¬ 
 hicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population" 
 (p. 729). This trickle-down theory worked as badly as trickle-down 
 theories usually seem to do. As Gauri Viswanathan observes, it was 
 unlikely that an anglicized elite in which a limited amount of power 
 was invested would labor diligently at modernizing the vernaculars 
 so as to erode its own monopoly. 31 
 
 English was introduced as a conduit of reform, a means of keep¬ 
 ing India in step with (although respectfully behind) the continu¬ 
 ing advancement of the West. Ironically, it also became a gesture 
 of removal, increasing the distance between government and the 
 governed and establishing an Olympian bureaucracy within a steel 
 frame of self-righteousness. It has been pointed out that entrenching 
 English simply meant that India's lingua franca would be the lan¬ 
 guage of its rulers and that this had always been so, regardless of who 
 ruled India. But other dynasties made India their home and merged 
 themselves with India. Their cultures were carried with their lan¬ 
 guages into the fabric of India's multivocality. The British stayed 
 aloof, physically in the segregated world of their cantonments and 
 psychologically on the protective heights of Western superiority and 
 on the platform of racist theories erected later on those heights. 
 
 Two generations earlier, Burke had pointed out how the migrant 
 character of the British administration distinguished it from others 
 who had conquered and governed India: 
 
 The Asiatic conquerors very soon abated of their ferocity, 
 because they made the conquered country their own. . . . 
 
 But under the English government all this order is reversed. 
 
 . . . Young men, boys almost govern there, without society 
 and without sympathy with the natives. . . . Animated with 
 all the avarice of age and all the impetuosity of youth they 
 roll in one after another,- wave after wave, and there is noth¬ 
 ing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless 
 prospect, of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with 
 appetites continually renewing for a food that is continu¬ 
 ally wasting. 32 
 
 This distinctive alienness of the English, which Burke sees as a 
 failure of responsibility, is seen by Karl Marx in a sharply differ¬ 
 ent light: "Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls who had successively over- 
 
 Macaulay 193 
 
run India, soon became Hinduised, the barbarian conquerors being 
 by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior 
 civilization of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors 
 superior, and therefore inaccessible to Hindu civilization." 33 
 
 Superiority here, as with Mill, Macaulay, and Hegel, lies in the 
 advanced position of the West along the inevitable route of civili¬ 
 zation. The march—that thinly disguised metaphor of intellectual 
 fascination with the Napoleonic—may be the irresistible movement 
 forward of the idea, of democratic institutions, or of the organiza¬ 
 tion of the means of production. The underlying momentum can 
 be differently interpreted, but the momentum, however it is inter¬ 
 preted, gives the West a right to leadership, to unconditional control 
 over the marching legions, that extinguishes the nostalgia of sub¬ 
 ject peoples for institutions that in Hegel's words "do not any longer 
 count in world history." England, Marx continues, is empowered to 
 fulfill a double mission: "the annihilation of old Asiatic society and 
 the laying [of] the material foundations of Western society in Asia." 
 Spenser, Milton, and Cromwell on Ireland and Guyon in destroying 
 the Bower of Bliss speak the same inexorable evangelical language. 
 For Marx also the cost of transformation counts for little against the 
 grim satisfaction that the ground has been leveled for fundamental 
 change: "The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap 
 of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun." 
 
 Philip Mason finds a "philosophic" basis for English aloofness in 
 Plato, 34 and Plato's stately hierarchies are certainly a more elegant 
 foundation for lofty disinterestedness than the merciless tramp of 
 history's marching armies. There are difficulties in implementing 
 either concept with the sad stuff of human nature, even if it is En¬ 
 glish. The superior may be inaccessible, but the inaccessible is not 
 therefore superior. 
 
 Alienness may have been strengthened by the insulations of an 
 imported language restricted to an interpreter class whom the Brit¬ 
 ish, because of the mechanism of government they had devised, had 
 to rely on but also came to distrust. Typical Anglo-Indian novels of 
 the period (and it is difficult to find a novel that is not typical) are 
 suspicious of the Indian intellectual (usually a Bengali) and repose 
 their confidence in those untainted by urban corruption, blissfully 
 ignorant of Macaulay's minute, and hence instinctively loyal to the 
 raj 35 The interpreter class, brought into being as a mediating agent, 
 becomes a primary locus of subversion. This is only one of the many 
 examples of Aristotelian peripeteia that embellish the narrative of 
 British power in India. 
 
 194 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
The minute and even the way in which the minute was argued 
 were the consummation of a discourse that now seemed to have at¬ 
 tained hegemonic status, articulating not only itself but also the per¬ 
 missible terms of involvement with itself. Nevertheless, the passing 
 of the minute into policy was not accompanied by confident state¬ 
 ments about the future of British rule over India. Trevelyan, perhaps 
 the most fervent supporter of the minute, was among the most ar¬ 
 ticulate in voicing his misgivings: 
 
 The political feeling against us in India as foreigners and as 
 destroyers of the independence of so many races and states 
 is very strong. 
 
 The existing connection, between two such distant coun¬ 
 tries as England and India, cannot in the nature of things be 
 permanent: no effort of policy can prevent the natives from 
 ultimately regaining their independence. 
 
 We are, I fear, notwithstanding all our efforts for the good 
 of the people, an unpopular domination. 36 
 
 Emily Eden's perception is not dissimilar. "In the face of those 
 high hills some of which have remained untrodden since the cre¬ 
 ation," she was struck by the incongruity of "105 Europeans, being 
 surrounded by at least 3000 mountaineers, who, wrapped up in their 
 hill blankets, looked on at what we call our polite amusements, 
 and bowed to the ground if a European came near them. I some¬ 
 times wonder they do not cut all our heads off and say nothing more 
 about it." 37 
 
 What Eden sees in its immediacy is projected by Trevelyan as a 
 narrative of the future in which popular feeling rises, the "existing 
 connection" becomes impossible to maintain, and the Indian people 
 regain their independence. This is a straightforward anticipation, 
 lacking in literary depth. It is more satisfying to take up the theme 
 of the peroration to Macaulay's 1833 speech, in which India's inde¬ 
 pendence becomes England's finest hour. Philip Mason, who makes 
 a quite notable effort to style the history of British rule in India as 
 a self-consuming artifact, finds important precedents in Sir Thomas 
 Munro and Mountstuart Elphinstone: "Whenever we are obliged to 
 resign our sovereignty we should leave the natives so far improved 
 from their connection with us, as to be capable of maintaining a 
 free, or at least a regular government among themselves." 38 Power 
 is yielded reluctantly here, subject to the proviso that irreparable 
 harm should not be done by yielding it. Elphinstone's scenario is 
 
 Macaulay 195 
 
more poetic: "The most desirable death for us to die should be the 
 improvement of natives reaching such a pitch as would render it im¬ 
 possible for a foreign nation to retain the government." 39 
 
 An imperialism that can be seen as proceeding magnanimously 
 to its own extinction would make the history of the British in India 
 a well-wrought work of literature, morally edifying as well as aes¬ 
 thetically elegant. It is also a styling not without appeal to a nation¬ 
 alist movement whose triumph would be to have brought about the 
 expulsion of the British by moral coercion rather than by military 
 force. The structure of the fiction is not debated. Indeed, the idea of 
 an imperial regime officially dedicated to its own disappearance is 
 an open invitation to a subject people to press for evidence of a with¬ 
 ering away that would indicate that disappearance is a real objective 
 and not a rhetorical claim. The debate is over whether the fiction is 
 taking the steps within itself that would prepare it for the closure it 
 uncomfortably advocates. 
 
 Between earlier and later versions of the self-consuming artifact, a 
 less generous view of the English mission in India intervenes. Ma¬ 
 caulay participates in this construction as much as in the ones that 
 bracket it. "It is by coercion, it is by the sword, and not by free 
 stipulation with the governed, that England rules India" (14:281), he 
 announces belligerently in replying to a suggestion by W. E. Glad¬ 
 stone that an implicit contract exists between England and India. 40 
 England's responsibilities to India are unilaterally assumed, not con¬ 
 tractually prescribed; they are the moral claim of an advanced im¬ 
 perial conscience arising solely from England's answerability to its 
 own self-image. The responsibilities to which England sees itself 
 called can vary depending on what it wishes to think of itself and on 
 where it chooses to place India in the space between narrowing dif¬ 
 ferences and implacable otherness. After 1857, the typical location 
 of India in that space might offer England an image of the Olympian 
 performance of duties to an ungrateful populace, of character build¬ 
 ing at the outposts of empire, of exile endured and domestic happi¬ 
 ness sacrificed so that the white man's burden might be shouldered. 
 Figures of trusteeship and guardianship could be perceived as pro¬ 
 claiming momentous responsibilities but also as providing abundant 
 opportunities for deferral. Much time could pass before the natives 
 were sufficiently civilized, and in any case, the purpose of the great 
 game was to continue playing the game and not to end it. "The sun 
 never sets on the British Empire" was the enlightening proclamation 
 to be found every week in the center pages of Arthur Mee's Chil- 
 
 196 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
dien’s Newspaper. It is a fitting caption for the illusion of perma¬ 
 nence. More persuasively, Kim, in the timelessness of the imperial 
 pastoral, freezes the great game into a state of being, as the active 
 principle placed in contestation with the contemplative one of the 
 lama's quest. 
 
 Marian Fowler sees the history of the British in India as progress¬ 
 ing from "crass commercialism" through "sanctimonious ideals of 
 moral and sacred duty" to a "Late Raj period, bloated into overween¬ 
 ing pride and arrogance." 41 The discourse to which Macaulay gave 
 the finishing touches was able to accommodate all these forms of 
 greatness. Like other discourses that endured, it combined cohesive¬ 
 ness with elasticity. As the sun sets reluctantly on it, we are able to 
 discern its comic aspects, but the raj revival is more notable for its 
 guilty irony, the result of an understandable desire to eat one's cake 
 while complaining about the calories. 
 
 No discourse is totally hegemonic. If Caliban is taught language, 
 his profit on it is not to curse but to argue, or as De Quincey puts 
 it, to equivocate. Arguing results in requests for clarification, and 
 continuing requests will strip a discourse of its saving opacity, its op¬ 
 portunities for evasion and deferral. Power is not necessarily bound 
 by the discourse that gives it dominance. When no further spaces 
 for maneuvering can be found, power can theoretically move to a 
 different platform, but nations can be reluctant to relinquish their 
 answerability to fictions that they themselves have erected and that 
 persist in their own minds as historical and moral loyalties. The hold 
 of an imperial fiction on the imperial mind can be extraordinarily 
 tenacious, so that an exit maneuver within the fiction itself can be 
 preferable to dispensing with the fiction. The turn toward the exit 
 will take place when the assignations of discourse are sufficiently 
 undone for Caliban to ask who really is Caliban. This is the question 
 that Gandhi, through the civil disobedience movement, positioned 
 himself to pose and the point at which the Furies must leave Prome¬ 
 theus. 
 
 Macaulay 197 
 
Afterword: 
 
 From Center to Circumference 
 
 s© 
 
 At the end of a long history of misrepresentation, it is appropriate to 
 ask how India might wish to see itself in relation to that history. The 
 undertaking should not be avoided. To avoid it by disengaging from 
 history and by seeking to begin de novo is a perennially attractive 
 but not a real alternative. We cannot imagine in innocence. India is 
 not a state of being frozen in the classical past from which paradigms 
 for the future can be derived. India is unavoidably everything that 
 has happened to India. It cannot eradicate its history or try to slice 
 out of it those parts that embarrass its current definitions of nation¬ 
 hood. It has to find itself in relation to propositions that prevailed in 
 the world of thought for several centuries and that now have to be 
 worked through rather than erased. 
 
 The history of the discourse that governed India has to include not 
 only the dominant imperial statement but also a highly articulate 
 nationalist counterstatement. In rewriting India's femininity and 
 in rewriting center-circumference and self-and-other distinctions as 
 unity in diversity, the counterstatement is strikingly effective be¬ 
 cause much of its power is derived from appealing to the very his¬ 
 tory that imperial thought devalues. India's incarceration in itself, 
 a proposition favored by evangelists, is similarly rewritten as India's 
 reflexive recourse to its openness, and once again, the appeal is to a 
 history that is claimed to have testified continuously to the rewrit¬ 
 ing. 
 
 Given the cohesion of the counterstatement and its foundations 
 in Indian thought, it seems almost perverse to argue that the eman¬ 
 cipatory effort must be directed against it as much as against the im¬ 
 perial statement. A critique of the counterstatement is all the more 
 difficult because it is defensively essentialist, invoking the past not 
 in order to admit its own contingency but in order to place itself out- 
 
side a history that does no more than write out the forms of meaning 
 of an ultimacy beyond it. 
 
 Yet an essentialist construction remains a construction, and in 
 the aftermath of its political success, we can begin to see it as a re¬ 
 sistance construction. A resistance construction will have to be re¬ 
 written if it is to voice the needs of an independent India. If it is not 
 rewritten, it is likely to become involved in shadowboxing with a 
 substituted dominance. It must then continuingly reconstruct that 
 dominance in order to maintain its own character as a statement 
 of resistance. India, or the Indian establishment, will become the 
 adversary in the counterdiscourse it has itself articulated, and this 
 tendency is not difficult to detect in recent reflections about India 
 by progressive historians. 
 
 We might begin with India's femininity. Since the feminine in¬ 
 cludes half of the human world's diversity, the phrase "feminization 
 of the Orient" calls on us to use it with caution. We have seen India's 
 femininity read in Camoes as signifying openness to subjugation; 
 read in Dryden as signifying desirability and wildness,- read in Hegel 
 as a delirium of possibilities, with its evaluating center no longer 
 a presence but a void; read subversively by Owenson as an Edenic 
 companionship to a masculine, hierarchically superior West; and 
 read singularly in Shelley as the generative force that bridges the dis¬ 
 tance between concept and implementation, between thought and 
 its realization in the world. 
 
 The nationalist recuperation of India's femininity in response to 
 these varieties of denigration (Owenson and Shelley apart) once again 
 has deep roots in India's history. Indeed, it might be perceived as a 
 defense against that history. The precious stone set in the silver sea 
 and ringed on its other two sides by the world's most formidable 
 mountains has always offered itself to a dream of self-containment, 
 of a protected space that is the ground of a secure distinctiveness. 
 Yet to recall John of Gaunt's speech is also to remember that the 
 sea has not served India as a moat and that its mountains have not 
 served it in the office of a wall. A country whose symbolic geogra¬ 
 phy gathers it to itself has had to live through and survive a history 
 of violation. The unity of India and the intactness of Indianness thus 
 become defensive essentialisms that it is difficult to avoid. Draupadi 
 can be humiliated but not disrobed; the legend not merely preserved 
 in the pages of the world's longest epic but also celebrated in song 
 and dance everywhere in India is tenacious in its hold on the imagi¬ 
 nation. 
 
 Afterword 199 
 
In a short story by Mahasweta Devi that Spivak translates/ Drau- 
 padi's disrobing is resisted by the establishment and insisted on by 
 the victim. The real disrobing is that of the discourse itself. A cloak 
 woven with old embroideries is thrown away to further the sub¬ 
 versive enterprise of walking naked. The dismantling question asks 
 how much has changed and whether inviolable India does not still 
 continue to be violated, with the violations now concealed by the 
 mystifications of the nationalist fable. The trope of India's femi¬ 
 ninity is tellingly unmasked, but we can argue that a different ver¬ 
 sion and not a discarding of that femininity is needed, one in which 
 Elizabeth Hamilton's recognition of feminine India's tenacity of self- 
 knowledge and accommodative strength can be made appropriate 
 to the realities of today. Unity in diversity is a proposition inti¬ 
 mately linked to Hamilton's view of feminine India. Accommoda¬ 
 tive strength is called for by the distinctive cultures now flower¬ 
 ing from India's many languages, and tenacity of self-knowledge is 
 needed if a center no longer imperial is to maintain its contesta- 
 tional relationship with the margin. 
 
 As a phrase nurtured by historical circumstances, unity in diver¬ 
 sity challenges an imperial view of India's unity in which diversity 
 is overcome rather than respected. Like other imperial understand¬ 
 ings, the view claims to be rooted in the ethos of the people it subju¬ 
 gates. "The British could not have organized India as they did," Spear 
 observes, "if the people had not already been, as it were, apprenticed 
 to the idea of unity." 2 If Aurangzeb was "the most implacable of an- 
 nexers," the "real reason for aggression" was "the dogma of Indian 
 indivisibility." 3 It is hard not to notice that in two pages an "idea" 
 has graduated into a "dogma" to be written irresistibly into history 
 by those who profited most from its implementation. 
 
 That India is a country offering itself for conquest is a proposi¬ 
 tion embodied in a memorable metaphor by Camoes. We have heard 
 its echoes in Goldsmith, Hegel, Dow, and elsewhere. That the pur¬ 
 pose of conquest is to bestow on India a unity that it seeks but that 
 its fragmented, natural state prevents it from attaining is a British 
 innovation with Miltonic origins. The Miltonic presence becomes 
 stronger if we attribute the dramatically swift expansion of British 
 power in India to divine providence rather than to the acumen of 
 the East India Company. There is no lack of such attributions. John 
 William Kaye's 1853 history of the company is particularly earnest 
 in its appreciation of the Almighty's helpfulness, and Burke writes 
 with appropriate solemnity of Britain's "glorious empire given by 
 
 200 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
an incomprehensible dispensation of Divine providence into our 
 hands." 4 Colley even tells us that the "Probable Design of the Divine 
 Providence in subjecting so large a portion of Asia to the British Do¬ 
 minion" was among the topics in an essay competition at Cambridge 
 University, for which an appropriate prize was awarded. 5 
 
 The gifts of an incomprehensible Providence call for exploration 
 of the meaning of the gifts. Good works are not the basis of election, 
 but they can be among its crucial signs. The mysterious purpose 
 of the divine donation can only be worked out and made evident 
 in the moral constructions that respond to that purpose. Imperial¬ 
 isms thus motivated will be tirelessly self-justifying; they will also 
 be Olympian, set apart by election, accountable only to their inner 
 voices. In a secular world, they will wear with righteousness the 
 cloak of a transferred divinity. 
 
 Milton's God, armed with golden compasses (a printer's ornament 
 evocative of the divine book now to be the manual of imperial dis¬ 
 course), sets "bounds" to a world delivered from chaos into order. 
 Raphael, his messenger, lays down the principles of "binding" within 
 that world's "just circumference." Lacking those principles and the 
 strong relationship they suggest between bounding and binding, the 
 world would sink back into the chaos from which it was rescued. 
 Adam, professing himself well taught by Raphael's exposition, adds 
 the spatial metaphor that has already been implied to the Arch¬ 
 angel's hierarchical modeling: 
 
 O favourable Spirit, propitious guest 
 
 Well hast thou taught the way that might direct 
 
 Our knowledge and the scale of nature set, 
 
 From centre to circumference, whereon 
 In contemplation of created things 
 By steps we may ascend to God. 
 
 [PL 5.507-12) 
 
 Raphael's treatment of the scale is an exercise in continuity. Dif¬ 
 ferences on the ladder are of degree, not of kind, and body can even 
 work up to spirit within the scale's containment. Nothing on the 
 scale needs to be the other of anything else. In fact, the concept of 
 otherness consorts uneasily with the monism Milton espouses in 
 De Doctrina Christiana. 
 
 The figure is not inherently imperial, but Milton's figures pull in 
 different directions, despite the imperiously proclaimed cohesion of 
 his text. "God is thy law, thou mine" (4.637) is certainly a statement 
 
 Afterword 201 
 
that an imperial power would not be reluctant to hear from sub¬ 
 ject peoples. The hierarchical modeling of geopolitical space and the 
 Olympian elevation of the ruler above the "subjected plain" of the 
 ruled (12.640) can be made to join with the dispositions of race, ty¬ 
 pology, and gender to provide a well-stocked grid for the migration 
 of metaphors. The "direct" and "set" of Adam's acknowledgment to 
 Raphael transmit the coercive force of this compounding. 
 
 Center-circumference dispositions are part of the modus operandi 
 of imperial thought, but a city planned to display those dispositions 
 was an innovation in imperial ordering, all the more significant be¬ 
 cause of its belatedness. Delhi replaced Calcutta as India's capital 
 in 1911, but it took twenty years for New Delhi to be completed 
 and to be given its crucial role in the imperial statement. Nation¬ 
 alist resistance was mounting at that point, and the British were to 
 depart sixteen years later. Stressed by these anxieties, the imperial 
 proclamation engineered by Sir Edward Lutyens was appropriately 
 strenuous, with center-circumference relationships inscribed indel¬ 
 ibly not simply in the vistas that led from the subjected plain to 
 the viceregal eminence but even in the redesigning of major inter¬ 
 sections as confusing roundabouts. Proceeding along the dominant 
 vista of Kingsway, those devout in appreciation would ascend not by 
 steps but by a carefully determined gradient to that imperial sub¬ 
 stitute for the house of God, the viceregal palace. The gradient as 
 it now exists is the unsatisfactory result of a long dispute between 
 Lutyens and Herbert Baker, his collaborator and partner. Lutyens re¬ 
 ferred to it ever after as his Bakerloo. 6 We can now read "Bakerloo" 
 as doing more than truncating the vista of viceregal dominance that 
 Lutyens valued so highly. The truncating also makes more imperi¬ 
 ous the north and south secretariat buildings on either side of the 
 ramp that have become the true site of power in independent India. 
 This is a result Baker may have foreseen. 
 
 New Delhi's relentlessly radial planning has been overgrown but 
 not erased by India's untidiness. Erasure would not be appropriate, 
 given the importance of the wheel in Indian iconography. But the 
 wheel does not privilege either the hub, the spokes, or the rim. Its 
 effective functioning as an icon depends on interdependence rather 
 than on a centralized dominance. India, after 1947, has not moved 
 very far in this direction. In fact, if we recall Britain's fashioning 
 of its role in India from 1760 to 1835 as first successionist, then 
 revisionist, and subsequently assimilationist, we might have to con¬ 
 clude that India today remains becalmed in the successionist phase. 
 
 202 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
It is unlikely to advance beyond it until it succeeds in engaging 
 its often intoned commitment to secularism with a religiocultural 
 imagining of unity that Indian nationalism once foregrounded but 
 that it is now understandably reluctant to endorse. 
 
 Appropriations of Milton form an important presence in imperial 
 thought. The romantics rewrote Milton. In doing so, they rewrote 
 center-circumference relationships in a manner that approaches the 
 Indian principle of unity in diversity. Blake casts Urizen as the first 
 imperialist, making the Fall the totalizing and enclosing of a previ¬ 
 ous openness. Drawing the just circumference is the primal act of 
 injustice. The Edenic state is contestational rather than hierarchical, 
 creatively unstable, involved in continuing negotiations with itself. 
 Likewise, Wordsworth, in the 1805 version of the Snowdon experi¬ 
 ence, finds the "imagination of the whole" residing in the turbulent 
 but conjoined voice of many waters and not in the unchanging calm 
 of the firmament above them. The 1850 text imperializes this lan¬ 
 guage, transferring the envisioning of wholeness from the "home¬ 
 less voice" of the waters to the unifying strength of the omniscience 
 above them. 7 Both Blake and the early Wordsworth help us in anno¬ 
 tating the Indian principle so as to open up its brevity and to wrench 
 it away from its incantational status. The phrase is unity in, not 
 unity and or unity versus, diversity. The choice of the preposition is 
 crucial. A philosophy of immanence could be built on that slender 
 bridge. 
 
