As Michael S. Dodson outlines in the opening pages of this well-argued book, the secondary literature on British Orientalists, with very few exceptions, is in agreement on two points: that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Orientalists were dewy-eyed admirers of India's classical literatures, and that Orientalists were bested in a confrontation with the culturally supremacist Anglicists. Dodson intervenes in this literature with the proposal of a juste milieu. As much as later Anglicists, early Orientalists ranked nations along a scale of progress at whose apex was Britain, Dodson observes, and the contrast between the two is therefore vastly overdrawn. Moreover, Anglicists were never the hegemonic voice in colonial administration they are usually made out to be, Dodson contends, with Orientalist visions continuing to define the mainstream of educational policy well into the nineteenth century. This retelling rests on what is the most valuable line of inquiry in the book, which traces historical transformations in the relationship between pandits and Orientalists in Benares over the course of the nineteenth century.
Dodson's argument proceeds in six chapters. In the first, Dodson builds on existing scholarship to describe how eighteenth-century Orientalism, from its very inception and despite its keen appreciation of Indian languages, shared with the colonial state a commitment to civilizational progress. The second and third chapters describe how the pandits' relationship with British Orientalists was increasingly brought under the mantle of government educational institutions, and they subsequently became essential to what Dodson calls (following C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], esp. 224–26) the “constructive orientalism” of the nineteenth century, a form of mastery of Indian languages intended to facilitate the introduction of European knowledge to the “traditional intelligentsia”—with a view to winning thereby the hearts and minds of the entire populace.
The constructive Orientalist project entailed the mastery of Indian languages as a prelude to the introduction of European knowledge, Dodson argues, and was therefore neither Orientalist nor Anglicist as these are traditionally understood. Dodson is at his best in the succeeding chapters describing this project's fruits. The fourth chapter provides a fascinating account of the endeavors of James Ballantyne, whose wish was to introduce both European science and Christianity to pandits in the Sanskrit language; this gave rise to often bizarre British experiments (discussed in chapter 5) with different ways to render scientific terms into Sanskrit. Although Ballantyne's own preference for coining Sanskrit words (as opposed to using transliterated European words) was not widely imitated by others, Dodson suggests that this preference may have contributed to later efforts to Sanskritize Hindi. The sixth and final substantive chapter pays attention to two pandits in particular, Bapudeva Sastri and Vitthala Sastri, whom Dodson finds could use Orientalist knowledge to proto-nationalist ends. These men, Dodson reveals, although construed by the British as shining examples of properly reeducated pandits, never granted to European knowledge the supremacy their teachers did. That claims to scientificity have frequently been made in the defense of “traditional” Indian knowledge is well known to students of Indian nationalist writings; here, Dodson offers a conjecture about the genealogy of this rhetoric and advocates further research into possible continuities between Sanskrit writings in 1860s and 1870s Benares and the nationalist writings that emerged shortly thereafter.
While Dodson thus moves us beyond the binarism of Orientalist and Anglicist, there is another binarism with which he wishes to contend, and in this, his success is less certain: “it is imperative,” he tells us, “to break down the simplistic binary of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance,’ for these categories have served to predetermine . . . the types of activities which should be understood as oppositional or agentive” (p. 11). This is a welcome repudiation of attempts to valorize the “autonomous” activities of Indian subjects, a project whose pitfalls have now been persuasively articulated (see Rosalind O'Hanlon, “Recovering the subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 [1988]: 189–224). This reviewer was therefore surprised to find Dodson returning to resistance talk in his description of the work of the two pandits. He seeks to correct accounts of pandits that confine them to a “‘traditional’ space of agency” (p. 146). Dodson admits that nationalism is not the only form that resistance to the colonial state can take. Yet this is ultimately the agenda to which he tells us the pandits contributed. The correlate of disavowing “quisling versus revolutionary” talk would be to understand agents as sometimes engaged in projects reducible neither to colonialism nor nationalism. These portmanteau categories are poorly suited to figures such as Dodson's pandits, enmeshed in complicated political and social milieus in which it is often impossible to disaggregate state and nonstate agents, practices, and interests, let alone to reduce these to constituents of colonialism or nationalism.
Notwithstanding this return to talk of nationalism and resistance, Dodson's is a rich account of pandits' contradictory role in the production of knowledge in colonial India, and it overturns many assumptions in the literature along the way. As such, it will be of great interest to historians of modern South Asia, but also more broadly to those engaged with the roles of informants in the production of colonial knowledge, and with the history of modern educational policies and institutions in the colonial context.
