ARCHAEOLOGY OF BABEL !e Colonial Foundation of the Humanities SIRAJ AHMED Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ahmed, Siraj Dean, author. Title: Archaeology of Babel : the colonial foundation of the humanities / Siraj Ahmed. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi"ers: LCCN 2017028137 (print) | LCCN 2017045915 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503604049 (electronic) | ISBN 9780804785297 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503604025 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism and philology. | Philology--Political aspects--History. | Humanities--Methodology--History. | Literature--History and criticism--!eory, etc. Classi"cation: LCC P41 (ebook) | LCC P41 .A37 2017 (print) | DDC 407--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028137 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro Cover design by Rob Ehle. Photograph courtesy of Shirin Abedinirad. For Yashi Ahmed This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Prologue 1 Introduction !e Colonial History of Comparative Method 17 1. !e Return to Philology, the End of Weltliteratur 20 2. !e Ruins of Babel, the Rise of Philology 24 3. Aryanism, Ursprache, “Literature” 29 4. Colonialism and Comparatism 37 5. Chapters in the History of the Philological Revolution 41 First Stratum: !e Literary !e Persian Imperium and Ha"z, 1771 #.$.–1390 #.$. 51 1. !e Colonial Grammar of “Literature” 57 2. From the Persian Imperium to the British Empire 62 3. !e Passions of Literature: Ha"z, 1771 #.$. 67 4. Nietzsche and “World Literature” 72 5. Sovereign Law and Sacred Life: Ha"z, 1390 #.$. 80 viii C ONTENTS Second Stratum: !e Immanent Shari‘a and the Mu‘allaqāt, 1782 #.$.–550 #.$. 97 1. !e Colonial Rule of Law 105 2. !e Imperial Institution of Shari‘a 110 3. Shari‘a from Colonialism to Islamism 115 4. Shari‘a from the Qur’ān to Colonialism 120 5. State Models and War Machines I: !e Mu‘allaqāt, 1782 #.$. 129 6. State Models and War Machines II: !e Mu‘allaqāt, 550 #.$. 135 !ird Stratum: !e Originary !e Dharma and Śakuntalā, 1794 #.$.–1400 &.'. 147 1. From the Indo-European Hypothesis to Hindu Nationalism: #e Laws of Manu, 1794 #.$. 153 2. !e Idea of Indo-European Civilization: Śakuntalā, 1789 #.$. 160 3. !e Dharma and Sacri"cial Violence, 100 #.$. to 1400 &.'. 166 4. !e Sovereign and the Earth: Śakuntalā, 415 #.$. to 400 &.'. 173 Conclusion: Genealogies of Emergency 187 1. !e Colonial Matrix of Emergency 187 2. Philology—Colonial Law—Emergency 190 3. !e Real State of Emergency, the Tradition of the Oppressed, the Nameless 195 Notes 201 Bibliography 231 Index 259 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A preliminary version of this book’s introduction was published in Critical Inquiry 39 (Winter 2013), © 2013 by !e University of Chicago. !anks to Richard Neer, W. J. T. Mitchell, and CI’s editorial board for being receptive to an unusual argument and asking me to push it further. !ough I lack the words to express it, I know how fortunate I’ve been to have an editor as perceptive in all things as Emily-Jane Cohen. !ank you for taking my ideas seriously in the beginning and giving them the time they needed to develop (I promise not to miss another deadline). !e students in the CUNY Graduate Center class I taught on “Criti- cal Method and Colonial Law” modeled a theoretical open-mindedness I’d other wise assume was no longer in fashion. I wish I could talk to academics like them for the rest of my life. Sunil Agnani, Alice McGrath, Tim Alborn, Boris Maslov, Ilya Kliger, Kristina Huang, Bill Warner, Madeleine Dobie, Chris Hill, Chris Bush, Daniel O’Quinn, Elaine Freedgood, Dohra Ahmad, Chris Taylor, and Anjuli Raza Kolb gave me opportunities to present this project. Audiences at Brown University, Birkbeck College, University of London, the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University’s Maison Française, Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities, the University of Toronto, and New York University o"ered helpful feedback. Particular thanks to Betty Joseph, Sandra MacPherson, Ben Baer, Gauri Viswanathan, x A CKNOWLEDGMENTS Michael Allan, Tanya Agathocleus, Nancy Yousef, Suvir Kaul, the late Srinivas Aravamudan, Stathis Gourgouris, Ania Loomba, Ajay Rao, Veli Yashin, Joseph Massad, Moustafa Bayoumi, Paul Narkunas, Frank Crocco, Shireen Inayatulla, Sandra Cheng, and Claudia Pisano for their comments on these and other occasions. Informally, Teena Purohit responded to my inchoate ideas with wise advice. Stanford’s external readers provided pen- etrating analyses both before I began the manuscript and after I had #nished it. Shoumik Bhattacharya read the whole manuscript, expertly, in draft. It has greatly bene#ted as well from Christine Gever’s awe-inspiring command of English, among other languages, and eagle-eyed editing skills. With