 Center-circumference hierarchizations dominated English think¬ 
 ing about India, subtly nourishing the Reformation roots of that 
 thinking by displacing the creation of the world into the creation 
 of empire. The British wrote Milton's commanding account of the 
 first creation into the conquest of India at the same time that the 
 romantics were undoing that very account. It would be comforting 
 to say that imperialism trudged behind literature in the grand march 
 of understanding. It would be closer to the truth to conclude that 
 the swift and decisive growth of imperial power in India snuffed out 
 the anti-imperial tendencies in romantic literature that might other¬ 
 wise have led to a different outcome. The dogma of indivisibility is 
 Urizen's dogma, not Aurangzeb's. It is bestowed on Aurangzeb to 
 translate a justification for territorial aggrandizement (which Blake 
 was then energetically questioning) into a deeply felt need of the 
 Indian people. 
 
 The omnific word bringing order into the chaos of eighteenth- 
 century India is a submerged but potent figure in Britain's imperial 
 
 Afterword 203 
 
rhetoric. The figure encourages us to exaggerate the self-assurance of 
 Mughal rule. The "collapse" that followed can then be dramatized, 
 and domination by the British can be provided with an appropriate 
 Indian precedent. Spear, a recent historian but not one suspicious of 
 inherited models, underlines this self-assurance by observing with 
 some of the relish of aftersight that Mughal India thought it had the 
 measure of its European visitors and "regarded them as pawns in the 
 never-ending games of politics and commerce." To Mughal India's 
 complacent confidence in its power to maintain itself against exter¬ 
 nal challenges, the northern Europeans "seemed to be heavy, shrewd 
 and dull, and in no context dangerous." 8 
 
 Successionist thinking can be expected to attribute to the Mughals 
 the hegemony it seeks to obtain for itself. It can then view Mughal 
 hegemony in an ironic light as unknowingly vulnerable, as await¬ 
 ing its perfecting by its inheritors. But hegemony for its own sake is 
 less than acceptable to an imperialism blessed or harassed by a con¬ 
 science. It can even be argued that previous hegemonies were made 
 vulnerable by the thoughtless pursuit of hegemony for its own sake. 
 A moral foundation for hegemony must be built, and that foundation 
 is best laid (following Miltonic precedents) by stipulating anarchy as 
 the only possible alternative to the "omnific word" of dominance. 
 
 Although British thinking about India outgrew the successionist 
 phase, this constituent in it was preserved and even enhanced. Its 
 persistence in Spear's work well after India attained its indepen¬ 
 dence is a reminder of its stubborn vitality as a crucial part of the im¬ 
 perial statement. The unity of India had, of necessity, a high place in 
 that statement, but it was a unity bestowed by a transcendent power 
 on a fragmented India, desiring wholeness but unable to attain it. 
 
 The nationalist counterstatement invoked unity in diversity in 
 order to retrieve the idea of unity from this imperial context. In 
 doing so, it resorted to a defensive articulation, but one with sub¬ 
 stantial roots in Indian thought, which replaced the imperial with 
 the immanent and the potentially contestational. The replacement 
 converged on romantic perceptions and romantic views of the rela¬ 
 tionship between the fragment and the whole. It also went further, 
 laying the basis for its own deconstruction. The transition from the 
 early romantic view of the fragment as seeking wholeness to the 
 later perception of it as resisting wholeness charts a movement that 
 applies itself with disconcerting relevance to the problems of con¬ 
 temporary India. It also prefigures the movement from modern to 
 postmodern modes of understanding, reminding us that the Indian 
 
 204 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
nationalist poem was high modernist, even to the extent of reaching 
 its maximum articulation at the same historical point as the literary 
 movement it paralleled. 9 
 
 Yet unity in diversity does more than prewrite romantic thought 
 and rescue the idea of unity from imperial contamination. Mod¬ 
 ern historians can find in the phrase a more accurate description of 
 eighteenth-century India than the central dominance and circum¬ 
 ferential anarchy written into earlier stereotypes. The thirty-one- 
 volume New Cambridge History of India, loosely federated like the 
 eighteenth-century India it perceives, may even provide, when it is 
 completed, an oeuvre obtaining unity from diversity, avoiding grand 
 narratives and espousing petits recits. C. A. Bayly can now position 
 his contribution to this project so as to put it to us that the Mughal 
 empire was a "much less substantial hegemony" and the society of 
 eighteenth-century India was "more varied" than the "stereotype of 
 decline and anarchy" that was the "unwritten emblem" of the au¬ 
 thors of the old Cambridge history. 10 Bayly can even concede that 
 "the presumption that the decline of a powerful, extractive, all-India 
 state in the form of the Mughal Empire brought misery seems a 
 curious reflexive shadow thrown by the imperialists of the following 
 century." 11 Nevertheless, the perspective of the older history "seems 
 now, for all its drama, not so much wrong as manifestly inadequate 
 as a theme." 12 
 
 How the theme will be made adequate is not clear. World pictures 
 are anathema today, but if we insist too much on the density and 
 thickness of the actual, we may be left not with translucence but 
 with an opacity that forbids interpretation instead of stimulatingly 
 resisting it. The more persuasive theme might include a less hege¬ 
 monic center, a circumference no longer thought of as intrinsically 
 wayward, and the possibility of center-circumference relationships 
 that are cooperative rather than resistant to each other. These sophis¬ 
 tications might bring the model up to date and could also locate it 
 within the space of "practical" politics in contemporary India. Unity 
 in diversity goes beyond these refinements and presents itself as a 
 more audacious exercise in risk taking that empowers the margin 
 and inscribes center-circumference relationships as contestational 
 rather than cooperative. We can say that the principle belongs to 
 poetics rather than to politics, but the poetics of politics have a para¬ 
 digmatic force, substantiated in this case by an Indian political tra¬ 
 dition that is as much populist as it is authoritarian. 13 
 
 The contemporary prestige of the margin makes it important that 
 
 Afterword 205 
 
the center should not be lost in the circumference and that diversity 
 should recognize rather than submerge its contestational opposite. 
 When Rushdie writes of the "lust for centrality" and the "Indian 
 longing for form," 14 he acknowledges a force of consolidation in 
 Indian thought that the word "lust" both intensifies and subverts. 
 "Longing for form" is a phrase that needs to be reinscribed as we 
 recall complaints about Hinduism's formlessness,- Lowes Dickinson 
 cowering before the proliferations of temple sculpture/ 5 Forster's 
 Fielding returning with relief to "the Mediterranean harmony",- 16 
 Yeats's contrast between "calculation, number, measurement," and 
 "Asiatic vague immensities",- 17 and Pound's ugly invective about the 
 "obnubilations" of Indian art. 18 The longing for form is surely most 
 intense when the pressure of multitudinousness bears in on its fra¬ 
 gility, when the proliferation of the temple facade and the "complete 
 simplicity / Costing not less than everything" of the temple's inner 
 sanctum are brought together in the interplay of contraries. Rushdie 
 typically and justly questions the "lust for centrality" even as he 
 concedes it, disclaiming the center not as a location but as an ex¬ 
 clusive point of reference. As a point of reference, it is parodied by 
 the novel's exuberant paranoia. 19 Likewise, the linearity of Padma's 
 "what happens nextism" is eddied around by the narrator's digres¬ 
 sions and dilations, by the refusal of the "squirming facts" (as they 
 are called by Wallace Stevens) 20 to offer themselves to the sequen¬ 
 tial imperative. But the linearity is significantly not dismantled. The 
 novel's movement to its climax through its own distractions and the 
 devastatingly comprehensive peripeteia of its unraveling testify to a 
 longing for form, manifest even in the forms of undoing. 
 
 The point here is not to savor Rushdie's complexities, which 
 would call for much more than limited space in an afterword, but to 
 indicate the degree to which he writes the principle of unity in di¬ 
 versity into the poetics of his novel. Because Rushdie's treatment of 
 the principle is contestational and because of his repeated references 
 to the foremost poet of contestation, Blake, 21 his work nourishes the 
 convergence of Indian and romantic understandings along lines al¬ 
 ready discussed in these pages. 
 
 One far-reaching consequence of placing unity and diversity in a 
 contestational relationship is that center-circumference and center- 
 margin mappings, as well as the typological and progressive readings 
 of history that are annexed to these geopolitical dispositions, will 
 have to be fundamentally rethought. An interesting preface to this 
 rethinking is provided unexpectedly in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet and 
 
 206 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
specifically in the many interpretations it offers of Queen Victoria's 
 picture, interpretations carefully placed both in historical time and 
 in the progress of the novel. 22 At first, the picture is a means of 
 teaching Indian schoolchildren the English language, which carries 
 with it the considerable benefit of imparting the meaning of empire 
 through its visual grammar. Outside the picture is the space of un¬ 
 createdness. Inside, all is significant, with the scale of nature leading 
 us by steps from the frame's just circumference to the queen's cen¬ 
 tral presence. At the end of Scott's novel, in a grimly comic hyphena¬ 
 tion, the picture is described as an "alle-gory." But the most radically 
 destabilizing reading is offered by Barbara Batchelor, who sees the 
 picture more than once as unfinished because the "unknown Indian" 
 is absent from it. 
 
 If we carry our reflections on this statement well beyond any 
 point Barbara Batchelor could have intended, it will be apparent 
 that there will have to be unknown Indians as long as we persist in 
 composing pictures. A dangerous consanguinity may exist between 
 spatial forms and political understanding. One virtue of contesta- 
 tional thinking is that it frees us from forms with built-in dispo¬ 
 sitions of privilege that must then be painstakingly undermined in 
 the very process of inscribing them. Moreover, insofar as the con- 
 testational forces are thought of as open rather than adversarial to 
 each other, the dynamic and continuingly changing states of equilib¬ 
 rium at which they arrive may be closer to the turbulence and com¬ 
 plexity of the actual than to the current simplifications of political 
 and social mechanics. 
 
 It is not customary to read the Mahabharata contestationally, but 
 as the palimpsest of the nation's narration, it is forced into conten¬ 
 tion with its own overwriting. The torsional forces engendered by 
 its layerings persuade us to find its enlightenments in its entangle¬ 
 ments. Its stresses and strains may be specific to itself, but they are 
 also evocative of the founding dubieties that underlie the text of any 
 nationhood. To read it is to carry its problematics into the space that 
 contemporaneity occupies and to add another layer to the palimp¬ 
 sest, rewriting it in response to and in extension of the text's own 
 troubled process of self-formation. 
 
 Rigveda 10.129 23 is a more ultimate scene of writing, imagining 
 cosmic beginnings behind the mythohistorical beginnings that are 
 encompassed by the Mahabharata 's overlayings. As befits a poem of 
 the source, it is also a poem of irreducible belatedness. The Shin¬ 
 ing Ones who are the creation's first witnesses come into being only 
 
 Afterword 207 
 
after previous and unknowable events have set a scene capable of 
 being witnessed. Like Shelley's Triumph of Life, Rigveda 10.129 ends 
 with a query, but its waterfall of questions following questions de¬ 
 scends not into an abyss of indeterminacy but into the peace of the 
 mind's happiness at the possibilities that it has urged into its own 
 life and that it is now unceasingly called on to explore. 
 
 It is distressing to do no more than point a passing finger at two 
 works, one exquisitely brief and the other hugely encompassing, that 
 can be crucial to Indian ways of self-understanding. The stringently 
 limited and highly preliminary concern here is to suggest that these 
 works be considered as scenes of writing that bear on our future 
 writing of ourselves. 
 
 The disquieting paradox of the Mahabharata as a scene of writ¬ 
 ing is that it asks not to be rewritten but unwritten. It is the poem 
 of the original trauma and of an ancestral, fratricidal holocaust, of 
 a long, inexorable march toward disaster that enlightened counsel 
 tried vainly to avoid. Strikingly, the poet in the poem is a partici¬ 
 pant as well as a narrator, a biological parent within the fable as 
 well as an imaginative parent outside it. He is both the voice and 
 the victim of the poem's momentum, an author committed to bring¬ 
 ing into being an epic that is struggling not to be. Confronting an 
 independent India at every turn in the road of the nation's life, the 
 Mahabharata calls on us to abort its reincarnation. 
 
 Blurring the line between the actual and the imagined is an 
 accusation frequently brought against Indian modes of thought. Lit¬ 
 erature, in its nature, can place itself outside the accusation. The 
 Mahabharata disturbs us because it is so much more than litera¬ 
 ture, because the threat of its realization bears so powerfully on 
 the actual, because we must learn to avoid its outcome without al¬ 
 together disavowing its poetics. 24 
 
 As the previous paragraphs have suggested, it may be impossible 
 not to imagine India, even among those who have identified and re¬ 
 proached those forms of imagining that have served imperial aims. 
 Nevertheless, the imagining must proceed within restraints if we 
 are to circumvent the accusation that the main distinctiveness of 
 the site called India is its endless rhapsodizing of itself. To expose 
 constructions of India by Western dominance and the essentialist 
 counterconstructions of a defensive nationalism is not thereby to 
 mark out a terrain free from the hazards of constructions. The best 
 we can do is minimize those hazards by seeking to define the condi¬ 
 tions of our imagining. 
 
 208 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
The main effort has to be to join the distinctiveness of India's 
 past to the desirabilities of a human project that is itself a construc¬ 
 tion, sustained but also interrogated by the forms of understanding 
 that enter its composition. Placing ourselves along this line of con¬ 
 nection, we can benefit from the perception of India's beginnings as 
 lying not in a single source but in a mixed origination. Such a com¬ 
 mencement locates us from the outset amid the instabilities and 
 accommodative stresses of dialogue and prescribes an inaugurating 
 openness that we must struggle continually to disentangle from the 
 institutional closures to which it has repeatedly been subjected. 
 
 These closures have often been emphatic enough for many to feel 
 that modern India must turn away from a history in which it is 
 unable to find a foundation or even a precedent. Such a maneuver 
 may be momentarily reassuring because of its disavowals, but it also 
 comes uncomfortably close to conceding the otherness of Indian 
 thought to any progressive agenda. By depriving classical India of 
 any presence in world understanding, it reduces modern India to an 
 epiphenomenon of the West. More insidiously, it entrenches one his¬ 
 tory by neutralizing another, by implicitly accepting the West's view 
 of the India it appropriated, and by being content to claim limply 
 that an independent India can implement more successfully than a 
 subjected one a program to which it has subscribed but not contrib¬ 
 uted. 
 
 The alternative is not easy to construct (or even imagine), but an 
 India that wishes to write itself into and not merely to be written by 
 world understanding has to fall back on the powerful ambivalences 
 that characterize its founding texts and has to find within their invi¬ 
 tations to openness the sustenance it can carry into the present 
 moment. The familiar saying that Hinduism is not a religion but a 
 way of life is too easily appropriated by collective coercions that can 
 prescribe not merely the nature but also the nuances of the way. 
 We need to urge the saying back into the deeper recognition that 
 founding texts should be treated not as prescribing a way of life but 
 as offering a way for the life of thought. The creation hymn in the 
 Rigveda is an exemplary charting of this way. We should see it as 
 prefacing and entering into the problem-ridden, multilayered nature 
 of India's two founding epics and as manifest in the extraordinary 
 range of metaphysical possibilities that are embraced by Hindu re- 
 ligiophilosophical texts. Even the Sanskrit language of these texts is 
 creatively many-sided in its floating syntax, in its propensity for in¬ 
 determinate compounding (the word like the world is pulled apart 
 
 Afterword 209 
 
by what it consolidates), and in the divergent etymological roots of 
 its conceptual vocabulary. 25 
 
 An India stripped of its differences is a subscriber, not a contribu¬ 
 tor, to world understanding. An India disrespectful of the accommo¬ 
 dative strength that has characterized its history will be assimilated 
 rather than accommodated to principles it will be unable to revise 
 or even resist. To set aside or to ignore rather than to reinvigorate 
 India's past is to deny it any distinctive entry into the future. On the 
 other hand, to demand that a modern India, often unreceptive to its 
 past, accommodate a culture now uncertainly located, to filiations 
 and affiliations that seem to resist each other is to set down a com¬ 
 pounded difficulty in India's revisionary thinking about itself. It is 
 a difficulty India must confront. In doing so, it must succeed in not 
 confusing the space given to it by Western revisionary thinking with 
 the space its own articulacy is able to find for itself. 
 
 India and the West are enormous simplifications, and one cannot 
 be deaf to the irony of using the homogenizing language of imperi¬ 
 alism to mark out a terrain for a distinctive postimperial gathering 
 of voices. If the irony is not to become an embarrassment, we need 
 to admit that major coalescences of diversity such as "India," with a 
 long and stubborn history of self-imagining, have a place that is vital 
 in the tissue of cultural thought. They have to be received as oppor¬ 
 tunities for understanding and not merely as occasions for vigilance. 
 We need to place these compendious namings under the suspicion 
 generated by a long and destructive history of the tyranny of abso¬ 
 lutes. We also need to see them as validated by their own persis¬ 
 tence, by the place they have earned in our envisioning of ourselves. 
 Perhaps we should proceed to the recognition that essentialist and 
 relativist ways of thinking coexist, constitute each other, and even 
 communicate with each other in the tensions of scholarly language. 
 
 These tensions become manifest when we assert that India, a land 
 of many languages and of cultures often vociferous in their differ¬ 
 ences, is held together by much deeper bonds than a simple com¬ 
 munity of economic interests. It would be an exaggeration to say 
 that one is driven to this proposition; one is also called to it by what 
 Rushdie describes as the Indian longing for form. That longing must 
 now face the stubborn difficulties of its implementation in a world 
 that cries out, with all the peremptoriness of the actual, for forms of 
 imagining that are answerable rather than Edenic. It must hold itself 
 in place by continually obtaining its legitimacy from a diversity it 
 must not only countenance but also embrace. Essential India was a 
 
 210 UNDER WESTERN EYES 
 
name withheld from history and was endowed with a mystique by 
 that withholding. In seeking control of its future, the name's mean¬ 
 ing must change and its implications must be rewritten. Imagined 
 communities are most potent in exile. They are more credible, al¬ 
 though less compelling, amid the abrasions of their reinstatement. 
 
 Afterword. 
 
 211 
 
Notes 
 
 Introduction: Preliminary Navigations 
 
 1 Klaus E. Knorr's important but neglected study, British Colonial Theo¬ 
 ries, 1570-1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944), esp. pp. 
 50-59, examines the significance of mercantilism in the relationship be¬ 
 tween commerce and conquest. 
 
 2 Jan P. Coen, quoted in Brian Gardner, The East India Company: A His¬ 
 tory (New York: McCall, 1972), p. 31. 
 
 3 Antonio van Diemen, quoted in ibid. 
 
 4 Joshua Child, quoted in Philip Mason, The Men Who Ruled India (Lon¬ 
 don: Pan Books, 1987), p. 20. See p. 44 for the East India Company's view 
 that it had to become a "nation in India." Mason's work was originally 
 published in two-volume form under the pseudonym of Philip Woodruff. 
 The two works differ; both are cited. 
 
 5 Ramakrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company 
 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973), p. 75. Charles accepted loans from 
 the East India Company to the extent of £170,000 over sixteen years. The 
 company also had to resort to large-scale bribing in the endeavor to pro¬ 
 tect its monopoly. James Mill estimates these bribes at £90,000 in 1693 
 (ibid., p. 84). Nevertheless, the New or English East India Company was 
 recognized by Parliament in 1658, having offered incentives superior to 
 the old one. The contest between the two was settled in 1702 by an In¬ 
 strument of Union. 
 
 6 See Mason, Men Who Ruled India, p. 19, on the difficulties of balancing 
 the Mahratta presence with the trading relationships being established 
 with the Mughals. The boredom and "amusements" of social life in Bom¬ 
 bay during this period are vividly conveyed in Dennis Kincaid's British 
 Social Life in India, 1608-193 7 (London: George Routledge, 1938), pp. 33- 
 53 - 
 
 7 The senior factor at Surat was William Methwold. In Salman Rushdie's 
 Midnight’s Children (London: Pan Books, 1982), Methwold is associated 
 with the last British footprint just as his namesake was with the first. 
 
Methwold's bequeathing of his estate on condition that it be left intact 
 reflects the safeguards surrounding Britain's departure from India. 
 
 8 For Child's War, which led to the acquisition of Calcutta, see John Keay, 
 The Honourable Company: A History of the Enghsh East India Com¬ 
 pany (London: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 148-68. There are several other 
 accounts, but this is the most judicious. 
 
 9 Charnock is described by Brian Gardner as "a singularly ruthless indi¬ 
 vidual—who became a legend in Anglo-Indian history" ( The East India 
 Company, p. 63]. On the other hand, John Keay characterizes Charnock 
 as "an old and respected servant of the East India Company" ( The Hon¬ 
 ourable Company, p. 148). 
 
 10 For Calcutta in its heyday, see Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: 
 British Architecture in India, 1660-1947 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 
 Books, 1987), pp. 47-76; John Keay, India Discovered (London: William 
 Collins and Sons, 1988), pp. 20-22; and John Pemble, ed., Miss Fane in 
 India (London: Headline, 1985), pp. 19-21. The best evocation of Cal¬ 
 cutta's Palladian elegance is provided in the striking illustrations in Jag- 
 mohan Mahajan's chapter on the city in The Rai Landscape: British 
 Views of Indian Cities (New Delhi: Spantech, 1988), pp. 39-56. 
 
 11 Lucy Hughes-Hallett examines this feminization at work in Dio Cas¬ 
 sius's Roman History in Cleopatra, Histories, Dreams, and Distortions 
 (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1990), p. 49. In the depiction of the battle of 
 Actium on Aeneas's shield ( Aeneid 8.675-728), Egypt is not only femi¬ 
 nized but also animalized and India is associated with the monstrous and 
 the demonic. The shield and its many contrasts between Rome and the 
 Orient are examined in detail in David Quint, Epic and Empire (Prince¬ 
 ton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 21-31. Ironically, Aeneas as a 
 Trojan and therefore an Asian does not escape feminization by his oppo¬ 
 nents, who seem particularly offended by his hairstyling. He is described 
 by a rejected suitor of Dido as a second Paris with his greasy hair bound 
 up beneath a bonnet and by Turnus as an Asian renegade curling his hair 
 with heated irons and drenching it with myrrh. 
 
 12 Angus Calder's Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the Enghsh-Speaking 
 Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780’s (New York: E. P. Dutton, 
 1981) is notable for its recognition of Ireland's place in the formation 
 of English imperialism. R. F. Foster's Modern Ireland, 2600-2972 (Lon¬ 
 don: Penguin Books, 1988) is of crucial importance. However, neither 
 deals with the potentially embarrassing relationship between England’s 
 rejection of Spanish imperialism and its cultivation of imperialism in 
 Ireland. Scholarship on early modern English constructions of Ireland 
 has expanded formidably after Calder. The range of this scholarship is 
 well brought out in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hatfield, and Willy Ma- 
 ley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 
 2334-2660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Connections 
 
 214 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 
 
between imperial perceptions of Ireland and of India remain almost un¬ 
 examined by the expansion. 
 
 13 Stephen Greenblatt's chapter on Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning 
 from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 
 pp. 157-93, remains the classical examination of this propensity in rela¬ 
 tion to otherness. Macaulay in his essay on Sir William Temple is strik¬ 
 ingly clear on the root-and-branch compulsion. ( Critical and Historical 
 Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome [London: Routledge, 1898], pp. 449-50). 
 When Mountjoy received his appointment in 1600, his plan, according 
 to Foster, "was to make Ireland 'a razed table' upon which the Elizabe¬ 
 than state could inscribe a neat pattern" ( Modern Ireland, p. 36). 
 
 14 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche fr. (Harmonds- 
 worth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. ii96n. References to The Faerie Queene 
 are to this edition. 
 
 15 Ibid., p. n87n. 
 
 16 References to Milton's poetry are to John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds., 
 The Poems of fohn Milton (London: Longmans, Green, 1968). Paradise 
 Lost is hereafter cited as PL. 
 
