Akbar's Dream* Phiroze Vasunia
Akbar’s Dream* Phiroze Vasunia “Some women are so—well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, and I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them, but— and here’s my difficulty—there’s nothing special about me, nothing specially good or strong, which will help me to resist my environment and avoid becoming like them. I’ve most lamentable defects. “That’s why I want Akbar’s ‘universal religion’ or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible. Do you see what I mean?” Adela Quested, in E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924) One of the fundamental challenges faced by British Orientalists in India in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the “theoretical problem” of Indian civilization.1 The languages, literatures, religions, and traditions of South Asia were of an antiquity that stretched back centuries or even millennia. Since the classical Greek and Latin authors had offered some vague knowledge of “India”, its people, and customs, the Indians were not quite savages or a people without history. The Indians of South Asia could not be assimilated to the “natural man” of the New World or the aboriginal inhabitants of the regions we now term Australia and New Zealand; nor could the Indians be likened to the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. Everywhere the Orientalist turned, he found evidence of rituals, texts, and theologies that seemed to hint at profound histories, elaborate schematizations, metaphysical sophistication, and complex mechanisms for social transmission. There were large numbers of Indian tribes, hill-dwellers, and villagers who seemed not to share in the traditions of their Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim compatriots, but their presence only sharpened, if by contrast, the deep-rooted and literate traditions that were manifest across the subcontinent.
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