equal expertise, Gigi Mark shepherded this book through Stanford’s production process, and Stephanie Adams guided the press’s e"ort to promote it. I (really) couldn’t have #nished this book without a year-long Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I couldn’t have received that fellowship without the support of Walter Blanco, Michael Dodson, and Tim Watson. Grants from CUNY’s Research Foundation en- abled me, among other things, to consult William Jones’s manuscripts in the British Library and the National Library of Wales and to retranslate his many French translations of Ha#z in Aix-en-Provence. I’m deeply grate- ful to Olivier Coutagne for helping me with the latter task. An award from CUNY’s O$ce of Research helped with publication costs. !e photograph of Shirin Abedinirad’s stunning installation Babel Tower on this book’s cover is used with her kind permission. I’m indebted to Rob Ehle, once again, for his beautiful artwork. Sincere thanks also to Madeleine Dobie, Janet Sorenson, Chandan Reddy, Anna Neill, Bhavani Raman, Sanjay Krishnan, Claudio Pikielny, Adam Pikielny, Noah Pikielny, Paula Loscocco, Jessica Yood, Terrence Cheng, Earl Fendelman, Dierdre Pettipiece, Mario DiGangi, Carrie Hintz, David Richter, Gerhard Joseph, Ashley Dawson, Watson Brown, Carlos Austin, Jim Bain, Don Buerkle, Rohan Deb Roy, Hussaina Amina, Aminath Rahmah, Riyaz ur-Rahman, Fahima Farook, Ahmed Salahuddin, Rukaiya Salahuddin, Maryam Salahuddin, Aysha Haji, Noora Hameed, Rifa Hameed, Fathi Hameed, Maryam Abdul Cader, Mohamed Hussain, and Sharafa Sirajudeen for their support. !ough the miles between us now prevent it, I wish I could linger with Nigel Alderman on another contemplative walk. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi My parents, Syed and Muthu Ahmed, knew long before I did what an unwise career choice this would be but still now treat my single-mindedness with the deepest generosity and love. I’ve dedicated this book to my sister, Yashi Ahmed, whose daily conver- sations (and perpetual joyfulness) keep me sane. She also happens to be the academic whose ethics I most admire, one who stubbornly treats science as a source of elegance and wonder, despite the corporate university’s demands. This page intentionally left blank ARCHAEOLOGY OF BABEL This page intentionally left blank PROLOGUE !e research that led to this book began with a still-disregarded detail of English and comparative literary history. A late eighteenth-century British polymath single-handedly translated the most in"uential works, arguably, of the Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit traditions. Displaying a mastery of Asian tongues even more improbable then, Sir William Jones published nuanced renderings of Ha#z in 1771, the Mu‘allaqāt in 1782, and Śakuntalā in 1789. !ough spread across two decades, these translations were part of a uni#ed project: Jones intended them to revolutionize European poetry, releasing it from the grip of ancien régime neoclassicism. Just as he had hoped, Romantic writers both inside and outside England located radically di$erent aesthet- ics in the works he translated and turned to them as models for their own poetry. Goethe in particular immersed himself in these works before he for- mulated the idea of Weltliteratur. But if the seminal place of Jones’s translations has been largely overlooked, they point to an even more disregarded history. Before they became part of Romanticism and world literature, these translations were the products of British colonial rule. Jones published each of them alongside philological studies that served the East India Company conquest of Bengal. !ese stud- ies—including the #rst colonial grammar of an Asian language, codi#cations of both Muslim and Hindu law, and the discovery of the Indo-European language family—helped lay the groundwork for the philological revolution. 2 P ROLOGUE In fact, they disseminated its cardinal principles: language pertains to history, not divine providence or the laws of nature; each language produces its own history; and the history disclosed by literature belongs to national peoples. But the relationship between colonial rule and the philological revolution has been excised from disciplinary histories of the humanities. Hence, even postcolonial scholars have come around on the question of philology, insist- ing in ever larger numbers that it is, as Jones always suggested, a politically progressive method. Many of those discussed in the Introduction and Conclusion to this book have, in fact, called for a return to philology. One irony of this call is that the philological revolution precipitated an epistemic transforma- tion so vast that it has, in fact, never ceased to de#ne the humanities. A second irony is that the new philology became so widespread and power- ful precisely because of its own colonial history.