 17 Foster writes of Ireland in 1600 as presenting English observers with a 
 "constant conundrum. How could the Irish be both savage and subtle? 
 Both warlike and lazy? At once evidently 'inferior' yet possessed of un¬ 
 governable pride? Cowardly, yet of legendary fortitude in the face of 
 death? Socially primitive, but capable of complex litigation?" ( Modern 
 Ireland, p. 25). All these paradoxes (with the exception of that in the sec¬ 
 ond question) are applicable to British constructions of India and are in 
 fact used by Macaulay in his essays on Clive and on Hastings ( Critical 
 and Historical Essays, pp. 524-71, 627-92). 
 
 18 Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1641), p. 2; Edmund Spen¬ 
 ser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: 
 Clarendon Press, 1970). Foster adds Fynes Moryson and William Cam¬ 
 den and finds Ireland's alleged Scythian ancestry "a particular favourite" 
 (.Modern Ireland, p. 32). In "Constructing the View of the Present State 
 of Ireland," Spenser Studies n (1994): 216-23, Jean R. Brink argues that 
 Spenser may not have written the View. So far, this possibility has not 
 been widely accepted. 
 
 19 Lord Byron, dedication to The Corsair, in Frederick Page, ed., Byron 
 Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 277. "Wild¬ 
 ness," used approvingly by Byron, can have completely different con¬ 
 notations in an imperial discourse with a strong religious constituent. 
 Milton's repeated employment of the word invests it heavily with infer¬ 
 nal associations. Hegel uses the term routinely in pointing to India as a 
 site of passion and extravagance. 
 
 20 Prometheus Unbound 2.4.94, in Thomas Hutchinson, ed., The Complete 
 Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Humphrey Milford, 
 
 Notes to Introduction 215 
 
Oxford University Press, 1907). References to Shelley's poetry are to this 
 edition. 
 
 21 M. M. Kaye, The Shadow of the Moon (1957, rptd. Harmondsworth: Pen¬ 
 guin Books, 1979), pp. 79, 37. Elsewhere, Lucknow is described as a "beau¬ 
 tiful, barbaric city" and as an "evil, beautiful, fantastic city" (pp. 379, 28). 
 
 22 Oliver Goldsmith, Goldsmith’s History of Man and Quadrupeds with 
 Numerous Original Notes (London: Smith Elder and T. Tess, 1838), 2:23. 
 Goldsmith's remarks are original only as reflection. The description, as 
 the editors note, is taken largely from Georges Buffon's Histoire Natu- 
 relle. 
 
 23 Percival Spear, India: A Modern History, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University 
 of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 226. 
 
 24 Schlegel's openness to otherness is well brought out by Gary Hand- 
 werk: "Envisioning India: Friedrich Schlegel's Sanskrit Studies and the 
 Emergence of Romantic Historiography," European Romantic Review 
 9, 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 231-42. Other scholars have drawn attention to 
 Schlegel's subsequent disillusionment with India. Handwerk argues that 
 Schlegel saw founding Sanskrit texts as envisioning an India that was not 
 fully realized even in classical India and from which India's subsequent 
 history made it more distant. The ideal remains in being for assimilation 
 into a world understanding that is implicitly Germanic. 
 
 25 Prometheus Unbound 3.4.179. 
 
 26 Ibid., 3.4.577-78. 
 
 27 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolo¬ 
 nial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 
 
 28 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin 
 and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983). 
 
 29 Quint, Epic and Empire, esp. pp. 8-9. 
 
 30 Said does say that the Orient is one of Europe's "deepest and most recur¬ 
 ring images of the other," but the same sentence also characterizes the 
 Orient as Europe's "cultural contestant." The next sentence adds that 
 "the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting 
 image, idea, personality, experience" (Edward W. Said, Orientahsm [New 
 York: Vintage Books, 1979], pp. 1-2). The language is more qualified than 
 the reports of it that are offered. It is notable that Said does not even 
 mention the other in his index. 
 
 31 Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic 
 Books, 1975), esp. pp. 5-6, 50-51. 
 
 32 Edward W. Said, "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocu¬ 
 tors," Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 223. 
 
 33 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, esp. chapter 4 on Spenser; 
 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture 
 (London: Routledge, 1990) and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the 
 New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michel de Cer- 
 
 216 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 
 
teau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Min¬ 
 neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and The Writing of His¬ 
 tory, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 
 
 34 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other 
 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). 
 
 35 Ibid., p. 247. 
 
 36 Ibid., p. 87. 
 
 37 Todorov's formulation of this recognition is extraordinary: "The cultural 
 model in effect since the Renaissance, even if borne and assumed by 
 men, glorifies what we might call the feminine side of culture: improvi¬ 
 sation rather than ritual, words rather than weapons" (ibid., p. 92). These 
 remarks are unlikely to convince many feminists and will not move 
 those who think that superior weaponry had something to do with the 
 British conquest of India. 
 
 38 Ibid., pp. 248-49. 
 
 39 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in fournahsm, 
 Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University 
 Press, 1993). 
 
 40 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Pohtics 
 (London: Routledge, 1988) and Outside in the Teaching Machine (Lon¬ 
 don: Routledge, 1993); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: 
 Routledge, 1994); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains (Ithaca: Cornell University 
 Press, 1991); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Univer¬ 
 sity of Chicago Press, 1992). To these should be added Kate Teltscher's 
 India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600-1800 
 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 199s). For further discussion, see my re¬ 
 view article, "Excess of India," Modern Philology 95, no. 4 (May 1998): 
 490-500. Jyotsna G. Singh's Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: 
 Discoveries of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 
 1996) is more hospitable than the above to Said's overall statements. S. P. 
 Mohanty's "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criti¬ 
 cism," Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1989): 1-31, is not a study in the 
 undoing of discourse, but by positing a minimal rationality that self and 
 other must share, it lays open to interrogation within imperial discourse 
 itself the extreme versions of otherness that discourse can generate. 
 
 41 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 174. 
 
 42 W. B. Yeats, "Per Arnica Silentia Lunae," in W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (Lon¬ 
 don: Macmillan, 1959), p. 340. 
 
 43 Suleri, Rhetoric of English India, pp. 16-17, 272. 
 
 44 Raleigh Trevelyan, The Golden Oriole: A 200 Year History of an English 
 Family in India (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 202-3. The 
 phrase encapsulates a notorious remark in E. M. Forster, A Passage to 
 India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 34. The re¬ 
 mark is antedated in a novel by G. A. Henty, who pushes the memsahib 
 
 Notes to Introduction 217 
 
factor as far back as 1857 in Rujub the Juggler (New York: Hurst, 1901], 
 pp. 29, 33. Discussion of the issue has been extensive and vigorous. 
 
 45 Yeats's thinking about the mask is in effect a claim that one must in¬ 
 habit the other in order to know the self. There is a distinction (based on 
 Blake's distinction between specter and emanation) between a true mask 
 that leads back into the self and a false mask that leads away from it. The 
 nature of true and false masks is determined by the system rather than 
 by the individual or the collective. Yeats's formulation acknowledges a 
 necessary collusion between the self and the other that is brought out 
 clearly in "Ego Dominus Tuus": "I call to the mysterious one who yet / 
 Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream / And looks most like 
 me, being indeed my double / And prove of all imaginable things / The 
 most unlike, being my anti-self" (in Richard J. Finneran, ed., W. B. Yeats: 
 The Poems [New York: Macmillan, 1983], p. 162). 
 
 46 Bhabha, "Articulating the Archaic: Cultural Difference and Colonial 
 Nonsense," in Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 123-38. Bhabha's spe¬ 
 cific example is the "Bourn, Bourn" of Forster's Marabar Caves. The noise 
 parodies the sacred word "Om” and does indeed reduce ultimate origi¬ 
 nation to self-reproducing nonsense. Nevertheless, the point made is 
 not simply about incomprehensible India but also about the manner in 
 which the word is heard differently within the limitations of those who 
 listen to it. This is a proposition familiar in Indian philosophy, with San¬ 
 kara as its most notable exponent. Forster prepares us for this realization 
 in the opening pages of his book, and Eliot in the final section of The 
 Waste Land (published two years before A Passage to India), as well as 
 in the epigraphs to Four Quartets, is advising us similarly of the relativi¬ 
 ties of understanding. As Cleo Kearns notes, the Upanishadic glosses of 
 the sound "da" emitted by the thunder "are the products or projections 
 of three communities of interpretation . . . each of whom have listened 
 to the original sound and heard in it their particular word or message" 
 (Cleo Kearns, T. S. Ehot and Indie Traditions: A Study in Poetry and 
 Behef [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 221). It is, of 
 course, impossible to decide whether the same word is being heard dif¬ 
 ferently or whether different words are being heard, but the possibilities 
 of communication between cultures will depend on the presupposition 
 adopted. Imperial power and its view of the nature of otherness seem 
 committed to the second presupposition. The other is untranslatable and 
 yet paradoxically kept in place by being translated. Both transparency 
 and inaccessibility to the imperial gaze are involved in a conundrum of 
 power that thrives on the success and feeds on the failure of that gaze. 
 With some simplification, we could treat Kim as a novel of transparency 
 and A Passage to India as a study in the opaque. 
 
 47 Suleri, Rhetoric of English India, pp. 2-6, 21, 28, 112. 
 
 48 Edward W. Said remarks that Kim's "picture of India exists in a deeply 
 antithetical relationship with the development of the movement for 
 
 218 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 
 
Indian independence," Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 
 p. 32. See also Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime, and Empire (Urbana: Uni¬ 
 versity of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 89-90. The postcolonial cult of Kim 
 calls for examination. It is remarkable that the exclusions of a novel 
 should be treated as adding to its charm and not as questioning its depth 
 of understanding. 
 
 49 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. xii-xiii, 69-71. See also Said's "Repre¬ 
 senting the Colonized," p. 221, for narrative as "a major cultural conver¬ 
 gence" that has "resonated with echoes from the imperial context." 
 
 50 See Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished (Princeton: Prince¬ 
 ton University Press, 1985), where this argument is developed at length. 
 
 51 In the nineteenth-century deification of history, the march of mind is a 
 crucial metaphor for the conquest of the world by the idea. Keats is re¬ 
 sponsive to this tide of thought to the extent that he agrees that "there 
 really is a grand march of intellect." He adds that in promoting that 
 march "a mighty providence subdues the mightiest minds to the ser¬ 
 vice of the time being" (Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Letters of John 
 Keats [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958], 1:282). It is this "gen¬ 
 eral and gregarious advance of intellect" that enables Wordsworth to see 
 farther into the "dark passages" of the mind than Milton. There is a 
 potential contention here between the intellect and the emotions that 
 Keats intensifies by promising that in Hyperion the march of passion and 
 endeavor will be undeviating (p. 207). When he moves later to the con¬ 
 clusion that the heart is the "Mind's Bible," the "Mind's experience," and 
 the "teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity" (2:102- 
 3), he has powerfully modified his original commitment to the march. 
 
 52 Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946) and 
 his speech proclaiming India's independence are the classic articulations 
 of this counterpoem. It is instructive to note that a scholarly state¬ 
 ment by professional historians such as Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukh- 
 erjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K. N. Panikkar, and Sucheta Mahajan in India’s 
 Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989) 
 also sees form emerging from fragmentation, with the gathering cohe¬ 
 sion and widening inclusiveness of the Indian nationalist movement 
 speaking in the end not only for India but also for all subjected peoples. 
 
 53 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, pp. 179-80. The semiemancipation that 
 Greenblatt characterizes with adroitness is "by no means autonomous" 
 but is also "not reducible to the institutional and economic forces by 
 which it is shaped." 
 
 54 The study of imperial relationships offers a dimension to gender studies 
 that has yet to be adequately explored. The suggestions for exploration 
 made so far refer to traffic from the theater of gender to the imperial 
 world. Movement in the reverse direction may be as important and has 
 scarcely been examined. 
 
 55 Said, Culture and Imperiahsm, pp. 161,132. 
 
 Notes to Introduction 219 
 
56 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference, id ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hop¬ 
 kins University Press, 1989). 
 
 57 The secret name is linked to Adamic naming, which is part of Adam's 
 assumption of "dominion absolute" over "beast, fish, fowl" [PL 12.67-68). 
 The names are given to Mowgli by the serpent Ka, the oldest inhabitant 
 of the jungle, who is therefore the jungle's memory. Ka, not accidentally, 
 means "who." The second part of Mowgli's claim to leadership is that he 
 can outstare any creature in the jungle in eyeball-to-eyeball confronta¬ 
 tions. The imperial gaze is transparently evoked, but we are also made 
 aware that superior knowledge gives the gaze its power. As Ronald Inden 
 points out in Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 86-87, 
 the jungle is a familiar metaphor for India. 
 
 58 Forster, Passage to India, p. 178. 
 
 59 I do not seek to evade the possibility that indeterminacies may be not 
 residual but central (as the Draupadi legend disturbingly suggests), that 
 spaces of indeterminacy resist determination of their limits, and that the 
 underground proliferation of these spaces makes it impossible to cor¬ 
 don them off. I merely raise the question here and elsewhere of whether 
 readings of historical events are entirely coincident with these readings 
 of textual behavior. 
 
 60 Hyperbolic acceptance that draws on the general reliance on hyperbole 
 of court poetry, Eastern and Western, can also be discomfiting by pressing 
 hegemonic claims to the boundaries of absurdity. Thus Keshub Grander 
 Sen's encomium of Queen Victoria (in Stephen Hay and I. H. Quereshi, 
 comps., Sources of Indian Tradition [New York: Columbia University 
 Press, 1958], 2:66-67) can be read according to taste as either wittily sub¬ 
 versive or grovelingly servile. 
 
 61 Edward W. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Literature, Politics, and 
 Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana 
 Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), p. 215. 
 
 62 Postmodernism was seen initially as a conspicuously male movement, 
 with feminism perceived largely as an image of the movement's self¬ 
 marginalization (Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Poh- 
 tics and the Avant-Garde [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], 
 pp. 186-89; Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, 
 Theory, Fiction [London: Routledge, 1988], pp. 61-71). Matters have now 
 advanced to the point where Sara Suleri can warn us against "the danger¬ 
 ous democracy accorded the coalition between postcolonial and femi¬ 
 nist theories in which each term serves to reify the potential pietism of 
 the other" (Sara Suleri, "Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolo¬ 
 nial Condition," Critical Inquiry 18 [Summer 1992]: 759). The coalition 
 between the postmodern and the postcolonial is subject to the same cau¬ 
 tions, particularly when we take into account the traditional feminizing 
 of subjected peoples. The two movements do indeed share (and share 
 
 220 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 
 
with feminism) a considerable range of metatactics, but the method 
 should not be taken as all of the message. Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Is 
 the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inquiry 
 17 (Winter 1991): 336-57 suggests some desirable distinctions. See also 
 Linda Hutcheon, " 'Circling the Downspout of Empire,'" in Past the Last 
 Post: Theorizing Post-Coloniahsm and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam 
 and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), pp. 167-89. 
 
 63 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowl¬ 
 edge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Uni¬ 
 versity of Minnesota Press, 1981). "The form of the unfinishable" is not 
 Lyotard's phrase. For Said's objections to Lyotard, see "Representing the 
 Colonized," pp. 222-23. Jameson continues to be committed to a grand 
 narrative and to a cultural logic that responds to the logic of that narra¬ 
 tive. Since the grand narrative is embedded in the political unconscious, 
 the response to it will be complicated by the patterns of behavior that 
 the unconscious exhibits. Petits recits can be treated as avoidances of a 
 grand narrative that will nevertheless manifest itself intermittently and 
 sometimes eruptively through those avoidances. 
 
 64 There is a latent absolutism in this kind of almost metaphysical resis¬ 
 tance to totalization that must guard against being tainted by what it 
 opposes. 
 
 65 See Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Trans¬ 
 nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," Critical Inquiry 19 
 (Summer 1993): 726-51. Describing postcoloniality as a condition that is 
 "safely distant and inert," Miyoshi goes on to argue that by dedicating 
 our attention to it or even to post-Marxism, "we are fully collaborating" 
 with the "hegemonic ideology" of transnational corporations, "which 
 looks, as usual, as if it were no ideology at all" (p. 751). Colonialism (in 
 the forms it has hitherto assumed) may be safely distant and inert, but 
 postcoloniality, in seeking to erase or relocate the cultural and psycho¬ 
 logical legacies of colonialism, has not by any means laid those problems 
 to rest. Miyoshi is, of course, right in pointing to a more immediate and 
 menacing agenda to which attention must be given. 
 
 66 It should be apparent from this paragraph that I do not endow discourse 
 with the kind of sovereignty to which Aijaz Ahmad objects in In Theory: 
 Nations, Classes, Literatures (London: Verso Books, 1992). Nevertheless, 
 I treat discourse as exercising a constitutive force and not as merely 
 offering a mediating facility. 
 
 1. The Lusiads and the Asian Reader 
 
 1 Luis Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads, trans. Leonard Bacon (New York: His¬ 
 panic Society of America, 1950), p. xix. References to The Lusiads are to 
 this translation. 
 
 Notes to Chapter One 221 
 
2 James H. Sims, "The Epic Narrator's Mortal Voice in Camoes and Mil- 
 ton," Revue de Litterature Comparee 51 (1977): 374-84; L. Martz Louis, 
 "Camoens and Milton," Ocidente: Revista Portuguesa de Cultuia, spe¬ 
 cial issue (November 1972): 45-59. 
 
 3 The Lusiads, p. xxv. 
 
 4 PL 4.172-77- 
 
 5 William Julius Mickle, The Lusiad; or The Discovery of India: An Epic 
 Poem (Oxford: Jackman and Lister, 1776), p. cxlvii. Mickle was by no 
 means a responsible translator. For an account of his inventions and 
 omissions, see George S. West, "W. J. Mickle's Translation of Os Lusiads," 
 Revue de Litterature Compaiee 18 (1938): 184-95. 
 
 6 Afonso de Albuquerque, quoted in Mukherjee, Rise and Fall of the East 
 India Company, p. 100. 
 
 7 William C. Atkinson, A History of Spain and Portugal (Harmondsworth: 
 Penguin Books, i960), p. 148; G. V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age: 
 European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400-1715 (London: Unwin Hyman, 
 1989 ), PP- 97, 14 - 
 
 8 This paragraph draws on Scammell, First Imperial Age, pp. 12-17, 67- 
 ioi; G. V. Scammell, The World Encompassed: The First European Mari¬ 
 time Empires, c. 8oo-i6so (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 
 pp. 275-30; Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean 
 World in the Age of Philhp II, illus. ed., trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: 
 Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 383-406; and C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Sea¬ 
 borne Empire, 1415-1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 39-64. John 
 Dos Passos's The Portugal Story: Three Centuries of Exploration and Dis¬ 
 covery (London: Robert Hale, 1970) is rich in evidence but suffers from 
 heroic idealization. 
 
 9 In 1647, Fletcher's Island Princess describes itself as set in India, whereas 
 its setting is the Spice Islands of Temate and Tidore. The habit persists 
 into the nineteenth century. India proper is referred to as West India and 
 the East Indies as the other India. See, e.g., Emily Hahn, Raffles of Singa¬ 
 pore: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 89,163, 202. 
 
 10 K. M. Panikkar, A Survey of Indian History (Bombay: National Informa¬ 
 tion and Publications, 1947), p. 116. 
 
 11 Heinrich Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia, ed. Joseph Campbell (Prince¬ 
 ton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:363. For a more problematized 
 account, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civili¬ 
 zation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: 
 Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 58-61. 
 
 12 The Lusiads, p. 395m 
 
 13 Christopher Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 
 Green, 1969), pp. 1441-49. Ricks's headnote indicates the extent of 
 Tennyson's research. On the Portuguese mission to Akbar's court, see 
 Bamber Gascoigne, The Great Moghuls (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 
 
 222 NOTES TO CHAPTER I 
 
pp. 110-15; on Akbar's "religion," see pp. 115-19. Tennyson's poem makes 
 British rule over India a fulfillment of Akbar's vision, which Aurangzeb 
 all but destroyed. British rule is thus domesticated by being placed in 
 succession to enlightened Mughal intentions. The canonical contrast be¬ 
 tween Akbar and Aurangzeb can then be presented as a regression that 
 British power is fortunately able not only to reverse but also to consum¬ 
 mate in the triumph of Christianity, as the religion into which other 
 religions must flow. 
 
 14 R. H. Major, "Journey of Abd-Er-Razzak," in India in the Fifteenth Cen¬ 
 tury: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India, ed. R. H. Major 
 (1858; reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992), p. 23. 
 
 15 Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the 
 History of India (reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1982), 
 p. 257. Paes's narrative is reprinted on pp. 236-90. 
 
 16 Scammell, First Imperial Age, p. 81. 
 
 17 Panikkar, Survey of Indian History, p. 176. 
 
 18 Ibid., p. 226. 
 
 19 Burton Stein's Vijayanagar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
 1990) is the most up-to-date and scholarly account available of the Vijaya¬ 
 nagar kingdom. I have also drawn on the following for this paragraph: 
 Sewell, Forgotten Empire; R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhari, and 
 Kalinkar Datta, An Advanced History of India, 4th ed. (Madras: Macmil¬ 
 lan, 1978), pp. 359-74; Romila Thapar, A History of India (1965; reprint, 
 London: Penguin Group, 1990), 1:324-36; and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A 
 History of South India, 4th ed. (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1966), 
 pp. 264-312. 
 
 20 Sewell, Forgotten Empire, p. 128. 
 
 21 One should contrast this with Paes's observation that Vijayanagar's 
 standing army (which he estimated at 1 million) consisted of "the finest 
 young men possible to be seen or that ever could be seen, for in all this 
 army I did not see a man that would act the coward" (ibid., pp. 279, 281). 
 
 22 Ibid., p. 208. 
 
 23 Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (New York: Colum¬ 
 bia University Press, 1971), 1:337. 
 
 24 See Bailey W. Diffey and George D. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese 
 Empire, 1415-1580 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 
 pp. 181-83, 186. This misunderstanding is amusingly developed in E. G. 
 Ravenstein, ed., A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 149 7- 
 1499 (1898; reprint, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), p. 49. 
 
 25 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World, ed. C. A. Patrides (Philadel¬ 
 phia: Temple University Press, 1971), p. 173. 
 
 26 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 9. The soliciting of Western domina¬ 
 tion is carried extraordinarily far back into Indian history by Jonathan 
 Fast in his novel Golden Fire (New York: Arbor House, 1986). Here we 
 
 Notes to Chapter One 223 
 
meet a princess with skin "white as rice flower," hair "like burnished 
 gold," and eyes "blue as the sky" (p. 15), a Goth from the "Land of Ice" 
 (p. 17) whose father was a general in the Roman army and who is now 
 one of the wives of the emperor, Samudra Gupta. She gives birth to a son, 
 conspicuously blond haired, who defeats Rama, the villainous and per¬ 
 verted claimant to the throne, marries the beauteous Dhruvadevi, and 
 brings India an era of prosperity. 
 
 27 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 172-92. 
 
 28 See chapter 4. 
 
 29 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of 
 England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 155-76,189-90. 
 
 30 C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 138. 
 
 31 Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity 
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 225. 
 
