Scottish Orientalism: The Continuum of Ideas

By Bashabi Fraser

The historical relationship between Scotland and India is a relatively unexplored part of colonial history. This project seeks to re-examine the interchange of ideas initiated in the 18th century by the Scottish Enlightenment, and the ways in which these ideas were reformed and shaped to fit the changing social fabric of Scotland and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this volume, the significance and influence both nations had on the other is examined and brought to light for the first time. With contributions from key individuals and institutions in both Scotland and India, the range of ideas that were interchanged between the two nations will be explored in the contexts of culture studies, history, the social sciences and literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912387373

Bashabi Fraser

Bashabi Fraser was born in West Bengal in India. Living a multicultural and colourful life, Bashabi divides her life between the two countries she loves most – India and Britain. After living in London, Bashabi returned to India to attend a convent boarding school on the Himalayas where she was threatened with expulsion after breaking all possible rules! Happily this threat never came to fruition and with a PhD in English Literature, she is now an associate lecturer in English Literature for the Open University and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at Edinburgh University. She travels widely working as a poet, attending councils and conferences around the world and has written for many publications, has two collections of poems in print and has been included in a number of anthologies. Bashabi has also written children’s stories and is writing a shadow puppet play and a book on the Bengal Partition and is a classical Indian dancer and choreographer. She now lives in Edinburgh with her husband and daughter.

Book preview

From the West to the East

Raja Rammohan Roy

Scottish Orientalists and the Bengal Renaissance: An Introduction

Bashabi Fraser

THIS BOOK CONSIDERS the work of Scottish Orientalists who are significant in Indian history, having contributed to India’s socio-cultural developments. The intention is to understand their special significance within the context of British Orientalism. This study is not about the emergence and history of the Bengal Renaissance per se, but about the impetus prominent Scottish Orientalists lent to the tide that changed Bengal/India and propelled her on this unstoppable crest into the modern era. The Indo-Scottish interface generated a continuum of ideas as evident in the work of Bengal Renaissance figures who worked closely with Scottish Orientalists, effecting the transformation of the socio-cultural fabric of Bengal through the implementation of their epoch changing ideas in a period of creative transition.

In order to gauge the special approach of Scottish Orientalists in and to India, it is necessary to go back to the significance of the ideas generated during the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century which were reinterpreted and reshaped by Scottish Orientalists, the legatees of the Scottish Enlightenment, who contributed to the socio-cultural, religious and literary debates that affected the social reality and ideology of the times in Scotland and India from around the mid-19th century to the 1930s. Jane Rendall has said ‘the extent to which the Scottish Enlightenment offered a conceptual framework for the understanding of complex and alien Asian societies has been underestimated’ (Rendall ‘Scottish Orientalism from Robertson’ 69). This introductory chapter thus addresses and assesses this hitherto largely unexplored field and considers the socio-historic significance of the debates that were generated in the discourse that inspired and informed the Bengal/Indian Renaissance Movement. The prevailing debates emanating from Scottish Orientalists in India will be considered, inasmuch as they affected and informed the wave of change influenced by certain Scots whose interventions affected religious thinking, education and Bengali society, which would affect India as the nationalist consciousness gained momentum.

For the purposes of this study, we will first look at the major ideas that were established during the period of the Scottish Enlightenment on which later modernity is based (The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World). The Act of Union in 1707 gave Scotland the opportunity to work within, and benefit from, the British colonial enterprise. They did pay higher taxes but gained from a better governance. The Scottish Reformation (1638) introduced an egalitarian democratic spirit to Scottish culture with the setting up of Scottish Presbyterianism, followed at the end of that century by instituting schools in every parish. The Scottish idea of history then became important as it was fundamentally based on the idea of progress.

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history and a creature of his environment. It shared with the broad spirit of the European Enlightenment the thirst for knowledge and the willingness to challenge dogmas. Scottish Universities, at this time, played a key role in framing and generating transformative ideas. Scots invented the social sciences and the establishment of different branches of learning into disciplines; Edinburgh and Glasgow were the vanguard of bringing new disciplines into universities.

Moving away from the Hobbesian moral law and view of life being ‘nasty, brutish and short’ for the majority (and that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely), Scottish intellectuals were influenced by the Scottish philosopher, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Hutcheson believed that people are born with an innate moral sense of what is right and wrong, that man is not inherently selfish and his search for personal and public happiness is justified from this sense of moral judgement (Herman 73). Hutcheson was the first to teach in English rather than Latin at Glasgow University. As a moral philosopher, he has had a lasting impact on Scottish thinking as he advocated the universal right of freedom, attacking all slavery and was Europe’s first liberal thinker. An example of this liberal thinking is evident in India many years later in the formation and thinking of the Indian National Congress. Two Scots, Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912) and Sir William Wedderburn (1838–1918) were founders of the Indian National Congress as a body that pressed for greater Indian representation and a stronger voice in India’s governance. Wedderburn and another Scot, the wealthy businessman, George Yule (1829–1892), were Presidents of the Indian National Congress.

Lord Kaimes (Harry Home), the Patron of David Hume and William Robertson, used a four stage analysis of human society and its progression: 1. Hunting, 2. Pastoral, 3. Agricultural, 4. Commerce/Industry. He proposed that changes in the means of production bring in historical change, so, for example, institutions like law have to alter as society alters. All of this led several leading Scotsmen to refrain from racial interpretations of history (not accepting slavery in Scotland).

David Hume, arguing against Hutcheson, radically said that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions. The most basic human passion was self-gratification. Society’s problem was to channel passions in a constructive direction, meaning that liberty had to be counterbalanced by authority. In answer to Hume, Adam Smith referred to the inborn moral sense of human beings, speaking of a ‘fellow feeling’ which enabled one to place oneself in another’s position. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith explored the nature of human progress, the notion of specialization and division of labour, whose importance grows with each stage in society. He also applied this notion to intellectual labour. However, he was critical of the British government’s defence of producers and pointed out the costs of capitalism. The sociologist, Adam Ferguson, recognized the danger of subservience to profit, while Smith believed that the benefits of capitalism were worth the price.

The polymath, Dugald Stewart, who replaced Adam Ferguson in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1785, was the intellectual bridge between the Scottish Enlightenment and the Victorian era as he ‘put the disparate works of the Scottish school together as a system, a system of classical liberalism’ (Powell 9). He promulgated a liberal optimism, and was the teacher of Lord Minto, ‘providing the ‘conceptual tools they could use as a framework for their analysis of Asian cultures’, creating some ‘distinctive Scottish paradigms of empire’ (Ibid.). In conclusion, the great insight of the Scottish Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and see the world as it truly is.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first published in Edinburgh from 1768 to 1771 in three volumes, was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, the age of ‘new ideas’ (Powell 8) – as a compendium of knowledge which remains highly regarded, even today.

The Scottish Orientalist project, if one may call it so, goes back to a seminal Orientalist figure in the historian William Robertson (1721–1793), Principal of the University of Edinburgh, who wrote of a sophisticated civilization in India while resident in the Scottish metropole in Edinburgh. His 1791 volume, An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, traces the commercial links that facilitated a cultural exchange between the West and India. In this West meets East study, Orientalists who were writing in India like Quintin Craufurd (1743–1819) and his Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning and Manners, of the Hindoos (1792), become significant, who endorse a similar perspective, very much in the spirit of the scholar-administrators like Sir Thomas Munro (1761– 1827), Sir John Malcolm (1769–1833) and Hon Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) and the Muir brothers of Kilmarnock, John Muir (1810–1882) and Sir William Muir (1819–1905). The Muir brothers’ study of the original sources of Vedic and Arabic civilizations (Powell 10), are seminal works of Scottish Orientalists.

However, one notes a narrative shift in the change in perception of India in Western discourse, effected by another Scot, James Mill (1773–1836), through his significant six volume text, The History of British India (1817). Mill was deeply influenced by Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) who was his teacher at the University of Edinburgh. This History became a source of ‘knowledge’ for British personnel who came out to serve and rule India, as it was their recommended text. Mill’s History told them of the inherent ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’ nature of the Hindu and his ‘depravity’, fuelled by his superstition and ‘primitive’ religion. The initial use of ‘Hindu’ in British discourse was a synonym for everything ‘Indian’, which, only in later times, was used for the religious majority of the sub-continent. The misreading of Indian civilization by Mill justified the sense of the colonisers’ ‘superiority’, which led to a disinterest amongst East India Company servants, and later employees, of the Raj in Indian culture, literature and the historical continuity of an old civilization that had been validated by earlier ‘Orientalists’ like Robertson. This project will study how the reading of history and interpretations of culture and literature have been instrumental in forming the minds of generations responsible for governing India, establishing business houses, managing plantations and trade in Indian produce in a global market.