 32 Gerald M. Moser, "What Did the Old Man of the Restelo Mean?," Luso- 
 Brazihan Review 17 (1980): 149. The old man's harangue is also consid¬ 
 ered by Jack E. Tomlins, who argues that two playlets written by Gil 
 Vicente in 1509 and 1520 are echoed in the episode. He concludes that 
 the opening dedication, the old man's rebuke, and the disillusioned en¬ 
 voi of the epic were all composed after the poet's return from India. The 
 poem "flies apart at three junctures," thus undoing "the very business 
 of the epic." Before The Lusiads was published, Camoes "saw the Orien¬ 
 tal conquest—with India the brightest diamond in the crown—as mere 
 vanity and total ruin" (Jack E. Tomlins, "Gil Vicente's Vision of India and 
 Its Ironic Echo in Camoes's' Velho do Restelo,'" in Empire in Transition: 
 The Portuguese World in the Time of Camoes, ed. Alfred Hower and 
 Richard A. Preto-Rodas (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, Center 
 for Latin American Studies, 1985], pp. 170-76). Tomlins in effect con¬ 
 firms my view of the marginal location of the poem's misgivings about 
 itself. His argument is that these recantations came too late to enter a 
 central space already occupied by a previous poem. The recuperation via 
 chronology can only be conjectural and is not supported by any evidence 
 except the desirability of the recuperative arrangement, but that desir¬ 
 ability makes a statement that will be becoming familiar. 
 
 33 Alexander A. Parker, "The Age of Camoes," Texas Quarterly 15, no. 4 
 (1972): 11. 
 
 34 Kenneth David Jackson, "Alabaster and Gold: A Study of Dialectics in 
 Os Lusiados," Luso-Brazihan Review 17 (1980): 203. 
 
 35 The Lusiads, pp. 411-23. 
 
 36 Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 117. 
 
 37 Ibid., p. 120. In genre terms, epic could be deflected into romance by the 
 Adamastor episode but maintains its status as epic by fully containing 
 that episode. 
 
 38 Ibid., p. 118. 
 
 224 NOTES TO CHAPTER I 
 
39 Thetis is not to be confused with Tethys. 
 
 40 Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 124. Quint's reading is disputed or perhaps 
 "balanced" by Lawrence Lipking's in "The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, 
 Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism," PMLA hi, no. 2 (March 
 1996): 218. See also the ensuing correspondence in PMLA 112, no. 1 (Janu¬ 
 ary 1997): 123-24. 
 
 41 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 190. Mickle's reading is described as 
 a "bizarre twist" in this spiral. Commerce and its relationship to national 
 identity are "central to The Lusiads," but Camoes worked to suppress 
 what Mickle strove to exalt. 
 
 42 The integral relationship between commerce and empire is underlined 
 in Knorr, British Colonial Theories, pp. 19-22. 
 
 43 C. A. Patrides, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: 
 f. M. Dent and Sons, 1985), p. 184. The highly male sexual imperialism 
 of this passage is crossed by the uneasiness of submission to a female 
 monarch who lays down the terms of the license, receives the bond for 
 its execution, and imprints both with the royal seal of approval. The ap¬ 
 propriately distant site for this uneasiness is Amazonia, which, as Louis 
 Montrose observes, cries out to be invented (Louis Montrose, "The Work 
 of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," in New World Encounters, 
 ed. Stephen Greenblatt [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 
 p. 202). The remoteness of Amazonia makes possible lessons on the 
 perils of role reversal that it would be less than tactful to intone in En¬ 
 gland. Reducing the monarch's body to colonial status (albeit with her 
 approval) is among the passage's subversive satisfactions. In the process, 
 the seal that was the monarch's property becomes the property of her 
 subject in a restoration of sexual-political normalcy sufficiently periph¬ 
 eral to be discounted even while it continues to be imagined. 
 
 2. Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton’s India 
 
 1 Dryden's play Aureng-Zebe, first performed at Drury Lane on Novem¬ 
 ber 17, 1675, the year after the second edition of Paradise Lost was pub¬ 
 lished, seems to offer a different view of the Orient. Appearances can be 
 wittily misleading, as chapter 3 attempts to show. 
 
 2 J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject (London: Chatto and Windus, i960), 
 pp. 101-2. 
 
 3 India's association with the land of Faerie is picked up in Keats's "The 
 Cap and Bells or The Jealousies." 
 
 4 See James H. Sims, "Camoens' Lusiads and Milton's Paradise Lost: 
 Satan's Voyage to Eden," in Papers on Milton, ed. Philip Mahone Griffith 
 and Lester F. Zimmerman (Tulsa: University of Tulsa Press, 1969), pp. 
 38-39. 
 
 5 Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the 
 
 Notes to Chapter Two 225 
 
Great Mogul 1615-19, ed. William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899]. 
 For Hawkins, see Early Travels in India, I58i-r6i9, ed. William Foster 
 (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 192,1), pp. 70-121; 
 for Coryat, see ibid., p. 269. A typically lively account of Roe's embassy 
 is provided in Gascoigne's Great Moghuls, pp. 141-50. 
 
 6 The phrase is used by Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.3.218-21, al¬ 
 though not with the associations with which Milton invests it. Its most 
 famous and possibly final use is in Wordsworth's sonnet on the extinc¬ 
 tion of the Venetian republic. 
 
 7 As translated in Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne (Delhi: Banar- 
 sidass, 1972), p. 68. 
 
 8 On Milton's revisionary treatment of Camoes, see James H. Sims, "A 
 Greater Than Rome: The Inversion of a Virgilian Symbol from Camoens 
 to Milton," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. 
 Ramsey (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance 
 Studies, 1982), pp. 334-44. 
 
 9 Scammell, World Encompassed, pp. 101-2. 
 
 10 John Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle 705-35. 
 
 11 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Ran¬ 
 dom House, 1994), p. 235. 
 
 12 Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
 1973); 6:352. 
 
 13 The view put forward here is consistent with that offered in Sims, "Ca¬ 
 moens' Lusiads and Milton's Paradise Lost," pp. 43-44. See also Quint, 
 Epic and Empire, pp. 253-67. Quint rightly observes that "Milton in 
 keeping with his general criticism of the earlier epic tradition exposes 
 as false the distinction which that tradition draws between martial hero¬ 
 ism and mercantile activity" (p. 264). 
 
 14 Pope Alexander IV, quoted in R. E. Latham, trans., Marco Polo: The 
 Travels (London: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 11. 
 
 15 See John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford Uni¬ 
 versity Press, 1987), p. 166. Compare PL 9.76-82 and the comment in 
 Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, p. 86on. Joseph E. Duncan ob¬ 
 serves that the association of Paradise with India was strongest during 
 the Middle Ages when Prester John was reputed to have established him¬ 
 self in the Far East. With his relocation to Ethiopia, interest in India as 
 the site of Paradise waned (Joseph E. Duncan, Milton’s Earthly Paradise: 
 A Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 
 1972], pp. 76,195).The most extensive discussion is in Stephen G. Darian, 
 The Ganges in Myth and History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 
 1978), pp. 172-82. 
 
 16 Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, p. 695m 
 
 17 Raleigh, History of the World, pp. 136-39. Patrides (Intro, p. 38) sees 
 Raleigh as a possible source for this passage, but it should be remem- 
 
 226 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 
 
bered that Raleigh seems to distance himself from the identification he 
 discusses (p. 38). 
 
 18 Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, p. 920m 
 
 19 Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama 13.5. 
 
 20 Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, in A. D. Godley, ed., The Poetical Works 
 of Thomas Moore (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 
 1915), p. 42. In an even more fervent commendation of the banyan tree, 
 Sydney Owenson describes it as "the most stupendous and beautiful pro¬ 
 duction of the vegetable world" and as a "symbol of eternity" whose 
 "great and splendid order the Architect of the universe himself designed." 
 Defying "the decay of time, it stands alone and bold, reproducing its own 
 existence and multiplying its own form" (Lady Morgan (Sydney Owen¬ 
 son], The Missionary, 2d ed. [London: J. J. Stockwell, 1811], 2:9-10). See 
 also the compendious entry in Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson- 
 Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases and 
 of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical, and Discur¬ 
 sive, ed. William Crooke (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1994), pp. 
 65-67. Milton's lines on the tree were known sufficiently to be quoted by 
 a Bengali Moslem, Dean Mahomed, in a 1794 account (published in Ire¬ 
 land) of his travels in India and departure from it. See Michael H. Fisher, 
 The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1769-1851) in India, 
 Ireland, and England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 82. 
 
 21 Quoted in Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, p. 920m Although 
 Renaissance herbalists resemble each other markedly in their descrip¬ 
 tions of the banyan tree, Gerard's language here is striking in suggesting 
 the essential similarity between the proliferating wood and the barren 
 desert. Both are places of temptation in Milton's work. Gerard's infernal- 
 izing of the tree, which romantic writers reverse, should be contrasted 
 with Milton's ambivalences. R. R. Cawley in Milton and the Literature of 
 Travel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951) cautions us against 
 searching for single sources of passages in Milton, who usually amalga¬ 
 mates more than one source. S. Viswanathan, "Milton and Purchas's Lin- 
 schoten: An Additional Source for Milton's Indian Figtree," Milton News¬ 
 letter 2, no. 3 (October 1968): 43-45, puts forward a case for this ingredi¬ 
 ent in the conflation. The case is disputed by James Patrick McHenry in 
 "A Milton Herbal," Milton Quarterly 30, no. 2 (May 1996): 69. 
 
 22 Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University 
 Press, 1956), p. 135. 
 
 23 Pliny makes the comparison to Amazonian shields, but Raleigh, who 
 claims to have actually seen banyan trees in the New World, disagrees 
 [History of the World, pp. 137-39). 
 
 24 These crucial lines are as follows: "Such of late / Columbus found the 
 American so girt / With feathered cincture, naked else and wild / Among 
 the trees on isles and woody shores" [PL 9.1115-18). The "of late," which 
 
 Notes to Chapter Two 227 
 
seems to advise us of the up-to-dateness of Milton's scholarship, refers 
 to discoveries that took place 170 years before Paradise Lost was pub¬ 
 lished. The distant event is also misperceived. Columbus did not find the 
 American girt at all but clad in "native honour," as Adam and Eve were 
 before taking refuge in the banyan tree. The "featured cincture" in which 
 Milton chooses to attire the "American" refers to much later encounters 
 on the mainland. The confusions of time and place seem to be made 
 with one overriding purpose. If first nations can be identified with the 
 original shame rather than with the original innocence, their distance 
 from a redeemed Christian state can be made more important than their 
 proximity to the Edenic. Western encounters with the New World were 
 initially beguiled by that proximity. As the need to devalue subjected 
 civilizations took over, the depth of distance inevitably prevailed. Milton 
 seems to provide a microenactment of this historical change in percep¬ 
 tion, as his language passes from a nakedness associated in the fourth 
 book with majesty and innocence to a nakedness now associated with 
 wildness. Paradise can be a "wilderness of sweets" and "wild above rule 
 or art" (5.294-97), but these Edenic connotations are heavily overlaid by 
 the infernal associations that surround wildness in its fallen state. So 
 pressing are these associations that Adam sees the luxuriance of Paradise 
 as a wilderness, even as he decides to partake of the fruit with Eve (9.910). 
 
 25 Carey and Fowler, Poems of John Milton, p. 920m 
 
 26 This is the mandate given by the shade of Anchises to Aeneas in the sixth 
 book of the Aeneid. The excellence of others (presumably the Greeks) 
 may lie in astronomy, philosophy, literature, and the fine arts; the Ro¬ 
 man accomplishment will be to govern other nations with the firmness 
 and justice those nations are unable to find within themselves. 
 
 27 Camoes ( The Lusiads 1.54) mentions Mombasa, Quiloa, and Sofala. Mil- 
 ton repeats all three names in n.399-400 and inserts Melind, not simply 
 for the alliterative effect but because Melind was crucial to the outcome 
 of da Gama's voyage. See E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its 
 Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 241, and Bowra, From 
 Virgil to Milton, p. 238. 
 
 28 Scammell identifies the pilot as Ibn Majid, "the most distinguished navi¬ 
 gator of the time" ( World Encompassed, p. 235). Ravenstein, in his edi¬ 
 tion of First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, identifies the pilot as "a native of 
 Gujarat" (pp. 45-46n). 
 
 29 Carey and Fowler do not capitalize "great mogul" ( Poems of John Milton). 
 Other editions capitalize and underline it. 1 retain the capitalization else¬ 
 where. In coupling Agra and Lahore, Milton follows early travelers such 
 as William Finch, Thomas Coryat, and Edward Terry, the last of whom 
 describes Agra and Lahore as "the two choice cities of this Empire." The 
 tree-lined boulevard connecting the two cities is admired by all ( Early 
 Travels in India, ed. W. Foster, pp. 155-67, 243-44, 293). 
 
 228 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 
 
30 Paradise Regained is hereafter cited as PR. Carey and Fowler note that 
 G. W. Whiting [Review of English Studies 13 [1937]: 209-12) has produced 
 evidence to indicate that Taprobane usually meant Sumatra [Poems of 
 John Milton, p. 1139). However, The Lusiads (10.107) identifies Taprobane 
 with Sri Lanka. Since Taprobane is mentioned by Milton in conjunction 
 with the Malay Peninsula ("golden Chersoness"), Sumatra is indicated, 
 particularly since The Lusiads (10.124) suggests that Sumatra was once 
 joined to the Malay Peninsula. "Indian isle" may seem to suggest Sri 
 Lanka, but Sumatra was part of "further India," and "utmost" would be 
 less effective if Sri Lanka were intended. According to Major, the iden¬ 
 tification of Taprobane with Sumatra "was maintained throughout the 
 maps, almost all of them Italian, of the sixteenth century and was con¬ 
 tinued by Mercator" [India in the Fifteenth Century, p. lxii). 
 
 31 Since contemporary Rome was the other of Protestantism, it is fitting 
 that classical Rome in its decadence should provide this other with its 
 ancestry. But Rome's story is also England's and is a clear warning of how 
 the reformed collective self can slide back into the other if it is wanting 
 in vigilance. 
 
 32 Don M. Wolfe et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of Milton (New Haven: 
 Yale University Press, 1953-), 4:684. 
 
 33 Milton may be alluding to the passage in the Aeneid discussed in note 26. 
 
 34 English imperialist and Protestant poetics are never very far from each 
 other. Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Cen¬ 
 tury Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) has 
 demonstrated how heavily the religious poetics of seventeenth-century 
 England depended on the image of God in the self. Within imperialist 
 poetics, the presence of the image confers the right to dominion, but the 
 right can be argued to be contingent on a standard of behavior that tes¬ 
 tifies convincingly to that presence. Gandhi's achievement was to have 
 brought the interrogative pressure of the civil disobedience movement 
 to bear decisively on this moral linchpin, displaying in the process a de¬ 
 gree of Christian heroism that the dominant power was requested to find 
 in itself. 
 
 3. Appropriating India: Dryden's Great Mogul 
 
 1 Dedication to the Earl of Mulgrave, quoted in L. A. Beaurline and Fredson 
 Bowers, eds., John Dryden: Four Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chi¬ 
 cago Press, 1967), p. 107. References to Aureng-Zebe are to this edition. 
 
 2 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales, in The Works of Samuel John¬ 
 son, ed. Gwen J. Kolb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 16:37. 
 
 3 Michael Wood's Legacy: A Search for the Origins of Civilization (Lon¬ 
 don: Network Books, 1992), p. 87, reproduces a painting by Benjamin 
 West of Clive receiving the revenue grant from Shah Alam II. It can be 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 229 
 
contrasted with the reproduction of a religious debate held at Akbar's 
 ibadat-khana (p. 74). (See Gascoigne, Great Moghuls, p. ri6, for another 
 depiction of the same event.) In both paintings, the Mughal monarch 
 occupies the traditional center position and the Portuguese priests are 
 kneeling in the circle around Akbar, whereas Clive and his entourage 
 are stiffly erect. Those nearest Akbar's throne are the Islamic mullahs 
 and not the Portuguese Jesuits; in West's painting, Clive's left leg all but 
 brushes against the throne and his right hand extends over it to receive 
 the grant. Akbar inclines slightly toward his Moslem counselors as if in 
 debate with them; Shah Alam bends forward as if offering a concession 
 to Clive from a throne of which he is now only the nominal occupant. 
 
 4 The Akbar-Aurangzeb contrast is needed to provide the British, as suc¬ 
 cessors to the Mughals, both with an example to avoid and with a prece¬ 
 dent on which to improve. It is explicit in eighteenth-century British 
 histories of India (see chapter 4) and in Tennyson (see chapter 1, n. 13) 
 and lies behind the severely adverse comments on Aurangzeb by William 
 Jones and Sydney Owenson (see chapters 4 and 6). Rammohun Roy en¬ 
 dorses this contrast in affirming that Akbar's "memory is still adored" 
 whereas Aurangzeb's name "is now held in abhorrence" (Shashi Ahlu- 
 walia and Meenakshi Ahluwalia, eds., Raja Rammohun Roy and the 
 Indian Renaissance [New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1991], p. 125). Most 
 Indians would find little to like in Aurangzeb, but not everyone would 
 wish to subscribe to a polarity that glorifies Akbar as a consequence. 
 Aziz's nostalgia for the days of Mughal glory, his preference for Aurang¬ 
 zeb over Akbar, and his critical remarks on Akbar's universalism need 
 to be viewed against this background (Forster, Passage to India, pp. 83, 
 155—56, 266). 
 
 5 Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: Four Tragedies, p. ro8. 
 
 6 James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale 
 University Press, 1987), p. 273. 
 
 7 Frangois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, a.d. 1656-1668, 2d ed., 
 trans. Archibald Constable (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914). 
 
 8 Hansen, Peacock Throne, pp. 352-53. 
 
 9 Spear, India, p. t47. For a brief and helpful account of Bernier's ideas 
 on India and their influence, see S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: 
 A Study in Eighteenth Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: 
 Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. rr-t5. 
 
 ro Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: Four Tragedies, p. ro8 ; Winn, John Dry¬ 
 den and His World, p. 273; George McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, 
 1660-1685 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. r8s. 
 
 ri Hansen, Peacock Throne, p. 353. 
 
 12 McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, p. 185. 
 
 13 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 
 r925), 1:198. 
 
 230 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 
 
14 In the prologue to Auieng-Zebe, Dryden describes himself as grown 
 weary of "his long-lov'd Mistris, Rhyme" (Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: 
 Four Tragedies, pp. 8-9). Passion is too fierce to be bound in fetters. But 
 rhyme can be a protection as well as a bondage. Thus in the prologue 
 to All for Love, first performed on December 12,1677, Dryden describes 
 himself defensively as "without his Rhyme" and as fighting "this day 
 unarm'd." He is also under the disadvantage of recounting a well-worn 
 tale almost as old as Dido's (ibid., p. 207). The prologue is mystifyingly 
 titled as a prologue to Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 15 McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, p. 185. 
 
 16 Dedication to the Earl of Mulgrave, in Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: 
 Four Tragedies, p. 108. 
 
 17 Michael Alssid, "The Design of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe," Journal of En¬ 
 glish and Germanic Philology 64 (1965]: 464. 
 
 18 These lines do not attain the impassioned brilliance of Donne's confla¬ 
 tion of the imperial, the commercial, and the sexual in the nineteenth 
 elegy. Nevertheless, the underlying insinuation asks to be pursued. The 
 East India Company's venture is the acquisition of India (Indamora). Its 
 shareholders, seeking the "double gains" of commerce and possession, 
 have laid out all their stock to make this climactic "purchase." Thus the 
 acquiring of India is foreseen even at a time when the British position 
 in India (see introduction) was precarious. This reading would not have 
 been esoteric in a London where the East India Company was already 
 one of the city’s largest employers, where Bombay had been leased to the 
 company by the Crown, and where Charles (who had read Dryden's play 
 in draft form) was, it will be remembered, accepting substantial loans 
 from the company. 
 
 Laura Brown's exploration of the representation of women in the con¬ 
 text of mercantile capitalism from 1688 to 1730 would have benefited 
 considerably from an examination of Aureng-Zebe. "The female figure," 
 Brown argues, "through its simultaneous connections with commodi¬ 
 fication and trade on the one hand and violence and difference on the 
 other, plays a central role" in constituting the "mercantile capitalist ide¬ 
 ology" (Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early 
 Eighteenth-Century English Literature [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 
 1993], p. 11). One might plausibly suggest that Indamora and Nourmahal 
 exemplify between them the "simultaneous connections" that Brown 
 delineates. It could further be argued that the two representations in 
 their hidden complementarity testify to the intimate link between com¬ 
 mercial satisfactions and the exercise of an imperial power by which 
 "violence and difference" can be held in check. 
 
 19 Harold Lamb, Nur Mahal (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1935). Lamb 
 argues interestingly that "women who lived behind the veil can never 
 find their way into the pages of scholars except as names" and that it 
 
 Notes to Chapter Three 231 
 
is fiction rather than history or biography that can bring such women 
 "from the silence" (Author's note). 
 
 20 T. J. Murari, Taj: A Story of Mughal India (Sevenoaks, England: New En¬ 
 glish Library, 1987)- 
 
 21 Hansen, Peacock Throne, pp. 37, 43. 
 
 22 McFadden, Dryden the Pubhc Writer, p. 200. 
 
 4. James Mill and the Case of the Hottentot Venus 
 
 1 Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Na¬ 
 tion in Indostan from the year MDCCXLV (London, 1763). For a more 
 sophisticated exercise in the genre (and one more appreciative of the Se¬ 
 poy contribution to British victories in India), see Philip Mason, A Matter 
 of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (Lon¬ 
 don: Peregrine Books, 1976). Pages 29-109 deal with events up to Buxar. 
 Mason's narrative supports the melancholy conclusion that "Afro-Asia 
 was taught to conquer itself for foreign pay, most of it taken out of Afro- 
 Asian pockets" (Victor G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to 
 Collapse, 1815-1960 [London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1982], p. 16). 
 
 2 Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, 3 vols. (London: S. A. Bechert 
 and P. A. De Hontd, 1768-72); Francis Gladwin, The History of Hin¬ 
 dostan during the Reigns of Jehangir, Shah Jehan, and Aurangzebe (Cal¬ 
 cutta, 1788); Thomas Maurice, The History of Hindostan, Sanscreet and 
 Classical, 7 vols. (London, 1800); Maurice Thomas, The Modern History 
 of Hindostan (London, 1802-10); Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the 
 South of India, 3 vols. (London, 1810-17). These histories and others are 
 discussed by J. S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India: The Assessments of 
 British Historians (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1970). 
 
 3 Wilks asked Sir James Mackintosh if it was true that Moore had never 
 been in the East. When Mackintosh confirmed that he had not, Wilks 
 replied that that showed him that "reading over D'Herbelot" was "as 
 good as riding on the back of a camel." Moore took pleasure in this sally 
 (Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh [Chicago: Henneberry, n.d.j, p. 16). 
 
 4 See Keay's India Discovered, pp. 176-91, for an account of the survey. A 
 fuller but less involving narration is provided in Clements R. Markham, 
 A Memoir of the Indian Survey (1878; reprint, Amsterdam: Meridian, 
 1968), pp. 66-147. The survey's climax was the locating of India's highest 
 peak, named appropriately after one of the surveyors. 
 
 5 Dow , History of Hindostan, 3:xxxv-xxxvii. 
 
 6 Goldsmith, History of Man, 1:114-15. At a time when little that was 
 positive was being said about India's self-respect, Thomas Moore's note 
 provides a much-needed corrective in referring to "That national inde¬ 
 pendence, that freedom from the interference and dictation of foreigners, 
 without which, indeed, no liberty of any kind can exist; and for which 
 
 232 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 
 
both Hindoos and Persians fought against their Mussulman invaders 
 with, in many cases, a bravery that deserved much better success" ( The 
 Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, with Memoir by David Herbert M.A. 
 [London: Charles Griffin, 1872], p. 82n). This note is not in Godley's edi¬ 
 tion. 
 
 7 C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Hutchin¬ 
 son, 1977), pp. 199-202; Gertrude Z. Thomas, Richer Than Spices (New 
 York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp. 93-115; Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 
 235-38. Entrepot trade could have grimmer consequences, with Indian 
 textiles exchanged for African slaves acquired for labor in the New World 
 (Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire [London: Little, 
 Brown, 1994], p. 26). 
 