Mill had never set foot in India and had no linguistic acquaintance with Indian languages, claiming his ‘expertise’ in India’s history from the distance of the metropole, in an act that marginalises India’s history through a written discourse based on second-hand knowledge, which takes on the aura of ‘authenticity’ associated with the written word. Mill’s treatise was further consolidated by another Scot, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859, who lived in India between 1834 and 1838) whose ‘Minute on Indian Education’ of 1835, passed the judgement that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ (Sharp 109); sweeping statement made by a Member of the Governor-General’s Council, who, like Mill, did not possess any first-hand knowledge of Indian Languages or of Arabic. These texts were instrumental in constructing perceived notions as ‘facts’ about India, and the reality on the ground became secondary in an assessment of far-flung colonies, which could thus be written about, assessed and branded as ‘inferior’ without association with the people or the land that was being described–negating the human association so necessary for a fuller understanding of the people and their context. By these means, another ‘myth’ was constructed, the myth of Indian barbarism and decadence against Western rationality and superiority, negating and dismantling the view that was prevalent and practised during the Scottish Enlightenment. As Subrata Dasgupta has said, ‘the Scottish Enlightenment embodied not only rationalism but also a solid dose of Scottish practicality’ (Dasgupta, Awakening 146), which would be exemplified by the work on the ground carried out in the educational sphere by significant Scottish thinkers and pragmatists as will be discussed below.

Robertson did not visit India, but he preceded the Victorian, evangelist views, when there was still a certain respect for the wonder that was India and the sophistication of her civilization.

And as we have seen, Mill wrote about Indian history and made sweeping, definitive statements about India and Indians (and of Indian art, which will be discussed below) without ever visiting India. Macaulay dismissed all Arabic and Sanskrit literature without having any knowledge of any of the Indian languages and its continuous literary history that was over 3,000 years old. Later, Ruskin’s dismissal of the beauty, meaning and deep philosophy of Indian art and architecture would be based on secondary sources and information without any direct contact with examples of Indian art or debates with Indian art critiques (Mitter 244).

However, Mill’s representation of India continued to be challenged in subsequent publications, (e.g., in thoughtful analyses by John Crawfurd (1783–1868) in his History of the Indian Archipelago (1820) and, in A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonisation of India (1828).) There was also the French account by Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) who came to India in 1754, and whose work was rediscovered by Raymond Schwab in 1950. His La Renaissance Orientale was later translated into English in 1984 by Patterson-Black and Reinking entitled, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 (1984). This Orientalist perspective of India is considered a seminal text by Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978).

What we are looking at here, however, is pre-Saidian Orientalism (with a capital O) as opposed to Saidian/post-Saidian orientalism (with a lower case), in relation to India where Scots played a pivotal role in the civil, military, maritime and medical services at the beginning of the 19th century, in private businesses, in partnerships in agency houses in the Presidencies, particularly in Calcutta (Powell 6). The Saidian thesis that all orientalist endeavours were for the advancement and empowerment of the colonial state, as discussed by Michael Dodson in his Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India 1770–1880 (2007) establishing a discourse which was aimed at representing, speaking for, dominating and ruling the Orient, is not pertinent to this particular study. The pre-Saidian Orientalism was, in many cases, a self-fulfilling scholarly venture to gather knowledge and indulge in a cultural exchange with native scholars, which Bayly called ‘constructive orientalism’ in his Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870 (1996), a term Dodson also uses with reference to the educational scene. This form of Orientalism has been called ‘neo-orientalism’.

The idea of a ‘Scottish School’ of Indian governance has been mooted by Martha McLaren in her British India and British Scotland, 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building and a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (2001) and Michael Fry in his The Scottish Empire (2001). There is a general consensus about a Scottish ‘distinctiveness’ ‘in such spheres as governance, militarism and trade’ (Powell, 7) as has been noted by Philip Constable in ‘Scottish Missionaries’ (Constable 278-313). Michael Fry also speaks of a ‘discrete Scottish attitude to empire linked in general to the intellectual climate’ practised by Governor-Generals like Munro, Malcolm and Elphinstone (Powell 7). However, the idea of tracing a distinctive Scottish School or paradigm has been challenged by scholars like Jane Rendall in her article ‘Scottish Orientalism from Robertson to James Mill’, where she speaks of the intellectual influences of Scots in ‘a second generation of philologists and historians, who worked in the spirit of Robertson’s liberal humanism rather than under James Mill’s racist construct of India and her people (Rendall). The Muir brothers’ (Ibid.) generation of Scots did have some links with Rendall’s scholars like: Alexander Hamilton (1762–1864), James Mackintosh (1765–1832), John Crawfurd (1783–1868) and Mountstuart Elphinstone (all Haileybury pupils through their contacts in India). However, as Powell points out, a putative ‘third generation’ of Scottish scholar-administrators in the Muir brothers can be identified ‘at a considerable chronological remove from the original idea’ (Powell 9).

Warren Hastings (1732–1818), who came to Bengal in 1772 as Governor, was appointed Bengal’s first Governor-General from 1774 until 1785. Hastings was a key figure of this constructive orientalist group who believed that the British official serving in India should ‘think and act like an Asian’, having a good knowledge of the country’s literature, culture, its laws and history (Kopf 18). The Orientalists familiarized themselves with various facets of the Indian knowledge domain. Calcutta, as the capital of the Bengal Presidency, became a beehive of scholarly activity under Hasting’s Governorship. These Indophiles included the Sanskritists William Jones (1746–1794, founder of the Asiatic Society in 1784), Henry Colebrook (1765–1836 who wrote Sanskrit Grammar and translated Indian law texts), Nathaniel Halhed (1751–1830) who wrote the first Bengali grammar), Charles Wilkins (1749–1836 who translated the Bhagvat Gita into English), James Princep (1799–1840 who deciphered the Bramhi script of ancient India) and Robert Chambers (1737–1803, third President of the Asiatic Society, who was interested in law and literature) (Dasgupta, The Bengal Renaissance 24, 31).

These eighteenth century men actually preached and practised such a professional cosmopolitanism, a scholarly ideal perhaps best exemplified by the Asiatic Society (Curley 370).

According to David Kopf, these scholar administrators were ‘classicists’, cosmopolitan and rationalists rather than ‘progressives’, nationalist and romantics; they were very much products of the European Enlightenment (British Orientalism 22).

They were all Englishmen, apart from Sir William Jones, who was Welsh. Their Scottish counterparts, who were legatees of the Scottish Enlightenment and are identified by many scholars as Scottish Orientalists, may be described in Kopf’s terms as progressives, nationalist and romantics. They fell into a different category of men who would influence the ‘Awakening’ of the Bengali mind (Ibid. 19; Dasgupta, Awakening 2) in no uncertain terms as they moved away from a focus on classical Sanskrit scholarship to vernacular Bengali and to education in English. It is in the area of educational and cultural reform and in their association with Indian reformers, that Scottish Orientalists influenced and facilitated the Bengal Renaissance, which would later affect all of India. Though they did not study William Robertson’s history of India at University, his book was available and read and his views on India were well known: ‘to him (Robertson), the cave temple–one of the earliest forms of architecture–indicated a developed state of society, as equally the sculptures in them reflected considerable achievement for the period (Mitter 177).

These Scottish Orientalists were not influenced by James Mill’s The History of India. According to Mill, India’s crudeness and barbarism could be detected in her art. In his estimation, not only was Indian art ‘primitive, unattractive, rude in taste and genius’, but ‘unnatural, offensive and not infrequently disgusting… The Hindus copy with great exactness, even from nature. By consequence they draw portraits, both of individuals and groups, with a minute likeness; but peculiarly devoid of grace and expression…They are entirely without a knowledge of perspective, and by consequence of all those finer and nobler parts of the art of painting, which have perspective for their requisite basis’ (Ibid. 176, 177). This strong indictment of Indian artistic expression, the culmination of her civilization according to Mill, is not evident in the consciousness of Scottish Orientalists.

George Davie in his work, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (1961), speaks of the generalist education in secondary schools in Scotland, which offered a Universalist body of knowledge–very school worth mentioning at this higher education today. The Scottish secondary schooling system had philosophy at its core, rather than the classics, which, Davie notes, marked the English system. In Scotland, a general education that covered poetry, philosophy, science and mathematics, did not see these subjects as competitors, but together they accounted for an intellect that was philosophical, scientific and humanist, hence ‘democratic’. Murdo Macdonald in his ‘Introduction’ to the 2013 edition of Davie’s book, links the intellectual traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment to those of today. Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), a generalist who will be discussed later, welcomed this scientific approach to teaching, affirming that any aspect of knowledge, culture or society benefits from illumination of all other aspects, (Macdonald 77). Davie’s idea of the Democratic Intellect has been challenged as too simplistic by some scholars, while hailed and accepted by others like Macdonald and the Indian historian, Barun Dey.

We have already discussed one Scot who was responsible for the introduction of English education and Western science first in Bengal, which soon spread across India, namely Thomas Babington Macaulay. This clever but audacious proposal to create a band of brown sahibs (there is no mention of brown memsahibs here) in India, ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (Sharp 116) so that the British could create a brand of loyalists amongst the natives and continue to rule by proxy, reaped tremendous benefits for British rule for over a century. However, this step also generated ideas of modernity, of democracy – humanist ideas emanating from the British and Scottish Enlightenment, ideas of freedom, the dignity of man and the right to question and challenge as thinking, debating individuals and societies – questioning and answering the British in their own words, in a language they understood, English.

This brings us to the discussion of two Scots, David Hare and Alexander Duff, who were central figures in Calcutta, influential in the education sector and who contributed to the developments that would become the cornerstone of higher education in modern India. We have the story from Peary Chand Mitra (1814–1883) that on one occasion when Raja Rammohan Roy (founder of the Bramha Samaj in 1828 and the leading spirit of