 8 Samuel Foote, The Nabob, in Paula Backscheider and Robert Howard, 
 eds., The Plays of Samuel Foote (New York: Garland Press, 1983), pp. 39- 
 40. Literature on the nabobs includes The Nabob: A Novel in a Series 
 of Letters (London, 1785) and The Disinherited Nabob: A Novel, Inter¬ 
 spersed with Genuine Descriptions of India (Dublin, 1787). Book 2, chap¬ 
 ter 7, of Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845) recounts the story of a "Nawab" 
 who began life as a waiter in an exclusive club on St. James's Street and 
 rose to become a member of the House of Lords. The last nabob is Jos Sed- 
 ley in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847). Foote's play is perceptively 
 discussed in Singh, Colonial Narratives, pp. 53-78. More than Singh (esp. 
 on p. 59), I see the furor over the nabobs as helping to open a transitory 
 space during which the idea of empire was not altogether unquestionable. 
 
 9 Foote, The Nabob, p. 65. 
 
 10 Roger Williams, quoted in Calder, Revolutionary Empire, p. 90. 
 
 11 Henry Mackenzie, The Man ofFeehng, ed. Hamish Miles (London: Schol- 
 artis Press, 1928), p. 170. 
 
 12 William Cowper, The Task, 4.28-30, in The Poetical Works of William 
 Cowper, 4th ed., ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 
 1934), p. 183. 
 
 13 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and 
 the Columbian Legacy (New York: Plume Books, 1992), pp. 169-72. 
 
 14 Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald J. Greene 
 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 10:421-22. Some years earlier, 
 Cornelius de Pauw had described the discovery of the New World as the 
 most calamitous event in human history. See J. H. Elliott, The Old World 
 and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Canto edi¬ 
 tion, 1992), p. 1. 
 
 15 Johnson, Works, 10:421. The most powerful indictment of empire was in 
 the Abbe Raynal's Philosophical and Pohtical History of the Settlements 
 ana Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. It was published 
 in 1770 or 1772 (the date is indeterminate) in four volumes, subsequently 
 expanded to eight and then to twelve. It went through twenty authorized 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 233 
 
and a considerably larger number of pirated editions. Henry Steele Com- 
 mager describes it as preaching the immorality of war and the iniquity 
 of colonies and as the first history "to do justice to the colored races" 
 and "to fit together politics and economics and religion and society into 
 a single pattern" (Henry Steele Commager, "Was America a Mistake?," 
 Horizon 9, no. 4 [Autumn 1967]: 30-33). 
 
 16 Beaurline and Bowers, Dryden: Four Tragedies, p. 30. The editors are 
 elaborating on a comment by John Loftis. 
 
 17 Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 675. Smith's remark is in a tradition out¬ 
 lined by Elliott ( The Old World and the New, pp. 9-10) and only briefly 
 challenged by eighteenth-century misgivings. 
 
 18 Jesuits such as Thomas Stevens and De Nobili acquired some knowledge 
 of Sanskrit, and an unpublished Sanskrit grammar by Heinrich Roth may 
 have been used by Paulinus for a Sanskrit grammar published at Rome 
 in 1790. Abraham Rogers published at Leyden in 1651 a work incorpo¬ 
 rating 200 stanzas of Bhartrhari. This version of the Proverbs is generally 
 accepted as the first direct translation of a Sanskrit text into a European 
 language. It seems to have stood alone for more than a century. 
 
 19 Wendy Doniger, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the San¬ 
 skrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 12-14. 
 
 20 It is important to see the movement from the proliferative abundance 
 of the facade to the bareness of the inner sanctum as a metaphor for 
 the progress of understanding as well as an architectural binding of 
 contraries. "A condition of complete simplicity / costing not less than 
 everything" is the end of the journey in Eliot's Four Quartets. But the 
 end does not erase the beginning. Each is contained in the other, as the 
 opening line of Eliot's "East Coker" and its inversion in the final line of 
 the poem indicate and as is made evident in the metaphysical statement 
 that the movement through the temple asks us to experience. Repeated 
 references in the Upanishads to the deep cavern of the heart and to the 
 small space within the lotus of the heart establish the inner sanctum as 
 a retreat from multiplicity but also as the germ of that multiplicity. The 
 statement made by the architecture of the Hindu temple goes beyond 
 reconciling the real and the phenomenal; it situates us within their nec¬ 
 essary coexistence. 
 
 21 William Beckford, Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1970), p. 123m 
 
 22 Ibid., p. 145m The editor describes this as a "more complex and derisive 
 version" of the note to Samuel Henley's 1786 translation of Vathek from 
 the French. Beckford disowned Henley's edition. 
 
 23 In a letter to Hastings on October 23, 1786, Jones states that the Gita 
 "owes its appearance" to Hastings's patronage (Garland Cannon, ed., The 
 Letters of Sir William Jones [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], 11:718). The 
 editor's notes point out that Wilkins had shown Hastings his translation 
 
 234 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 
 
and that Hastings's introduction, written on the spot, had led to publi¬ 
 cation by the company (pp. 660-61). A drawing by Blake, of which "the 
 subject is, Mr. Wilkin translating the Geeta," has unfortunately not sur¬ 
 vived (Martin Jarrett-Kerr, "Indian Religion in English Literature, 1675- 
 1967," in Essays and Studies of the English Association, 1984 [London: 
 Humanities Press, 1984], p. 89). 
 
 24 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of 
 India and the East, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinkins,- 
 foreword by Edward W. Said (New York: Columbia University Press, 
 1984). 
 
 25 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Triumph of Life 211. 
 
 26 Lord Teignmouth, ed. ( Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspon¬ 
 dence of Sir William Jones (London: Hatchard, 1807), p. 288. John Shore 
 (Lord Teignmouth) later became a governor-general of India. 
 
 27 Mukherjee finds that Jones's career "shows more than anything else, the 
 dichotomy of the attitudes of some of the British in India" who were 
 "radicals at home, attracted to India's past, and yet committed to authori¬ 
 tarian rule over her peoples" ( Sir William Jones, p. 3; see also pp. 125-28). 
 
 28 Warren Hastings, quoted in P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of 
 Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
 Press, 1970), p. 189. 
 
 29 P. J. Marshall, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: 
 Clarendon Press, 1981), 5:386. The difference between Fox's East India 
 Bill and the Magna Carta is that one was bestowed by Parliament and 
 the other exacted from the monarch. That difference can become cru¬ 
 cial given Burke's treatment of human rights as inherited rather than 
 inherent, as a "patrimony" derived from one's "forefathers," and even as 
 an "entailed inheritance" (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution 
 in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 
 1968], pp. 117-20,• Burke's italics). If rights are historically constituted, 
 some diffusion of power is necessary to constitute them. A totally dis- 
 empowered people cannot set up a patrimony to be bequeathed. The 
 history of a people can bestow on its rights an articulation distinctive 
 to that people, but it is a dangerous proposition to say that those rights 
 exist only insofar as they can be traced to a historical beginning. 
 
 30 Jones described Milton as the "most perfect scholar" and "sublimest poet 
 that our country has ever produced" (letter to Lady Georgiana, Septem¬ 
 ber 7, 1769, in Cannon, Letters of Sir William Jones, 1:39). Elsewhere 
 he described Milton as one of the greatest men "who ever adorned this 
 island" (Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, p. 51). 
 
 31 Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of Sir 
 William Jones, pp. 588-89. 
 
 32 Ibid., p. 592. 
 
 33 Satya S. Pachori, ed., Sir Wilham Jones: A Reader (Delhi: Oxford Univer- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 235 
 
sity Press, 1993), pp. 59, 61. I have cited this compilation rather than to 
 the six-volume 1799 edition or the thirteen-volume 1807 edition, both 
 of which are difficult of access. 
 
 34 Ibid., p. 58 (Jones's italics). 
 
 35 Ibid., p. 62. 
 
 36 The pages on Mill that follow have to be placed in contestation with 
 Javed Majeed's Ungoverned Imaginings: fames Mill's ‘‘The History of 
 British India" and Orientahsm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), the most 
 thoughtful and intelligent study so far of Mill's work. Majeed sees Mill 
 as a more complex figure than I do, working within boundaries that are 
 less clear-cut and more indeterminate than my reading suggests. Part of 
 the assertiveness of my characterization may be the result of my placing 
 Mill within imperial history and proceeding to read him as a decisive 
 contributor to that history. Some of the complexities of a mind can be 
 rubbed away when it is put into position as the mainspring of a discourse. 
 Paradoxes worthy of attention can and do arise when writers are appro¬ 
 priated by a discourse that they themselves have been indispensable in 
 articulating. Thus Macaulay would not have been possible without Mill, 
 even though Mill was no supporter of Macaulay's minute. Both utilitari¬ 
 ans and evangelists tended to be interventionists in India, whereas Mill 
 leaned toward a more restricted interface between subjected peoples and 
 those responsible for governing them. We can take note of these diver¬ 
 gences and still continue to urge that Mill's work be pondered in an 
 environment that the title of Majeed's book is not backward in invoking. 
 
 37 Percival Spear, A History of India (1965; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 
 1978), 2:47. 
 
 38 Calder, Revolutionary Empire, p. 158. 
 
 39 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperial¬ 
 ism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 78. 
 
 40 Trevelyan, Golden Oriole, p. 212. 
 
 41 Calder, Revolutionary Empire, p. 775. 
 
 42 See chapter 7. 
 
 43 Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1813-30 (London: 
 Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. 253. 
 
 44 John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology 
 of Imperiahsm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 192. De 
 Quincey found more than this in Kant. Section 4 of Kant's Observations 
 on the Beautiful and Sublime ("Of National Characteristics") contains 
 remarks on blacks' inferiority and on the Hindu addiction to the gro¬ 
 tesque. De Quincey's translation of this chapter appeared in the London 
 Magazine of April 1824. John T. Goldthwait in his edition and transla¬ 
 tion of Observations draws attention to a precedent in Hume ([Berkeley: 
 University of California Press, 1965), p. i23n). 
 
 45 The primary study of the Hottentot Venus is Sander L. Gilman's "Black 
 
 236 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 
 
Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late 
 Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," Critical Inquiry 12 
 (1985): 204-41. See also Johnson, Birth of the Modern, pp. 242-43; Suven- 
 drinal Perera, Reaches of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 
 I 99 1 )/ PP- 98-99; and Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflec¬ 
 tions on Natural History (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 291-306. 
 
 46 David Masson, ed., The Collected Writings of De Quincey, rev. ed., 
 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889), 1:89-98. References 
 to De Quincey's writings are to this edition. Barrell's fine book on De 
 Quincey, Infection of Thomas De Quincey, pays little attention to these 
 games. Nigel Leask's brief remarks are telling in pointing out how De 
 Quincey's strategy is "the product of an extreme anxiety of empire, which 
 identifies with the pariah-victim the better to condemn him to subservi¬ 
 ence" (Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of 
 Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], p. 5). 
 
 47 Gombroon, situated on the Persian Gulf and mentioned by Moore (God- 
 ley, Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, pp. 40sn, 407n), was later named 
 Bandar 'Abbas. De Quincey relocates it south of the equator, encourag¬ 
 ing a conflation between Gambia and the Cameroons. 
 
 48 James Mill, The History of British India, abridged by William Thomas 
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 157-58. Where possible, 
 references are to this edition rather than to one of the many editions 
 published in the nineteenth century. The most compendious of these is 
 the nine-volume fourth edition with notes and continuations by Horace 
 Hayman Wilson (London: James Madden, 1880). Wilson's note on this pas¬ 
 sage points out that Mill confuses the mythology of Hinduism with its 
 philosophy. Absurdity resides almost exclusively in the former. Hindu 
 philosophy's "disregard of all external and merely temporal existence" 
 and its "exclusive direction of the power of the mind to a man's own 
 soul" may be "unwise and ill-directed" but "can scarcely be termed with 
 justice mean and degrading" (1:384). Wilson subscribes here to the propo¬ 
 sition (often and perhaps overwhelmingly reiterated) of Hinduism as a 
 religion of world abandonment. The best response might be to ask how 
 dharma can be a significant and even crucial concept in a religion un¬ 
 able to generate a social philosophy. Nevertheless, the practical conse¬ 
 quences of the Western view should be obvious. A civilization incapable 
 of social thought will need to have its social engineering done for it. 
 
 49 Mill, History of British India, p. 197. 
 
 50 Ibid., pp. xix, xii. 
 
 51 Ibid., pp. 299-329. 
 
 52 Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in 
 Eighteenth Century India (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971), appen¬ 
 dix D. 
 
 53 Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine 6 (1805): 617.The high esteem in which 
 
 Notes to Chapter Four 237 
 
Jones held Indian literature and philosophy was acquired only after his 
 arrival in India and his "discovery" of the Indian past. As Mukherjee in¬ 
 dicates, Jones prior to that point had regarded Indian poetic accomplish¬ 
 ment as no more than imitative of the Persians (Sir William Jones, p. 47). 
 
 54 John Carnac, quoted in O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal 
 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 81. 
 
 55 Mill, History of British India, p. 13. 
 
 56 Philip Mason (pseud. Philip Woodruff], The Men Who Ruled India, vol. 2, 
 The Guardians (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 360. In a curious 
 and commendable footnote, Mason seems to completely recant his book, 
 but the recantation remains his, leaving intact the views of Jowett and 
 his disciples and their material consequences for India (p. 368). 
 
 57 Ibid. 
 
 58 Forster, Passage to India, pp. 31-32. Barbara Rosencrance's fine analysis 
 of these opening paragraphs stops short of my findings in this chapter 
 (Barbara Rosencrance, Forster’s Narrative Vision [Ithaca: Cornell Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1982], pp. 184-94). 
 
 59 Michael Edwardes, The Orchid House: Splendours and Miseries of the 
 Kingdom of Oudh, 1827-1857 (London: Cassell, i960), pp. 32-33. 
 
 60 S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2d ed. (London: George Allen and 
 Unwin, 1929-30), 1:186-87, and Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 
 2d ed. (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 
 84-90. Mistranslations of the Indian philosophical and moral vocabu¬ 
 lary are not difficult, and it can even be argued that the vocabulary is 
 locked into Indian civilization to such an extent that any translation will 
 be a mistranslation. Among mistranslations, the rendering of Maya as 
 illusion is the most destructive because it establishes an illusion-reality 
 binary that makes Indian civilization either totally world denying or 
 committed to the irresponsible cultivation of a world of pleasure and 
 fancy in which reason cannot claim a controlling status. 
 
 5. Hegel’s India and the Surprise of Sin 
 
 1 The Faerie Queene, in particular book 6, places the pastoral and the pur¬ 
 poseful in a relationship of contestation in which neither term is privi¬ 
 leged. Hegel proposes a relationship in which the purposeful repudiates 
 the pastoral. 
 
 2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. 
 J. Sibree (1899; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 40-41. References in 
 the text are to this edition of The Philosophy of History unless otherwise 
 indicated. References to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Rehgion 
 are to the three-volume translation of the 1840 second German edition by 
 E. B. Speirs and J. Burton Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). 
 The edition by Peter C. Hodgson of the translation by R. F. Brown, P. C. 
 
 238 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 
 
Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley: 
 University of California Press, 1988), is more scholarly. It reconstructs 
 the 1827 lectures rather than those delivered in 1831, reconstruction of 
 which, according to the editor, would involve a substantial degree of con¬ 
 jecture. After 1827, Hegel revised and substantially enlarged the section 
 on India. The revisions and additional material can be found as variants 
 in the notes to the Hodgson edition, but I have preferred to quote from a 
 translation that incorporates these changes. I am reassured in doing this 
 by Hodgson's characterization of the 1831 lectures as "representative of 
 Hegel's religious thought at its best and clearest" (p. 24). Hegel's changes 
 and augmentations after 1827 dispose of the view that his opinions on 
 India may have matured as he reflected on them further and as more 
 material on India became available. The later text (insofar as it can be 
 reconstructed) is more hostile to India than the earlier. 
 
 3 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost" (London: 
 Macmillan, 1967). 
 
 4 See Hegel, Philosophy of Religion (Hodgson edition), p. 46, for Hegel's 
 negative response to the German vogue for India. The rhetorical drama¬ 
 tization studied here has so far escaped notice. 
 
 5 Despite Greenblatt's persuasive juxtaposition of the Bower of Bliss with 
 the ravaging of Hispaniola, the Oriental associations of the Bower remain 
 strong, particularly in reflecting a sophisticated decadence stereotyped 
 as Oriental, which the Western psyche was learning to expel from itself 
 (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 179-84). 
 
 6 Nirad C. Chaudhari, The Continent of Circe: An Essay on the Peoples of 
 India (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965). 
 
 7 These remarks have not escaped comment, but the comments have been 
 recent and their belatedness reflects the extent to which a Eurocentric 
 text has been Eurocentrically read. This Eurocentrism is reflected in the 
 negligible attention given to the representation of India in the world 
 scheme of The Philosophy of History and The Philosophy of Religion. 
 The most specific and instructive comments on Hegel's India are offered 
 by Inden in Imagining India (esp. pp. 45-52), but much more needs to be 
 said. 
 
 8 Estimates of depopulation in the New World vary considerably, as might 
 be expected, but have tended to rise as it became clear that the original 
 population was underestimated in the interests of perceiving the New 
 World as "empty" and as therefore calling out for colonization. Scammell 
 puts the population of Mexico at 27 million in 1500 and perhaps only 
 half a million a century later ( First Imperial Age, p. 182). Peru's popu¬ 
 lation fell from 7 million in 1500 to little over a half million in 1620. 
 According to Greenblatt, the population of Hispaniola fell from 7-8 mil¬ 
 lion in 1492 to 28,000 by 1512 ( Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 226). 
 
 9 Hegel's racism is examined by Darrel Moellendorf in "Racism and Ratio- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Five 239 
 
nality in Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit," History of Political 
 Thought 13, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 243-55. Moellendorf argues that al¬ 
 though Hegel's philosophy of spirit is "tainted by the unusual (for Hegel) 
 causal role which he gives to a biological category, namely race," his 
 racism "can be traced to the general ideology of the nineteenth century" 
 and "does not follow from any of his fundamental claims about spirit" 
 (p. 243). 
 
 10 Hegel, quoted in ibid., p. 246. 
 
 11 Hegel, quoted in ibid., p. 248. 
 
 12 T. M. Knox, trans., Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1967), p. 218. References to The Philosophy of Right are to this 
 edition. 
 
 13 Hegel's obsession with the wildness of India is carried into The Philoso¬ 
 phy of Religion, which refers to "an endless breaking-up of the One into 
 the Many, and an unstable reeling to and fro of all content" (2:9); a "wild 
 play of begetting and destroying" and "a wild whirl of delirium" (2:24); a 
 "wild, extravagant disorder" (2:44) and "a wild extravagance" of "desire" 
 
 (2:45)- 
 
 14 This is the "dispersive vacillation between extremes" that Hegel makes 
 part of a pattern of bondage from which only the Caucasian race has 
 freed itself. The Philosophy of Religion develops this perception more 
 fully. One extreme of the "dispersive vacillation" is the union with God 
 that consists of the annihilation and "stupefaction of self-consciousness" 
 (2:34). The other extreme is a "wild, extravagant disorder" (2:44) in which 
 "everything is squandered on imagination and nothing reserved for life" 
 (2:45). The "people of India are sunk in the most complete immorality" 
 because they are the victims of a contingency that is total and that can 
 look to nothing outside its endless mutations except the "stupefaction" 
 of union with the ultimate. 
 
 15 The German enthusiasm for Kalidasa's Sakuntala is perhaps being con¬ 
 trasted here with the cooler reception of the play in England. Hegel's 
 opinion is in harmony with Mill's findings in The History of British 
 India, published the year before Hegel began his Berlin lectures. For the 
 German response to Sakuntala, see Dorothy M. Figueira, Translating 
 the Orient: The Reception of "Sakuntala” in Nineteenth Century Europe 
 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). Figueira seeks to 
 show how translations of Sakuntala reflect the agendas of their transla¬ 
 tors. They are not agendas that Hegel would have endorsed. 
 
 16 Hegel's recognition of India's propensity for military defeats is in an 
 established tradition. His actual comments are less abusive than Gold¬ 
 smith's (see chapter 4) but may be potentially more threatening: "The 
 important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the 
 universal. In India five hundred men conquered twenty thousand who 
 were not cowards but who lacked only this disposition to work in close 
 
 240 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 
 
co-operation with others" ( Philosophy of Right, p. 2.96). Lack of heroic 
 fiber is a humiliating reason for failure, but it is perhaps a less dangerous 
 one than misalignment with the universal. 
 
 17 Max Muller, India: What It Can Teach Us—A Course of Lectures Deliv¬ 
 ered before the University of Cambridge (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 
 1883). 
 
 18 Hodgson notes that "most of the secondary sources available to him 
 [Hegel] were prejudiced or ill informed, reflecting the attitudes of the 
 British East India Company" (Hegel, Philosophy of Religion [Hodgson 
 edition], p. 46). European scholarship on India was also available to Hegel, 
 but since his aim was to correct the German infatuation, the British 
 denigration came naturally to hand. Among the secondary sources "re¬ 
 flecting the attitudes of the British East India Company," we might list 
 Alexander Fraser Tytler's Considerations on the Pohtical State of India 
 (London: Black, Perry, Booksellers to the Honourable East India Com¬ 
 pany, 1815]. Tytler's extensive remarks on Brahman depravity approxi¬ 
 mate Hegel instructively, notably in the comment that the "day of a 
 Brahmin is passed in eating and sleeping" (p. 274). Tytler does not find it 
 inconsistent to observe elsewhere that "in India, from the effects of the 
 climate, no European ever walks" (p. 38). 
 
 Vituperation against Brahmans as the custodians of Hinduism's pet¬ 
 rified practices is routine during the Mill-Hegel era. The Jones era was 
 more sympathetic to Hinduism, but Burke is still unusual in referring to 
 Brahmans in his remarkable speech on Fox's East India Bill as "an ancient 
 and venerable priesthood, the depository of their [the Indian people's] 
 laws, learning and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and 
 their consolation in death" (Marshall, Writings and Speeches of Edmund 
 Burke, 5:389-90], In An Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowl¬ 
 edge Which the Ancients Had of India (London, 1791), William Robertson 
 takes a view of Hinduism that approaches Burke's. Hegel shows no evi¬ 
 dence of having read Burke or Robertson. See Karen O'Brien, Narratives 
 of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cam¬ 
 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), for comment on Robertson's 
 views. 
 
 19 The significant but less than obvious relationship between Hegel's views 
 on civil society and the views current among members of the Scottish 
 Enlightenment is studied in Norbert Waszek, "The Division of Labour: 
 From the Scottish Enlightenment to Hegel," Owl of Minerva 15 (Fall 
 1983)- 
 
 20 Hayden White in "Rhetoric and History," in Theories of History: Papers 
 Read at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark 
 Memorial Library, 1976), pp. 13-14, argues that even Hegelian logic can¬ 
 not provide the form and syntax of historical discourse. It is "the enthy- 
 meme rather than the syllogism which is the structural principle" of 
 
 Notes to Chapter Five 241 
 
this discourse, and "rhetoric rather than logic" is its "organon" (p. 16). In 
 his much fuller examination of the genre of The Philosophy of History, 
 White sees Hegel as proceeding through potential tragedy and beyond 
 irony to a comedic vision (Hayden White, Metahistory [Baltimore: Johns 
 Hopkins University Press, 1973], pp. 81-131). But any progress beyond 
 irony may remain vulnerable to further ironies. Irony can become its 
 own perpetuation. 
 
 21 John Milton, "Of Education," in Wolfe et al., Prose Works of Milton, 
 11:402-3. 
 
 22 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Lon¬ 
 don: Routledge, 1990), p. 3. 
 
 23 Panikkar, Survey of Indian History, pp. 58-59. The guru in Gita Mehta's 
 novel, Raj (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), p. 137, is making a state¬ 
 ment that is historically justified. 
 
 24 S. Radhakrishnan, ed. and trans., The Principal Upanisads (New York: 
 Harper, 1953), pp. 69, 73. 
 
 25 Kurt F. Leidecker suggests some of the ways in which Hindu thought 
 might be regarded as Hegelian ("Hegel and the Orientals," New Studies 
 in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus [New York: Holt Rine¬ 
 hart and Winston, 1991], pp. 156-66). 
 
 26 The supersession of fancy by reason in the advance of history may seem 
 reflected on a literary level by Thomas Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry 
 (1820). But Peacock was entertained by rather than obsessed with his 
 argument. 
 
 27 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social 
 Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. xii ; see also pp. ix, 39, 45, 47-49, 
 69, 153 - 54 - 
 
 28 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, 
 trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 
 pp. 67-69. 
 
 29 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen 
 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 89-148. 
 
 30 Gustav Emil Mueller, ed. and trans., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New 
 York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 107. 
 
 31 Ibid., p. 118. 
 
 32 Ibid., p. 217. 
 
 33 A. V. Miller, trans., Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, with a foreword by 
 J. N. Findlay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19. 
 
 34 John Milton, Areopagitica, in Prose Works of Milton, 11:553. 
 
 35 Hegel's italics. Translation of paragraph 347 of The Philosophy of Right, 
 in Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (New York: 
 Doubleday, Anchor Books, i960), p. 117. 
 
 36 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
 1946), p. 274. 
 
 37 The nakedly imperial implications of Hegel's thinking in The Philoso- 
 
 242 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 
 
phy of Right are examined by Tsenay Serequeberhan in "The Idea of 
 Colonialism in Hegel's Philosophy of Right," International Philosophi¬ 
 cal Quarterly 29, no. 3 (September 1989): 302-17. 
 
 38 Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentiahsm, p. 123. 
 
 39 Finneran, W. B. Yeats: The Poems, pp. 336-37. 
 
 40 Clark Butler, ed. and trans., Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington: Indiana 
 University Press, 1984), p. 116. 
 
 41 Ibid., p.325. 
 
 42 Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dra¬ 
 matic Writings, 1927-39 (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 151. 
 
 6. Feminizing the Feminine: Early Women Writers on India 
 
 1 India as a laboratory for canon formation and for the pedagogical prac¬ 
 tices surrounding the canon is studied by Gauri Viswanathan in Masks 
 of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), esp. p. 65. As 
 Viswanathan notes, the idea of India as a testing ground was originally 
 explored by Eric Stokes in The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: 
 Oxford University Press, 1959). 
 
 2 See chapter 4 and Marshall, British Discovery of Hinduism, p. 185. 
 
 3 Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence (Princeton: Princeton 
 University Press, 1967), p. 5. 
 
 4 Charles Grant, quoted in Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 80. 
 
 5 Ibid. 
 
 6 The subversiveness of mimicry is addressed by Homi K. Bhabha in "Of 
 Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in Bhabha, 
 Location of Culture, pp. 85-92. Although imperial discourse is both sub¬ 
 tended and subverted by the mimicry it calls for, the feminization of 
 subjected peoples rests on a hierarchical relationship that discourages 
 mimicry. Thus, even in its primary figurations, imperial discourse can 
 be found at odds with itself. 
 
 7 For the different modelings of Chandrapore, see Forster, Passage to India, 
 PP- 31—32; for the promise and the appeal, see pp. 148-49. One could 
 say that the paragraph on pp. 148-49 puts to work yet once more the 
 much-used trope of India's femininity. The observation would be correct 
 but worse than worthless. Forster's rendering of a figure too familiar to 
 call for attentiveness is deeply eloquent in its immediacy but also in its 
 evasiveness. "How can the mind take hold of such a country?" suggests 
 at once exasperation with colonial nonsense, fortification of the mind 
 against that nonsense, and the mind's need for an incomprehensibility 
 in which it seeks to find yet fears to lose itself. India's hundred mouths 
 are a multiplied invitation, a monstrous polyvalency, the embodiment of 
 the voracious feminine and at the same time the multitude of forms that 
 infinity requires to make itself manifest. The mouths speak through ob¬ 
 jects "ridiculous and august," inviting us to reflect on a separation that 
 
 Notes to Chapter Six 243 
 
becomes no longer easy to maintain. Their "promise" was historically 
 opulence and the seduction of the exotic. Their "appeal" can be India's 
 vulnerability, a claim on the exploitative conscience, proffered under the 
 cloak of a contiguous naming that calls for the imperial burden to be 
 shouldered. India is what is beheld in India, the terrain of the gaze, the 
 discovery that changes as we grasp it, the unveiling of the knower in the 
 knowing. These recognitions, which do not merely traverse an imperial 
 trope but open up its possibilities even as they encapsulate its history, 
 give substance to Suleri's caution against crude transpositions of gender 
 into empire ( Rhetoric of English India, p. 15). At the same time, we have 
 to take into account Brown's justified finding that the discursive inter- 
 twinings of the sexual, the commercial, and the imperial have yet to be 
 adequately explored [Ends of Empire). Works such as this, cognizant of 
 both warnings, must come to rest along a line that only tact and atten¬ 
 tiveness are capable of drawing convincingly. 
 
 8 Inden, Imagining India. Inden convincingly brings out the extent to 
 which Western scholarship on India was ideologically inflected. 
 
 9 These characterizations are all offered by Inden in ibid. Inden stops short 
 of calling them different names for India's femininity. 
 
 10 Ibid., pp. 4, 45-48. 
 
 11 Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British 
 Imagination, 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 
 
 12 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 199-224. 
 
 13 Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colo¬ 
 nial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 96; see 
 also pp. 93-94- 
 
 14 Suleri's consideration of this matter is appropriately complex but does 
 not deny that subjugation in the domestic order, limited dominance in 
 the imperial one, and the valorizing of empire by the sacrifice of family 
 life required to maintain it constitute a configuration too tightly inter¬ 
 locked to be easily pried open and one in which the opportunities for 
 maneuvering are restricted ( Rhetoric of English India, pp. 75-110). Most 
 forthright of all is Antoinette M. Burton in "The White Woman's Bur¬ 
 den," in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, 
 ed. Napur Chandur and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1992), pp. 151-52. 
 
 15 Anne K. Mellor, "Romanticism, Gender, and the Anxieties of Empire: 
 An Introduction," European Romantic Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 152. 
 
 16 A. L. Basham, ed., A Cultural History of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
 1975), pp. 373-74. Basham describes the work as the first novel about 
 India written in English. Mrs. Francis Sheridan's History of Nourjahan 
 (1767) can be regarded as belonging to another genre. 
 
 17 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 102. 
 
 18 Mill's derogatory comparison of Hinduism with Islam puts an end to 
 the Jonesian interregnum, that brief period during which Hindu religion 
 
 244 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 
 
and culture could be sympathetically viewed. Before the interregnum, 
 Islam was seen as India's official religion. After the interregnum, it be¬ 
 came India's preferred religion, and a Hinduism first merely colorful and 
 then inconveniently invested with classical authority was increasingly 
 perceived as chaotic and dangerous. 
 
 19 References to Translation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah are to Elizabeth 
 Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindu Rajah, 5th ed. (London, 
 1811), 2 vols. 
 
 20 See, in particular, C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the 
 British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]. 
 
 21 Hamilton's novel was written in the middle of the Jonesian interreg¬ 
 num, but one should not forget that only eleven years earlier, Beckford's 
 Vathek had treated Hinduism as the infernal circumference of an Islam 
 already circumferential to Christianity. The interregnum was a fragile af¬ 
 fair, with evangelical imaginings of India luridly at work during its span. 
 As has already been suggested, the quarter century after 1785 provided a 
 narrow time frame of opportunity during which Hindu culture could be 
 sympathetically examined. Hamilton may go further than anyone else 
 in endorsing that culture and in urging its reinstatement. We can at¬ 
 tribute the strength of her commitment not solely to a detached esteem 
 for things Hindu but also to a desire to idealize Hindu India as a site of 
 the culturally feminine; but although this explanation is plausible, it is 
 perplexed by her defense of caste hierarchies to which gender hierarchies 
 can be deemed analogous. The forces at work during the interregnum 
 are examined in an important study by Rosane Rocher, "British Ori¬ 
 entalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and 
 Government," in Orientahsm and the Postcolonial Predicament: Per¬ 
 spectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der 
 Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 215-49. 
 
 22 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, p. 166. 
 
 23 Fisher notes that "thousands of Indians made the trip to Europe" over the 
 years up to the publication of Hamilton's novel. "Most were sailors, ser¬ 
 vants, wives or mistresses of Europeans. A few were travellers or visiting 
 dignitaries" ( First Indian Author in Enghsh, pp. 191-92). Fisher's book 
 reprints the text of The Travels of Dean Mahomed, published by sub¬ 
 scription at Cork in 1794. Mahomed emigrated to Ireland in 1784 and 
 married an Irish student, Jane Daly, in 1786. His book, cast in the episto¬ 
 lary form, is in interesting proximity to Hamilton's novel. It is the first 
 book by an Indian author presenting India to a Western public. 
 
 24 References to The Wild Irish Girl are to Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), 
 The Wild Irish Girl, with an introduction by Brigid Brophy (London: Pan¬ 
 dora Press, 1986). 
 
 25 References to The Missionary are to Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), The 
 Missionary, 3 vols. (1811; reprint, Delmar: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1981). 
 
 26 In Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-182 5: Intercepted 
 
 Notes to Chapter Six 245 
 
Letters, Interrupted Seductions (New York: Oxford University Press, 
 1994), Nicola J. Watson connects the decline of the epistolary novel and 
 the rise of more authoritarian third-person narratives to the remodeling 
 of British national identity during the Napoleonic period. Fisher esti¬ 
 mates that "England had produced some 800 epistolary novels by 1790" 
 and that during the 1750-1800 period "approximately one out of every six 
 works of English fiction used it" ( First Indian Author in English, p. 222). 
 
 27 In one of the few articles of note on Owenson's ideology, Joseph W. 
 Lew argues that "The Wild Irish Girl, Ida of Athens and The Mission¬ 
 ary, different in technique as they may be, form an imaginative unit. In 
 these three novels, Owenson explores the range of possible 'outcomes' 
 to imperialism: from euphoric union to dysphoric mutual destruction" 
 (Joseph W. Lew, "Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire," Keats-Shelley 
 Journal 39 [1990]: 43-44). The problem remains of why Ireland should be 
 the site of the euphoric and India of the dysphoric construction. Insofar 
 as India is a surrogate for Ireland, The Missionary can be read as reassur¬ 
 ingly distancing the uneasy possibility of a dysphoric text that might still 
 be written about Ireland. Yet as Katie Trumpener argues, the "central 
 political tendency" of the national tale "shifts gradually from a celebra¬ 
 tory nationalist politics, which both recognizes cultural distinctiveness 
 and believes in the possibility of trans-cultural unions, towards another, 
 more separatist politics, in which a history of cultural oppression makes 
 rapprochement and reconciliation more and more inconceivable. The 
 national tale's marriage plot and its national characters are deeply af¬ 
 fected by these shifts" (Katie Trumpener, "National Character, Nation¬ 
 alist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 
 1806-1830," Enghsh Literary History 60 [1993]: 703). If we are witnessing 
 an ideological shift rather than the composing of an "imaginative unit," 
 the unfortunate outcome of The Missionary becomes a less distant inti¬ 
 mation of what the future could hold in store for Ireland. 
 
 28 Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: The Life and Times of Sydney Owenson 
 (London: Pandora Press, 1986), p. 108. 
 
 29 A. M. D. Hughes, The Nascent Mind of Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
 1947), pp. 90-92. Leask finds Luxima a character type to which Shelley 
 "returned obsessively in his Oriental poems." Offsetting this obsession is 
 Shelley's "radical scepticism regarding Hindu culture" ( British Romantic 
 Writers and the East, p. 192). 
 
 30 Echoes of The Missionary in Shelley's poetry are considered in S. R. 
 Swaminathan, "Possible Indian Influence on Shelley," Keats-Shelley 
 Memorial Bulletin (1958): 30-45, in the context of the writings of William 
 Jones and of Moor's Hindu Pantheon (1801), a work Shelley owned. John 
 Drew carries the study considerably further in his extensive examina¬ 
 tion of the presence of The Missionary in Shelley's Prometheus Un¬ 
 bound in India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University 
 Press, 1987), pp. 240-82. There are iconographic similarities between 
 
 246 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 
 
Shelley's Asia, Botticelli's Venus, and traditional depictions of Lakshmi 
 that, taken together, might make Asia a statement of the romantic move¬ 
 ment toward a world humanism enlarged beyond Greco-Roman bound¬ 
 aries. If Asia is in herself the marriage of East and West, and if she is 
 that world conscience she seems ardently to be in her strongly phrased 
 encounter with Demogorgon, she has to be distinguished from Luxima, 
 who represents only one side of that marriage and who represents it, 
 moreover, in a hierarchical relationship for which Milton's prelapsarian 
 Eve clearly provides the model. 
 
 31 The Goan Inquisition, established in 1560, was not abolished until 1812, 
 the year after the publication of Owenson's novel. Its special objects of 
 hatred were Portuguese who, like Hilarion, Indianized themselves ex¬ 
 cessively and converts who, like Luxima, reverted to Hinduism or never 
 really renounced it. For a graphic account of the Inquisition's cruelties, 
 see Paul William Roberts, Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India 
 (Toronto: Stoddard, 1994), pp. 85-89. See also Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne 
 Empire, pp. 269-70. 
 
 32 See chapter 2, n. 20, for Owenson's rendering of this set piece. 
 
 33 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 140. Hegel may well have been aware of 
 The Missionary and could be alluding to it in this passage. Luxima might 
 be India incarnate, a temptation to be sternly rejected, and the marriage 
 of East and West even in its hierarchical modeling, a proposition to be 
 resoundingly denounced. 
 
 34 The functional division between male and female in Hindu thought is 
 between concept and implementation and not between natura naturans 
 and natura naturata. The relationship between Prometheus and Asia 
 seems to approximate this functional division, as does the relationship 
 between the Father and the Son in Paradise Lost. 
 
 35 Prometheus Unbound 2.4.94. 
 
 7. Monstrous Mythologies: Southey and The Curse of Kehama 
 
 1 Robert Southey, Preface to The Curse of Kehama, in Poems, ed. Maurice 
 H. Fitzgerald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), pp. 117-18. This 
 edition reprints the 1810 and not the later preface. 
 
 2 Antony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and 
 the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer¬ 
 sity Press, 1992), pp. 45-47. The world, Grafton suggests, was still read, 
 according to Pliny, by discoverers more concerned with accommodating 
 their findings to the book than with rewriting the book according to their 
 findings. See also Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 21-22. Elliott is 
 particularly thought provoking in his comments on a Renaissance con¬ 
 servatism that should be only momentarily surprising ( The Old World 
 and the New, pp. 13-17)- For a bibliography of the monstrous directed 
 toward the interests of this book, see Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 
 
 Notes to Chapter Seven 247 
 
p. 15911. Sir Thomas Browne's witty comments in Religio Medici (1.15- 
 16) deserve attention (Norman J. Endicott, ed., The Prose of Sir Thomas 
 Browne [New York: Doubleday, 1967], pp. 20-23). Physical monstrosities 
 of the kind that Othello relates to Desdemona recede into the back¬ 
 ground as Indian civilization and Indian art in particular become the 
 habitat of the monstrous. See Partha Mitter, Much Mahgned Monsters 
 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), for further investigation of 
 the expanding scope of monstrosity. 
 
 3 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert 
 Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman, 1849-50), 3:18; hereafter cited as L 
 and C. 
 
 4 Kenneth Curry, ed., New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols. (New York: 
 Columbia University Press, 1965), 1:406; hereafter cited as New Letters. 
 
 5 J. W. Robberds, ed., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Wilham 
 Taylor, 1 vols. (London: John Murray, 1843), 1:375. In an unsigned review 
 of The Curse of Kehama published in two installments ( Eclectic Review, 
 March 1811, pp. 185-205; April 1811, pp. 334-50), John Foster carries the 
 thought further. The most important passages of the review are printed 
 in Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: 
 Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 138-45. "It was a thing not to be 
 endured," Foster writes, "that, while we are as proud as Kehama of pos¬ 
 sessing India, we should not be able to bring to the augmentation of 
 our national splendour that which India itself deems its highest glory, 
 its mythology." The failure of a poet of Southey's status to achieve this 
 "augmentation" proves "the utter desperateness of the undertaking." It 
 is as if a "fine British fleet" were dispatched to India "for the purpose of 
 bringing back, each ship, a basket of the gods of crockery" (p. 144). 
 
 6 Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, August 28, 1813, in Leslie A. Mar- 
 chand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals (Cambridge: Belknap Press of 
 Harvard University Press, 1974), 3:100-101. See also Rupert Christian¬ 
 sen, Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age, 1780-1830 (New York: 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1988), p. 195. Madame de Stael's advice, reported by 
 Byron three years after Kehama was published, indicates that Southey's 
 apprehensions about his audience were not unfounded. 
 
 7 Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination, p. 236. See also Leask, Brit¬ 
 ish Romantic Writers and the East, p. 96. 
 
 8 Madden, Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, p. 332. 
 
 9 James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, eds., Biographia Literaria (Prince¬ 
 ton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 64. 
 
 10 A firsthand description of Southey's library can be found in the section 
 on Southey in De Quincey's Literary Reminiscences in Masson, Col¬ 
 lected Writings of De Quincey, 11:337-38. Casaubon in George Eliot's 
 Middlemarch is engaged in a mythological project similar to Southey's 
 but disclaims any interest in recent poets. 
 
 248 NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 
 
11 Robert Southey, 1838 preface to The Curse of Kehama, in The Poetical 
 Works of Robert Southey, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, 1837-38). 
 
 12 Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a 
 Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i960), p. 79. 
 
 13 Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 
 
 1977), P- in- 
 
 14 Stephen Wheeler, ed., The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, 
 vol. 13, Poems (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), 1803 preface, p. 344. 
 
 15 Robert Southey, quoted in Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age, pp. 78- 
 79. For Portuguese methods of conversion, see Boxer, Portuguese Sea¬ 
 borne Empire, pp. 65-83. 
 
 16 Robert Southey, quoted in Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 82. 
 
 17 Ibid. 
 
 18 Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Bell and Daldy, 1861), p. 162. 
 
 19 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 93. 
 
 20 Annual Review for 1806, p. 593. Quoted in Carnall, Robert Southey and 
 His Age, p. 78. 
 
 21 For the protocol of the warrant, see Geoffrey Moorhouse, India Britan- 
 nica (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 131-36; Davies, Splendours 
 of the Raj, pp. 224-25. 
 
 22 Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age, pp. 124-27. 
 
 23 In Literature as a Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
 1987), pp. 18-19, Marilyn Butler draws attention to the manner in which 
 Byron and Shelley transfer Southey's anti-Hindu scenes to anti-Christian 
 contexts. She adds that "Southey's representation of society within India 
 might be construed as humanitarian, egalitarian and radical." This latent 
 populism makes the poem subversive of a discourse the accuracy of 
 which it also seeks to certify and is one more complication of the ex¬ 
 traordinary antipathy between the poem and its prefaces. 
 
 24 References to the notes to The Curse of Kehama and to the 1838 preface 
 are to the Poetical Works of Robert Southey. Modern editions print the 
 1810 preface and do not reprint the notes. 
 
 25 Madden, Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, p. 131. 
 
 26 Bernhardt-Kabisch, Robert Southey, p. 83. 
 
 27 See chapter 2, n. 20. 
 
 28 Southey improves on his predecessors with the resemblance between 
 Kehama's eternal incarceration in himself and the curse he inflicts on 
 Ladurlad. No such name as Ladurlad is to be found in Hindu literature. 
 The Anglicizing, along with the conversion of Gandharva to Glendo- 
 veer—a tribute perhaps to Scottish valor—is faintly comic at this point 
 in time. Nevertheless, Westernized names point to more substantial dis¬ 
 coveries of the West in India that are not conducive to a discourse of 
 estrangement. 
 
 29 Drew is taking a literal reading for granted when he finds Southey's nar- 
 
 Notes to Chapter Seven 249 
 
rative "firmly based on what he had (rightly) gathered was the essential, 
 as also the peculiar feature of Hinduism" ( India and the Romantic Imagi¬ 
 nation, p. 237). Drew then quotes the passage from the 1810 preface we 
 are now considering. No one could be less inclined to hostile judgments 
 against Hindu civilization than Drew, but the literal reading of Puranic 
 and Vedic texts must be as methodologically suspect as those naturalis¬ 
 tic (rather than semiotic) readings of Indian art that Mitter rightly criti¬ 
 cizes in Much Maligned Monsters. The year 1987 may seem late in the 
 day for resistance to figural readings, but Drew's view becomes far more 
 justifiable when we find a philosopher of the status of Surendrenath 
 Dasgupta resorting to similar readings of the Vedas in Indian Idealism 
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 1-19. Dasgupta is 
 concerned with putting forward an evolutionary view of Hindu religious 
 thought in which the "primitive" Vedas pave the way for the more "ad¬ 
 vanced" Upanishads. If we adopt this line of interpretation, there is no 
 need to recuperate early texts by attempting to read them figurally. In any 
 case, figural readings are not to be expected from philosophers, although 
 Sri Aurobindo points us in the right direction by endeavoring to read the 
 Gita as a philosophical allegory of the soul. My endeavor is to site Indian 
 religiophilosophical texts on a literary terrain and to request that they 
 be examined through the hermeneutics appropriate to such sites. The re¬ 
 quest is not extraordinary: if the Old Testament were read with stubborn 
 literalism, the results might well be, to use Southey's word, "peculiar." 
 
 30 In the Eclectic Review (March 1811, p. 186), John Foster caustically ob¬ 
 serves that Clive would have had no difficulty in seeing Kehama off the 
 premises. Unfortunately, it is not impossible for the modern reader to 
 discern resemblances between Kehama and Clive. 
 
 31 Foster sharply focuses Southey's dilemma: "We may wonder in very seri¬ 
 ous simplicity, why the poet should choose deliberately to excite at once 
 the two opposite sentiments of pleasure and disgust, with the knowl¬ 
 edge, too, that any attempt to prolong them both is infallibly certain 
 to end in the ascendancy of the latter'' (Madden, Robert Southey: The 
 Critical Heritage, p. 140). In characterizing Foster's review as a "very sug¬ 
 gestive misreading," Leask points to the problematics that surround the 
 question of a correct or even an appropriate reading ( British Romantic 
 Writers and the East, p. 96). Southey's own reading of his poem is, as we 
 have seen, highly indeterminate, partitioned irretrievably between the 
 poem and its prefaces. A more modern reading situated on the poem and 
 marginalizing the prefaces could still find the poem arguing indecisively, 
 although productively, with itself. 
 
 32 In his essay on history, Emerson argues that the driving force behind in¬ 
 quiry into the past is to domesticate the monstrous to "see the end of the 
 difference," to do away with the "wild, savage, and preposterous There 
 or Then and to introduce in its place the Here and the Now" ( The Col- 
 
 250 NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 
 
lected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2: Essays: First Series, text 
 established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr [Cambridge, 
 Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979], p. 7). 
 
 8 . Understanding Asia: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound 
 
 1 References to Shelley's poetry are to Hutchinson, Complete Poetical 
 Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
 
 2 A similar turn of language takes place in Genesis 6:6: "And it repented 
 the lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at 
 his heart." I am grateful to Lorenzo Minnelli for drawing my attention 
 to this inversion. The antecedent of "it" is more specific in Prometheus 
 Unbound, but it is entirely possible that the direction of Genesis 6:6 
 is being reversed so that the repenting in Shelley deconstructs not only 
 man as constituted by the curse but also God as "the creature of his wor¬ 
 shippers" ( Queen Mab 7.28). 
 
 3 Joseph Raben, "Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: Why the Indian Cauca¬ 
 sus?," Keats-Shelley Journal 12 (1963): 95-106; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s 
 Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, Calif.: 
 Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 61-70. Vague demarcations are exempli¬ 
 fied by Burke, who speaks (perhaps recalling PL 3.431-32) of "Mount 
 Imaus (or whatever else you call that large range of mountains that walls 
 the northern frontiers of India)" (Marshall, Writings and Speeches of 
 Edmund Burke, 5:394). 
 
 4 Lady Morgan, The Missionary, 1:130, 2:107. 
 
 5 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. 71. 
 
 6 It was not until 1821 that Shelley placed an order for Mill's history. Yet in 
 A Philosophic View of Reform, published two years earlier and discussed 
 later in this chapter, he displays his commitment not only to Mill's view 
 of India but also to the rhetoric in which that view is drenched. 
 
 7 Spear, India, p. 226. 
 
 8 Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill Jr., eds., The Complete Greek 
 Drama (New York: Random House, 1938), 1:140. 
 
 9 Curran, Shelley's Annus Mirabilis, pp. 45-47; Kenneth N. Cameron, 
 Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 
 P- 479 - 
 
 10 Lawrence J. Zillman, ed., Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound": A Variorum 
 Edition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), p. 330. 
 
 11 See also Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dra¬ 
 matic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 215m 
 
 12 Curran, Shelley's Annus Mirabihs, pp. 51-53; Drew, India and the Ro¬ 
 mantic Imagination, pp. 265-68. Leask points persuasively to the pres¬ 
 ence of the Kena Upanishad in the exchange between Asia and Demo- 
 gorgon ( British Romantic Writers and the East, pp. 149-50). Rammohun 
 
 Notes to Chapter Eight 251 
 
Roy had translated this Upanishad shortly before the appearance of 
 Shelley's poem. 
 
 13 See Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, pp. 146-47. Analogies 
 with Indian turns of language are not particularly striking here, given 
 the universality of the via negative as a mystical procedure. The secular¬ 
 izing of the language strategy in the passage quoted is unusual and can 
 cumulatively convey the discarded impositions of a previous discourse. 
 
 14 David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose, or the Trumpet of a Prophecy (Albu¬ 
 querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 239. 
 
 15 Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism 
 and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton Uni¬ 
 versity Press, r982), pp. 240-45. Play is an important element of Hindu 
 thought, entering into the activities of a cosmos that can be seen as self¬ 
 delighting as much as it is purpose dedicated. Dedication to a purpose 
 can be accepted as a form, but not the only form, of self-delight. 
 
 16 Tilottama Rajan, The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understand¬ 
 ing in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 
 1990), pp. 306-10. 
 
 17 Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabihs, p. 100. 
 
 18 The traditional difference between intuitive and discursive reason (which 
 Milton in PL 5.487-90 makes into a difference of degree rather than kind) 
 points to a more immediate, nondiscursive "language" in which pres¬ 
 ence is less corrupted by the linguistic screen. 
 
 19 An account of the impeachment as theater, less theatrical and more 
 analytical than Macaulay's, can be found in Suleri, Rhetoric of English 
 India, pp. 49-74. Teltscher offers a different analysis in India Inscribed, 
 
 pp. 157-91- 
 
 20 Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and 
 Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London: Minerva Books, 
 1993), PP- 257-384; Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 84. 
 
 21 Gardner, East India Company, p. 146. 
 
 22 Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, eds., The Complete Works of Percy 
 Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols. (London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30), 6:38-39. 
 
 23 W. B. Yeats, "The Indian upon God," in Finneran, W. B. Yeats: The Poems, 
 pp. 13-14. 
 
 24 Keay, India Discovered, pp. 64-74. Even a Buddhist shrine as well pre¬ 
 served as the one at Sanchi (examined by Captain E. Fell in 1819) was 
 taken only as evidence that Buddhism had spread to an Indian periphery 
 from a source presumed to be outside India. The claim that Buddhism 
 had originated in India was treated as merely one more example of the 
 Indian tendency to imagine India as the origin of everything. 
 
 25 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. 
 E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 388-89. For the presence of 
 Indian thought in the New Testament, see Arthur Schopenhauer, On the 
 Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La 
 
 252 NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 
 
Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), p. 187, and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. and trans., 
 Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms (London: Penguin Books, 
 1970), pp. 190-92. It should be noted that Schopenhauer treats Indian 
 thought as world denying (in his vocabulary, will denying), a proposition 
 contested in this book. Schopenhauer's relationship to Indian thought is 
 briefly studied in R. K. Das Gupta, "Schopenhauer and Indian Thought," 
 East and West New Studies 13, no. 1 (March 1962): 32-40. 
 
 26 Clark, Shelley’s Prose, p. 238. 
 
 27 Ibid. 
 
 28 Ibid. Rammohun Roy may well be a principal member of that Brah- 
 minical Society where "Locke and Hume and Rousseau are familiarly 
 talked of." An adequate assessment of Rammohun Roy still remains to 
 be written. Commentary on him is not inconsiderable, and a compila¬ 
 tion by V. C. Joshi ( Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization 
 [Delhi: Vikas, 1975]) provides more than one view of his significance. The 
 tendency, nevertheless, is to see a strongly overdetermined figure along a 
 single line of determination. Leask's running remarks on Roy in British 
 Romantic Writers and the East are the most responsive to the complexi¬ 
 ties of his context. 
 
 Shelley's reference to "many native Indians" is not without founda¬ 
 tion. At a meeting held on May 14, 1816, to found Hindu College, Cal¬ 
 cutta (which was designed from the outset not to live up to its name), 
 Sir Edward Hyde East found himself "struck with the enthusiasm of the 
 prominent pundits, Sanskrit scholars, for the introduction of Western lit¬ 
 erature and science." By 1830, the Committee on Public Instruction felt 
 justified in claiming that Hindu College students had acquired "a com¬ 
 mand of the English language" and "a familiarity with its literature and 
 science" to "an extent rarely equalled by any schools in Europe." 
 
 Henry Derozio, the first Indian poet writing in English, was the head 
 of the Department of History and English at Hindu College from 1829 
 until his controversial dismissal in 18 31; he was educated at Dharam- 
 tola Academy, a school run by a follower of Hume, David Drummond. 
 Bacon, Locke, Hume, Paine, and Bentham were important figures in the 
 extracurricular life of Hindu College. See Manju Dalmia, "Derozio: En¬ 
 glish Teacher," in The Lie of the Land: Enghsh Literary Studies in India, 
 ed. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 
 42-62; the quotations in the preceding paragraph are from pp. 47 and 48. 
 
 29 Clark, Shelley’s Prose, p. 238. This sentence should remain a major crux 
 for students of Shelley and India. Leask rightly attaches considerable im¬ 
 portance to it, referring to it as "that strange qualifying sentence" ( British 
 Romantic Writers and the East, p. 140) and arguing more emphatically 
 that "the last sentence is forced, surreptitiously, to admit that the Euro¬ 
 pean values which are to free them [the Indians] are also those which 
 enslave them" (pp. 119-20). Uneasiness is apparent in the awkward con¬ 
 struction of the sentence, in the internal rhyme between "should" and 
 
 Notes to Chapter Eight 253 
 
"would" that indirectly enacts, and in doing so seems to double, the frus¬ 
 tration of a people not yet free, and in the syntactic deferral of "attain" 
 to a horizon that is helpfully remote. "Attainment," moreover, is dis- 
 couragingly restricted to "a system of arts and literature of their own." 
 Political liberation seems significantly excluded. The final sentence may 
 be Jonesian in its substance, but one cannot graft a Jonesian recommen¬ 
 dation onto a Mill-Hegel view of India that has been designed to do away 
 with Jones. Taken as a whole, the passage, with its "strange qualifying 
 sentence," shows that Shelley, like Southey and Owenson, is a partici¬ 
 pant in two discourses and in the friction generated between them. It 
 also displays disturbingly the strength of his commitment to the less- 
 acceptable discourse. In exiling Prometheus and Asia to a country of the 
 mind, bereft of any relationship to India's actuality, Shelley raises but 
 cannot examine the question of how India was so comprehensively dis¬ 
 connected from itself. He also comes perilously close to the conclusion 
 that, at least for the time being, the wisdom of India is not for India but 
 for others better equipped to make use of that wisdom. 
 
 30 G. Wilson Knight, The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (Lon¬ 
 don: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 210. 
 
 9. Macaulay: The Moment and the Minute 
 
 1 G. M. Young, ed., Macaulay: Prose and Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard Uni¬ 
 versity Press, 1967), p. 728. References to Macaulay's work, wherever 
 possible, are to this edition, cited by page number. For material not in 
 Young, references are to The Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. 
 Lady Trevelyan (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 
 n.d.], 10 vols. ; cited by volume and page number. 
 
 2 The documentary appeared in the CBC television series The Nature of 
 Things (ca. 1994). The most thoughtful discussion so far of English studies 
 in India is Rajan, Lie of the Land. See also John Oliver Perry, Absent Au¬ 
 thority: Issues in Contemporary Indian Enghsh Criticism (New Delhi: 
 Sterling, 1992), pp. 327-94. English literature in Indian university De¬ 
 partments of English remains canonically taught as well as relentlessly 
 canonical. Teaching it within the history of imperialism or even in re¬ 
 lation to that history, as Viswanathan recommends ( Masks of Conquest, 
 pp. 167-69), is not the impending imperative for which we might hope 
 but a distant possibility reluctant to materialize. The same inertia resists 
 Ahmad's altogether commendable proposal that English literary studies 
 in India be situated within a cultural studies program [In Theory, pp. 
 278-84). 
 
 3 John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (Cambridge: Belknap 
 Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 475. 
 
 4 Owen Dudley Edwards, Macaulay (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 
 1988). 
 
 254 NOTES TO CHAPTER 9 
 
5 Jane Millgate, Macaulay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 
 
 6 Quoted in Edwards, Macaulay, p. 123. 
 
 7 Quoted in Millgate, Macaulay, p. 119. 
 
 8 Clive, Macaulay, p. 325. 
 
 9 Muller, India, pp. 137-38. 
 
 10 Edwards, Macaulay, p. 115. 
 
 11 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 81. 
 
 12 Millgate, Macaulay, p. 24 (italics added). The encomium and the uncriti¬ 
 cal acceptance of Mill's title endure well beyond what should have been 
 their day. See O'Brien's reference to Mill as "the great historian of British 
 India" ( Great Melody, p. xxxviii). 
 
 13 Clive, Macaulay, p. 296. Macaulay also made use of the voyage to pick 
 up the rudiments of Portuguese. 
 
 14 Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, with a new preface by 
 Nick Mirsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. viii. Thuggery 
 can be treated as a staging ground for the depiction of Hinduism's in¬ 
 nate perversity, with the Kali cult a nightmarish version of the feminine. 
 The fact is that many thugs were Moslem and that the principal thug 
 in Taylor's Confessions of a Thug is a Hyderabad Moslem, emotionally 
 involved in Mohurram in a way he never is in the Kali cult (pp. 106- 
 10). His Malthusian justification of the desirability of thuggery (pp. 43- 
 44) makes it apparent that Taylor (who is generous with epigraphs from 
 Shakespeare to his chapters) had also read Comus's speech in Milton's 
 Ludlow masque. Such fabrications imply that the motives of thuggery 
 were nonreligious even to the author of Confessions. Nevertheless, thug¬ 
 gery throughout the nineteenth century was one more sign of the horrors 
 of Hinduism, and the murderous designs of thugs under their veneer of 
 friendliness became a metaphor for a treacherous subcontinent. 
 
 15 Millgate, Macaulay, p. 20m. 
 
 16 Ibid., p. 95. 
 
 17 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-70 (New Haven: 
 Yale University Press for Wellesley College, 1957), p. 457. 
 
 18 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale 
 University Press, 1992), p. 9. 
 
 19 Hay and Quereshi, Sources of Indian Tradition, 2:43. 
 
 20 Ibid. 
 
 21 Lata Mani, "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial 
 India," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkun 
 Sansari and Krishna Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 88- 
 126. The original version appeared in 1987. For a critical view of it, see 
 Sheldon Pollock, "Deep Orientalism," in Breckenridge and van der Veer, 
 Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, pp. 99-104. For more on 
 the subject, see Arvind Sharma et al., eds., Sati: Historical and Phenome¬ 
 nological Essays (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988). 
 
 22 It should be noted that Roy felt that suttee should be made considerably 
 
 Notes to Chapter Nine 255 
 
more difficult rather than illegal. Abolition eventually had to come about 
 through reformist energies in the Hindu community (Sharma et al. ( Sati: 
 Historical and Phenomenological Essays, pp. 43-48). We could take Roy's 
 recommendation as a commitment to cultural self-determination, but it 
 also suited the agenda of those Orientalists who wished to expedite pro¬ 
 gressive change with the minimum of popular discontent. 
 
 23 Mani, "Contentious Traditions," p. 112; Rocher, "British Orientalism," 
 pp. 225-31. This phase was over by the time of the debate on suttee. As 
 the chapters on Owenson, Southey, and Shelley have shown, the Mill- 
 Hegel discourse had come to power everywhere but in Calcutta. 
 
 24 V. J. Kiernan, The Lords of Humankind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and 
 White Man in an Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 
 1986), p. 41. 
 
 25 David Kopf, British Orientahsm and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dy¬ 
 namics of Indian Modernization, 1773-183$ (Berkeley: University of 
 California Press, 1969). Viswanathan's methodological objections to Kopf 
 [Masks of Conquest, pp. 15-17) are well founded, but the same objec¬ 
 tions could be made to Schwab ( Oriental Renaissance ), and neither book 
 is disabled by insufficient attention to the politics of knowledge. Kopf is 
 particularly effective in bringing out the Enlightenment roots of a world 
 humanism that might otherwise be treated as a romantic inspiration, and 
 Schwab, more than anyone else, conveys the romance of understanding 
 that forms the aesthetic of the romantic project. 
 
 26 Kopf, British Orientahsm and the Bengal Renaissance, pp. 144-55, 81, 
 48, 96-97. 
 
 27 Clive, Macaulay, p. 360. 
 
 28 Stokes, Enghsh Utilitarians and India, p. 47; Clive, Macaulay, pp. 385- 
 87. 
 
 29 Gerald Sirkin and Natalie Robinson Sirkin, "The Battle of Indian Edu¬ 
 cation: Macaulay's Opening Salvo Newly Discovered," Victorian Studies 
 14, no. 4 (1971): 407-28. 
 
 30 Frederic Ives Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (1930; reprint, New York: 
 Haskell House, 1968; Arthur E. Christy, The Orient in American Tran¬ 
 scendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (1932; reprint, 
 New York: Octagon Books, 1963). See also R. K. Gupta, The Great En¬ 
 counter: A Study of Indo-American Literary and Cultural Relations 
 (Riverdale, Md.: Riverdale Company, 1987), pp. 29-41. 
 
 31 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, pp. 116-17. 
 
 32 Marshall, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 5:402. Burke may 
 see a failure of imperial responsibility, but he attributes it to the nar¬ 
 rowness of vision of the East India Company rather than to the nature 
 of imperial management. The empire remains a mysterious gift of Provi¬ 
 dence (see afterword, n. 4) calling for respectful exploration of the mean¬ 
 ing of the gift. Rabindranath Tagore's remembrance and adaptation of 
 
 256 NOTES TO CHAPTER 9 
 
Burke's simile in Creative Unity (London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 198-99, 
 is notable. 
 
 33 Shlomo Avineri, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New 
 York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 131-32. Ahmad in his chapter on Marx in 
 India does not adequately examine this passage, with its troubling impli¬ 
 cation that the cost of progress is the ruin of existing structures and that 
 the necessary agent of progress is Western dominance [In Theory, pp. 
 221-42). Nevertheless, he conveys the dimensions of a "moral dilemma" 
 that Keats's Hyperion, as we have seen, addresses with tragic eloquence 
 (p. 228). 
 
 34 Philip Mason, The Men Who Ruled India, vol. 2: The Guardians. 
 
 35 In The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism 
 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), Allen Greenberger ably defines 
 the parameters of these novels. They are limited to northwestern and 
 nonurban India (p. 38); they are likely to include "a heart-rending ac¬ 
 count of the way India destroys the institution of the European family" 
 and they portray "Hindus in general and Bengalis in particular ... in a 
 very harsh light" (p. 45); they regard the Moslems as an imperial people, 
 like themselves, whom they can understand better than other Indians; 
 and they therefore restrict their relationships with the Indian people to 
 Moslems to "an abnormally large degree" (pp. 45-47). Rocher contrasts 
 this preference with eighteenth-century attitudes ("British Orientalism," 
 p. 222). As she notes, the movement from an early sympathy for "mild, 
 meek, downtrodden Hindus" to the favoring of "virile, fearless Muslims" 
 provides "much of the texture" (p. 245n) of Hutchins's Illusion of Per¬ 
 manence and Ashis Nandy's Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self 
 under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). One might add 
 that Islam's accessibility to the West lay not simply in its imperial past 
 but, perhaps more important in its monotheism and its univocality, both 
 of which were congenial to the aims and texture of imperial discourse. 
 
 36 Trevelyan, Golden Oriole, pp. 222-23, 4 °- 
 
 37 Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the 
 Upper Provinces of India (London: Virago Press, 1983), p. 294; see also 
 pp. 35, 98. 
 
 38 Mason, Men Who Ruled India (London: Pan Books, 1987), p. xiii. 
 
 39 Ibid. 
 
 40 Burke's presentation of Fox's East India Bill and its connected legislation 
 as the Magna Carta of the Indian people can be read as implying such a 
 contract. 
 
 41 Marian Fowler, Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj (Mark¬ 
 ham, Canada: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 263. 
 
 Notes to Chapter Nine 257 
 
Afterword: From Center to Circumference 
 
 1 Spivak, In Other Worlds, pp. 179-96. 
 
 2 Spear, History of India, 2:51. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 53. 
 
 4 John William Kaye, The Administration of the East India Company: A 
 History of Progress 1853; reprint, Allahabad, India: Kitab Mahal, 1966). 
 Burke's reference to Britain's "glorious empire given by an incomprehen¬ 
 sible dispensation of the Divine providence into our hands" is quoted in 
 O'Brien, Great Melody, p. 581. See his introduction, p. xxxviii, for a witty 
 but not altogether sustainable contrast between Burke's and Mill's views 
 of history. Mill did not lecture to history. Both he and Hegel designed it 
 to lecture to us. 
 
 5 Colley, Britons, pp. 169-70. The topic contrasts with the series of ques¬ 
 tions posed by the Abbe Raynal to participants in an essay competition. 
 Indecisiveness was compounded when no prize was awarded. See Elliott, 
 The Old World and the New, pp. 1-2. 
 
 6 Davies, Splendours of the Raj, p. 231. See also Jan Morris and Simon Win¬ 
 chester, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (New York: Oxford 
 University Press, 1983), p. 220. The dispute between Lutyens and Baker 
 is narrated in detail in Robert Grant Irving's Indian Summer: Lutyens, 
 Baker, and Imperial Delhi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 
 142-63. 
 
 7 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, parallel text 
 version (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 1805 text, 13:40-65. For the Mil¬ 
 tonic trend in the 1850 revisions, see Rajan, Form of the Unfinished, pp. 
 137 - 39 - 
 
 8 Spear, History of India, 2:59. 
 
 9 If the Renaissance is characterized as early modern, romanticism can 
 be thought of as early postmodern. The designation might be more than 
 argumentatively interesting. If early modernism discovered itself on the 
 shoreline of the New World, early postmodernism can be perceived as 
 disarticulating that discovery in the distance between imperial and revo¬ 
 lutionary ideologies. One can even argue that the distance establishes 
 the dimensions of a political unconsciousness whose eruptive stresses 
 still bear on the literary realities of today. 
 
 10 Bayly, Indian Society, p. 3. 
 
 11 Ibid., p. 37. 
 
 12 Ibid., p. 9. 
 
 13 K. P. Jayaswal, Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in 
 Hindu Times (Bangalore, India: Bangalore Printing and Publishing, 1943); 
 D. Mackenzie Brown, The White Umbrella: Indian Political Thought 
 from Manu to Gandhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 
 18-19. See also Panikkar, Survey of Indian History, pp. 58-59, and Ralph 
 Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 497. 
 
 258 NOTES TO AFTERWORD 
 
14 Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, pp. 300, 356, 420. 
 
 15 R N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Sphere Books, 1988), 1:222. 
 
 16 Forster, Passage to India, p. 278. Adela returns similarly to Mediterra¬ 
 nean "clarity" (p. 263). In describing the Mediterranean as "the human 
 norm," Forster (via Fielding) adds that "when men leave that exquisite 
 lake whether through the Bosphorous or the Pillars of Hercules, they ap¬ 
 proach the monstrous and extraordinary." The southern exit via the Red 
 Sea "leads to the strangest experience of all" (p. 278). Forster's statement 
 is notable not only in conceding that monstrosity also lies outside the 
 Western exit but also in the map it offers us of a confined space of clarity 
 surrounded by the abnormal. The "exquisite lake" scarcely reflects the 
 turbulence of Mediterranean history. It reflects rather the mind's need 
 for a central calm, a calm both defined and disturbed by the word "ex¬ 
 quisite," with its gentle suggestions of fragility and artifice. Pound in 
 his essay on Cavalcanti shares with Forster the use of the phrase "Medi¬ 
 terranean clarity," adding to it "Mediterranean sanity," which matches 
 Forster's reference to the Mediterranean as "the human norm" (Liter¬ 
 ary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot [London: Faber and Faber, 1954] 
 p. 154). Pound's essay, first published in 1934, is vaguely dated 1910-31. 
 The language is probably not unique to Pound and Forster. 
 
 17 W. B. Yeats, "The Statues," in Finneran, W. B. Yeats: The Poems, pp. 336— 
 37 - 
 
 18 Ezra Pound, letter to Ronald Duncan, November 7,1939, in D. D. Paige, 
 ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-41 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and 
 World, 1950), p. 330. 
 
 19 Paranoia is not limited to Midnight’s Children. Spivak suggests that the 
 "genius of this book [The Satanic Verses\ is more the paranoid Schreber 
 than the visionary Blake" ( Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 226). 
 Spivak is not concerned with the parodic use of paranoia. I would be in¬ 
 clined to give this use some weight in evoking a form of imperialism 
 that is both nightmarish and comic. The visionary Blake is important 
 in Rushdie's overall understanding in stressing the Urizenic ancestry of 
 the paranoia he deflates and in contestionally asserting the proliferative 
 energy of the fragment against the consolidating energy of the whole. 
 
 20 Wallace Stevens, "Connoisseur of Chaos," in Wallace Stevens, Parts of a 
 World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 50. 
 
 21 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991), 
 p. 403, and The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, Penguin Books, 1988), 
 pp. 300, 304-5, 336 , 338 - 
 
 22 Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet (New York: William Morrow, 1976), 1:28, 
 2:396, 3:63-64, 268, 382-83, 4:504. 
 
 23 For a translation (among many) of this poem, see Rajan, Form of the Un¬ 
 finished, pp. 311-12. 
 
 24 Recent fictional responses to the Mahabharata include Shashi Tharoor's 
 The Great Indian Novel (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), an entertain- 
 
 Notes to Afterword 259 
 
ing but too insistent parallel between the classical epic and events in our 
 century. Githa Hariharan's Thousand Faces of Night (New Delhi: Viking, 
 Penguin Books, 1992) more persuasively dreams the Mahabharata into a 
 familial text. Dreaming it into a sociopolitical text is a more formidable 
 enterprise that, not surprisingly, has yet to be undertaken. 
 
 25 The intimate relationship between language and perception in classical 
 Indian thought is studied by Bimal Krishna Matilal in The Word and the 
 World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Also perceptive is Hajime 
 Nakamura's Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, 
 Japan, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), 
 pp. 52-53, 60-64, 73-76, 87-88. See also Betty Heiman, Facets of Indian 
 Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 125,157-77. 
 
 260 
 
 NOTES TO AFTERWORD 
 
Index 
 
 Aden,36 
 
 Adorno, Theodor, hi 
 A eschylus, 159,160,162 
 Africa, 102,112 
 Agra, 63, 77 
 
 Ahmad, Aijaz, 221 n.66, 257 n.33 
 Akbar, 38-39; versus Aurangzeb, 68, 
 80-81, 230 n.4 
 
 Albuquerque, Alfonso de, 31, 36, 39 
 Alcacer-Kebir, 36 
 Alexander, 41, 42,112,116 
 Alexander VI, Pope, 56 
 Allsid, Michael, 72 
 Amazons, 61 
 Anderson, Benedict, n 
 Apollonian and Dionysian, 84; and 
 Saturnian, 24,169 
 Arnold, Matthew, 94,120 
 Asia, 3,18; and Asian reader, 33, 
 
 34/ 35/ 38-39; as character in 
 Prometheus Unbound, 160-64 
 Augustine, Saint, 148 
 Aurangzeb, 52, 70-71, 88, 91, 134, 
 200, 203. See also Akbar 
 Aurobindo, Sri, 109 
 Aztecs, 140-41 
 
 Bacchus, 41 
 
 Bacon, Sir Francis, 103,148,178,180 
 
 Baker, Herbert, 202 
 
 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 23 
 
 Barbosa, Duarte, 39, 40 
 
 Basham, A. L., 122 
 
 Beaurline, L. A., 68 
 
 Beckford, William; Vathek, 84-85, 
 150 
 
 Bengal, 44, 67-68, 81,179,180-81, 
 182; Asiatic Society of, 85,169-70, 
 172; Renaissance in, 182,187 
 Bentinck, William, 91,186,190 
 Bernier, Fran$ois, 68-69, 7°, 130,159 
 Bernini, Gian, 50 
 Bhabha, Homi K., 19, 20, 22, 218 
 n.46, 243 n.6 
 
 Bhagavad Gita, 26, 85-86, 234-35 
 n.23 
 
 Blake, William, 203, 259 n.19 
 Bombay, 2, 213 n.6 
 Bowers, Fredson, 68 
 Bowra, C. M., 45 
 Braganza, Catharine of, 2 
 Brantlinger, Patrick, 90-91,121-22, 
 180 
 
 Broadbent, J. B., 50 
 Brophy, Brigid, 129 
 Brown, Laura, 231 n.18, 243-44 n -7 
 Burke, Edmund, 87,169,193, 200- 
 201, 235 n.29, 241 n.18, 258 n.4 
 Burney, Funny, 181 
 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 5, 6, 82, 
 141 
 
 Calcutta, 2, 202 
 Calder, Angus, 90, 91 
 Caliban, 197 
 
 Camoes, Luis Vaz de, 7,179; "By 
 the Rivers of Babylon," 46; The 
 Lusiads, 32-49, 54, 78, 87, 88,104, 
 
Camoes, Luis Vaz de ( continued ) 
 
 144,182,199; Old Man in, 35, 45, 
 49, 54 
 
 Canon and imperial presence, 20; 
 dismantling forces in, 66; teaching 
 of, in India, 254 n.2 
 Carnac, John, 95 
 Carpenter, Frederic, 192 
 Caucasian, 102-3 
 Caucasus (Indian), 157,159,173 
 Center and circumference, 201-3, 
 205-6; and margin, 44-45, 47 
 Charles II, King, 2, 67, 231 n.18 
 Charnock, Job, 3, 214 n.9 
 Chatterjee, Partha, 11 
 Chaudhari, Nirad, 102 
 China, 102,106, 107 
 Christy, Arthur, 192 
 Clive, John, 175,179 
 Clive, Robert, 2,119,182-84, 229-30 
 n-3 
 
 Coen, Jan P., 2 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 142 
 Colley, Linda, 185, 201 
 Columbus, Christopher, 45, 54, 60, 
 83,116, 227 n.24 
 
 Commerce, 1, 3, 54, 84. See also East 
 India Company; Imperiahsm 
 Contestation, 20, 204, 205, 206, 207 
 Conti, Niccolo, 39 
 Conversion, 95-96,119,132-33,145, 
 171-72; and conquest, 146 
 Coryat, Thomas, 52 
 Cowper, William, 83 
 Curran, Stuart, 163, 167 
 
 Da Gama, Vasco, 7, 31, 39, 41, 45, 
 46-47, 54, 63, 83, 116 
 Dara Shikoh, 71, 75, 86 
 De Certeau, Michel, 17 
 De Laclos, Charderlos, 129 
 Delhi, 202 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 92-93 
 Derozio, Henry, 253 n.28 
 Derrida, Jacques, 30 
 Dickinson, Lowes Goldsworthy, 206 
 Doniger, Wendy, 84 
 Donne, John, 7, 48, 231 n.18 
 
 Dow, Alexander, 78, 80, 126 
 Draupadi: disrobing of, 27,199-200 
 Drew, John, 163, 246 n.30 
 Dryden, John, 7-8, n, 52, 83, 91, 
 
 120,199; Ameng-Zebe, 67-77 
 Duperron, Anquietil, 85 
 Dutch imperiahsm, 1 
 Dyer, Reginald, 27 
 
 East India Company, 1-3, 79, 81,160, 
 169-70, 184, r85, 200, 213 nn.2, 5, 
 231 n.18 
 
 Eden, Emily, 195 
 Edwards, Owen, 175,180 
 Eliot, George, 248 n.io 
 Eliot, T. S., no, 218 n.46 
 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 195 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 155, 192, 
 250-51 n.32 
 
 Epistolary form, 128-29, 245-46 
 n.26 
 
 Essentialism, 11, 58,198-99, 208, 
 
 210 
 
 Evangelism, 21, 52,145, 149,184. See 
 also Root-and-branch mentality; 
 Utilitarianism 
 
 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 7, 53, 63 
 Fast, Jonathan, 223-24 n.26 
 Fatehpur-Sikri, 52, 63 
 Faust, 148 
 
 Feminization: and commodification, 
 7, 48, 73,104, 225 n.43, 231 n.18; 
 of India, 11, 21, 77,104,120-21, 
 130, I33, I37, l80-8l, I99, 200; of 
 New World, 18, 48; of Orient, 3, 7, 
 14,18, 42-43,141,162 
 Fish, Stanley, 101 
 Foote, Samuel, 82 
 Forster, E. M.: A Passage to India, 
 
 27, 97-99,120,163, 206, 218 n.46, 
 243-44 n.7, 2 59 n.16 
 Fort Wilham College, 190 
 Foster, John, 248 n.5, 250 n.31 
 Foucault, Michel, 30 
 Fowler, Alastair, 58, 60, 61 
 Fowler, Marian, 197 
 Fox, Charles James, 87, 235 n.29 
 
 262 INDEX 
 
France, 112, 166 
 
 Fundamentalism, 12, 13, 17, 187. See 
 also Root-and-branch mentality 
 
 Gadamer, Hans Georg, hi 
 G andhi, Mohandas K., 28,126, 197, 
 229 n.34 
 
 Ganges, 59, 88-89,15°; and Paradise, 
 57 
 
 Gardner, Brian, 169 
 Gerard, John, 60 
 Germany, 8, 102, 166 
 Gibbon, Edward, 79 
 Gibbs, Phoebe, 122 
 Gladstone, W. E., 198 
 Gladwin, Francis, 78 
 Goa, 31, 36, 39, 41 
 Goldingham, J., 95 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 6, 80 
 Grant, Charles, 119,169,186 
 Greenberger, Allen, 257 n.35 
 Greenblatt, Stephen, 17, 25, 43, 83, 
 239 n.5 
 
 Haileybury College, 190 
 Hakluyt, Richard, 47 
 Hallam, Henry, 175 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 124 
 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 118,123,124- 
 28,129,141,170,188 
 Handwerk, Gary, 216 n.24 
 Hansen, Waldemar, 68-69, 73 
 Hartley House, Calcutta, 122-24 
 Hastings, Warren, 25,119, 125-26, 
 145,168-69, 184-85 
 Hawkins, Richard, 51 
 Hegel, G. W. F., 8-9, n, 15, 24, 26, 
 
 29, 79, 83, 100-117,135, 150, 194, 
 199, 215 n.19. See also Imperial¬ 
 ism, discourse of 
 Helgerson, Richard, 45, 47, 48 
 Hindu College, Calcutta, 253 n.28 
 Hinduism, 84, 85,124-25,128,151, 
 160-61, 245 n.21, 247 n.31, 257 
 n.35; an d Buddhism, 171, 252 
 n.24; caste in, 124,127,146-47; 
 and contemptus mundi, 171; and 
 Hegel, 103-4, 107-9, II6 ; and 
 
 Jones, 86-88; literary versus literal 
 readings of, 150-51, 249-50 n.29; 
 and Mill, 93-94; penal code of, 91; 
 self incarceration in, 107-8,109, 
 172, 188,198; and Shelley, 170- 
 73; and Southey, 139-40, 146,150. 
 See also Hybridity; Islam; Maya ; 
 Monstrosity; Otherness; San¬ 
 skrit; Suttee; Unity in diversity; 
 Upanishads; Vedas 
 History: deification of, 90, 219 n.51; 
 form and fragmentation in, 177, 
 219 n.52; ironic form in, 178, 241- 
 42 n.20; thematization of, 177-78, 
 205 
 
 Homer, 43; Odyssey, the, 24 
 Hottentot Venus, 92, 97, 144 
 Hughes, A. M. D., 133 
 Hybridity, 11,13, 15-16,17, 103, 148 
 
 Imagined communities, 11, 12, 
 208-11 
 
 Imperialism, 29, 105,106; in culture, 
 38, 147,184; and economics, 12, 
 
 13, 29, 41, 49, 79, 8i ; and epic, 23; 
 as game, 28, 92-93,119-20, 197; 
 and Hegelian dialectic, 110-12; 
 and Miltonic creation, 203; and 
 narrative, 23; as self-consuming 
 artifact, 196 
 
 Imperialism, discourse of, 22; and 
 agency, 158; and Calvinism, 24- 
 25, 158; and contestational 
 interrogation, 20; and contra- 
 puntalism, 15; and cultural capi¬ 
 tal, 141,143, 248 n.5; and differen¬ 
 tial interrogation, 9, 20,135-36, 
 154-56; and feminization, 104, 
 120-22; and literature, 24-25, 26; 
 and Mill-Hegel, 8-9, 93-96, 118- 
 19,152, 153,175,191, 253-54 n.29; 
 and Protestant poetics, 229 n.34; 
 and Providence, 116, 200-201, 258 
 n.4; and Reformation thought, 
 
 3-4, 14, 107, 158; and Shelley, 
 171-73; and Southey, 143-44; and 
 textuality, 9, 22, 26-27, 29-30; 
 and transparency, 27, 218 n.46; 
 
 Index 263 
 
Imperialism, discourse of ( continued ) 
 and William Jones, 9, 86-87, 153 - 
 See also Otherness 
 Inden, Ronald, 120 
 India. See particularly Feminiza¬ 
 tion; Hinduism; Imperialism,- 
 Imperialism, discourse of; Unity 
 in diversity 
 Innocent IV, Pope, 56 
 Ireland, 4-5, 9, 54, 214 n.12; and 
 India, 5-6, 94 - 95 ,129,137, 215 
 n.18 
 
 Islam, 106—7; and Hinduism, 84, 85, 
 94 ,125,146 
 
 Jallianwalla Bagh, 27 
 James, Lawrence, 233 n.7 
 Jameson, Fredric, 20, 221 n.63 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 140 
 Jehangir, 73 
 Johnson, Barbara, 26 
 Johnson, Samuel, 83; Life of Dryden, 
 69; Rasselas, 67 
 
 Jones, William, 9, 85, 86-89, 94 , 96, 
 no, 122,135, 144, 150, 153,169, 
 174-75, 2-35 nn.26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 
 
 33 , 253-54 n.29 
 Josephus, 57 
 
 Kalidasa, 95, 150; and Sakuntala, 85, 
 
 86 , 93 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, 92, 236 n.44 
 Kaufman, Walter, 113, 115 
 Kautilya: Artha-Sastra, 70 
 Kaye, M. M., 6 
 Kaye, William, 203 
 Kearns, Cleo, 218 n.46 
 Keats, John, 23-24, 82, 90, 155, 219 
 n.51 
 
 Kieman, Victor G., 188, 232 n.i 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 21; Jungle Book, 
 
 27,120, 220 n.57; Kim, 22,120, 
 
 197, 218-19 n.48 
 Knight, G. Wilson, 172 
 Kohinoor diamond, 63 
 Kopf, David, 189,191, 256 n.25 
 
 Lahore, 63, 228 n.29 
 Lamb, Harold, 73 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 141,144,145 
 Leask, Nigel, 237 n.46, 250 n.31, 
 251-52 n.12, 253-54 n - 2 9 
 Lew, Joseph, 246 n.27 
 Lipking, Lawrence, 225 n.40 
 Longinus, 160 
 Lowe, Lisa, 20 
 Lucknow, 98 
 Luther, Martin, 115 
 Lutyens, Sir Edward, 202 
 Lyotard, Jean Franpois, 29, 205, 221 
 n.63 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 9, 28, 
 38, 79, 81-82,102, ir9, 126,147, 
 162,168,174-96 
 Macintosh, Sir James, 177 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 83 
 Mahabharata, the, 24, 207-8. See 
 also Draupadi 
 Mahasweta Devi, 200 
 Mahrattas, 2, 7,170 
 Majeed, Javed, 236 n.36 
 Malthus, Thomas, 190, 255 n.14 
 Mani, Lata, 187 
 Marcuse, Herbert, 110-11 
 Margin, 49, 203. See also Center and 
 circumference 
 Marvell, Andrew, 4t, 51,142 
 Marx, Karl, 193-94 
 Mason, Philip, 97,194,195, 238 n.56 
 Maurice, Thomas, 78 
 Maya, 99,163,171, 238 n.6o 
 McFadden, George, 69 
 Mee, Arthur, 196 
 Mehta, Gita, 242 
 Melind, 63, 228 n.27 
 Mellor, Anne, 122 
 Mickle, Julius, 35, 45-46, 47, 80, 
 
 144, 222 n.5 
 
 Mill, James, 8, 9, 24, 29, 79, 90-96, 
 105,109, 119,160, 181, 182,186, 
 T90, 236 n.36 
 Millgate, Jane, 175,184 
 Milton, John, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8,15, 25, 
 
 32, 42, 43, 50-65, 81, 97,105, 159, 
 200, 203, 204, 215 nn.16, 19, 227 
 n.21, 227-28 nn.24, 25, 27, 29, 
 
 235 n.30; and Camoes, 34 - 35 , 
 
 264 INDEX 
 
44 / 53 - 54 / 62-63; De Doctiina 
 Christiana, 55,175, 201; Defensio 
 Secunda, 64; A Masque Performed 
 at Ludlow Castle, 44, 55,135; and 
 New Delhi architecture, 201-2; 
 and Owenson, 130-31,134-35, 
 
 138; Paradise Lost, 50-65, 85; 
 Paradise Regained, 63, 64,165; 
 Samson Agonistes, 13, 73 
 Miyoshi, Masao, 221 n.65 
 Monboddo, Lord James Burnett, 92 
 Monstrosity, 103,139,148,149,152, 
 247-48 n.2 
 
 Montesquieu, Charles Louis, 83, 123 
 Moore, Thomas, 60, 78,141, 232-33 
 n.6 
 
 Moser, Gerald, 45 
 Mughal India, 38, 70, 76-77, 84, 
 204-5 
 
 Muller, Max, 104,179,181 
 Murari, T. J., 73 
 
 Nabobs, 45, 81, 233 n.8 
 Napier, McVey, 178 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, 115, 116, 144, 
 148, 194 
 
 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 24, 28, 219 n.52 
 New Cambridge History of India, 
 124, 205 
 
 Newman, John Henry, 142 
 New World, 6, 54,115,145, 227-28 
 n.24, 233 n.14. See also Feminiza¬ 
 tion 
 
 Nuniz, Fernao, 39, 40 
 
 Occident and Orient, 15,16,115 
 Orientalists and Anglicists, 189-91 
 Ormuz, 36, 51, 63 
 
 Otherness, 18, 96, hi, 179, 218 n.45; 
 and collusion, 22; and difference, 
 2i; and self, 16-17, 19, 91-92, 
 142-43; varieties of, 3 
 Owenson, Sydney, 9,141,182,199; 
 The Missionary, 123,130-37,159, 
 227 n.20; The Wild Irish Girl, 
 128-30 
 
 Paes, Domingo, 39, 223 n.21 
 Panikkar, K. M., 36, 40,108 
 
 Paradise, 35, 44, 52; and Kashmir, 
 130-31, location of, 57, 59 
 Parker, Alexander, 45 
 Parry, Benita, 121 
 Pasley, C. W., 157 
 Peacock Throne, the, 52-53, 57 
 Penal Code (Indian), 175 
 Peterloo massacre, 165 
 Pizarro, Francisco, 41 
 Plato, 97,188, 192,194 
 Pliny, 139 
 
 Portugal, 33 - 37 , 144,145 
 Postcolonialism, 165; and common¬ 
 wealth, 147; languages of, 166-68; 
 and nationalism (Indian), ii; and 
 postmodernism, 28-29, 220-21 
 n.62; and romanticism, 204 
 Pound, Ezra, 26, 206, 259 n.18 
 Prester John legend, 41 
 
 Quint, David, 15, 23, 28, 29, 46 
 
 Radhakrishnan, S., 28,108 
 Rajan, Tilottama, 167 
 Ramayana, the, 24 
 Raynal, Abbe Guillaume Thomas 
 Francois, 233 n.15, 258 n.5 
 Resistance statement (Indian), 11, 
 
 28,198-99, 204-5; high modernist 
 character of, 24, 205 
 Richardson, Samuel, 81,129 
 Rickman, John, 147 
 Roberts, Emma, 98 
 Roberts, Paul William, 247 n.31 
 Robertson, William, 241 n.18 
 Rocher, Rosane, 245 n.21, 257 n.35 
 Roe, Sir Thomas, 51 
 Rome, 63, 64 
 
 Root-and-branch mentality, 4, 21, 
 
 94 , 194 , 215 n.13 
 
 Rushdie, Salman, 29,126, 206, 259 
 n.21 
 
 Said, Edward, 15-16,19-20, 25, 42, 
 117,120, 216 nn.30, 31, 32, 218 
 n.48 
 
 Sanskrit, 84, 85-86, 187,191, 209-10, 
 234 n.19 
 
 Scammell, G.V., 36, 55 
 
 Index 265 
 
Schlegel, Friedrich von ; 8, 124, 
 
 159-60, 216 n.24 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 99, 171 
 Schwab, Raymond, 86, 89,123,154, 
 256 n.25 
 
 Scott, Paul, 2, 207 
 Selfhood. See Otherness 
 Semiramis, 41 
 Settle, Elkanah, 70 
 Sewell, Robert, 40 
 Shah Jehan, 52, 73 
 Shakespeare, William: compared to 
 Kalidasa, 95; Love’s Labour Lost, 
 226 n.6; A Midsummer Night’s 
 Dream, 5r 
 Sharpe, Jenny, 122 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6, 9,118,135, 
 142, 179,199; A Philosophical 
 View of Reform, 164-65,174; Pro¬ 
 metheus Unbound, 10, 66,154-55, 
 158-68,197; Queen Mab, 170; A 
 Refutation of Deism, 170,171; The 
 Triumph of Life, 86, 208 
 Sirkin, Gerald, 191 
 Sirkin, Natalie, 191 
 Smith, Adam, 52, 83,169 
 Southey, Robert, 9, 41, 60, 85, 91, 
 
 95,104, 123,135; The Curse of 
 Kehama, 139-56,192; Madoc, 140, 
 143,144, 149; Thalaba, 140,143, 
 
 149 
 
 Spain, 3, 4 
 
 Spear, Percival, 69, 90, 95, 200, 204 
 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 
 4, 43, 60, 84,194; A View of the 
 Present State of Ireland, 4 
 Spiral form and Hegelian dialectic, 
 110-12 
 
 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 19, 
 
 200, 259 n.19 
 Spurr, David, 15 
 Sri Lanka, 44 
 Stael, Madame de, 141 
 Stevens, Wallace, 206 
 Suleri, Sara, 19, 22, 244 n.14 
 Sumatra, 44, 64, 229 n.30 
 Survey of India, 79, 97 
 Suttee, 91,149,179,187 
 
 Suzuki, David, 174 
 Swaminathan, S. R., 246 n.30 
 Swift, Jonathan, 83 
 
 Tagore, Rabindranath, 28, 256-57 
 n.32 
 
 Tainos, 102 
 Talikota, battle of, 40 
 Tamburlaine, 57, 92,148 
 Tartars, 56-57, 82 
 Tasso, Torquato, 130 
 Taylor, Philip Meadowes: Confes¬ 
 sions of a Thug, 182, 255 n.14 
 Taylor, William, 141,143 
 Temple, Sir John, 5 
 Tieck, Ludwig, 160 
 Todorov, Tzvetan, 17-18, 217 n.37 
 Tomlins, Jack E., 224 n.32 
 Trevelyan, Raleigh, 21 
 Trevelyan, Sir Charles Edward, 176, 
 186,190,195 
 
 Trumpener, Katie, 246 n.27 
 Typology, 107 
 
 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 241 n.18 
 
 United States of America, 166. See 
 also New World 
 Unity in diversity, n, 199, 200, 
 204-6 
 
 Upanishads, 60, 109, 249-50 n.29 
 Urban VIII, Pope, 50 
 Utilitarianism and Evangelism, 95, 
 118,170,191 
 
 Van Diemen, Antonio, 1 
 Vedas, 150; Rigveda, 150, 206, 208, 
 209 
 
 Victoria, Queen, 182, 206-7 
 Vijayanagar, 39-41 
 Virgil, 32, 34, 43, 62,117 
 Viswanathan, Gauri, 193 
 
 Warrant of Precedence, 147 
 Wellesley, Marquess Richard Colley, 
 169 
 
 Western Design, the, 53-54 
 White, Hayden, 241-42 
 Whitman, Walt, 98 
 
 266 INDEX 
 
Wilkins, Charles, 85,126 
 Wilks, Mark, 78 
 Williams, Roger, 83 
 Winn, James Anderson, 68 
 Wordsworth, William, 174, 203, 226 
 n.6 
 
 Wynn, Charles, 141-42 
 
 Yale, Elihu, 1 
 
 Yeats, William Butler, 10,116, 170, 
 206, 218 n.45 
 Young, Robert, 105 
 
 Zimmer, Heinrich, 38 
 Zoroaster, 162 
 
 Index 267 
 
Balachandra Rajan is Professor Emeritus of English, 
 University of Western Ontario. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Rajan, Balachandra. 
 
 Under western eyes : India from Milton to Macaulay / 
 Balachandra Rajan. 
 p. cm. 
 
 Includes bibliographical references and index. 
 isbn 0-8223-2279-x (acid-free paper). 
 isbn 0-8223-2298-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 
 
 I. English literature—Indie influences. 2. English 
 literature—History and criticism. 3. India—Foreign 
 public opinion, British. 4. India—Relations—Great 
 Britain. 5. Great Britain—Relations—India. 6. India 
 Historiography. 7. India—In literature. I. Title. 
 
 II. Series. 
 
 PR129.15R35 1999 
 
 820.9*3254 —dc2i 98-30647 cip 
 
D01042919Q