1854 Colonial Indology

In April of 1854, a multitude of scholars published a book on Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, Applied to Language and Religion in London. It contained a brief chapter on “The Arian settlers and Aboriginal races of India“ that—despite relying on tortured reasoning, would go on to form the basis for the Aryan Invasion Theory. No aspect of India’s history that would be written hence has been untouched by the years of colonial discourse that followed. On the 169th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell this arc of India’s history truthfully.

THE 1854 PROJECT

The 1854 Project is an ongoing initiative from the Institute for ReWriting World History that began in April 2023, the 169th anniversary of the publication of Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, Applied to Language and Religion. It aims to reframe India’s history by placing the consequences of colonialism and the contributions of Indians, at the very center of India’s many narratives.

1854 and World History | The 1854 Project Book

Image from The Histomap (1931), Prose from The 1619 Project (2019)

In May of 1498, a group of ships appeared on the horizon, near Calicut, a trading port on the malabar coast of India.1 It carried a letter from the King of Portugal requesting ‘a treaty of amity and commerce, that he [the King of Portugal] may procure which the merchants of many parts of the world trade tither—promising many things from the Kingdom of Portugal which were not to be had in Calicut.’ No aspect of the republic that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of colonization that followed. On the 525th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

The Treaty of Allahabad (1765) transformed the East India Company (EIC) from a joint-stock company into a state actor, the Mughal Emperor assigning the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha to the EIC—“nothing remaining to him [the Soubah of these Provinces] but the Name and Shadow of Authority,” EIC officers transposing the grant as a license to exercise arbitrary power in India, thus beginning ‘that career of illegal and legal plunder.’

The Code of Capital (2019) by Katharina Pistor

Colonial scholarship was “a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means” intended to obviate native scholars and promote a new national literature “impregnated with Western ideas, yet retaining its native spirit and character,“ if as a way of relocating symbolic authority in India—appealing to, and constructing, the dogma, ‘the history of human civilization as a trajectory departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe.’

Literacy and power in the ancient world (1994) by Alan K. Bowman, Greg Woolf

The steamboats, railways, and telegraph reconfigured India’s political economy in gross ways, the outward appearance of largesse obscuring their economic structure was a drain on India’s economy—part of a program for “drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges and, squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames,“ the unequal terms acting to deepen India’s transformation “from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce,” exacerbating social tensions and opening communal fault lines in the body politic.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari 

The many interpretations of the Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 within India’s national literature reflect the event(s) undecided place in India’s history—from “the last effort of the dethroned feudal potentates to regain their power“ to a vast upsurge against colonial rule, stemming in part from a fractured national historiography searching for coherence under the specter of a colonial discourse prefacing the event(s) as “the most signal illustration of our [English] great national character ever yet recorded.“

Imagined communities (1983) by Benedict Anderson

The spread of the loanword caste, from the Iberian casta, in India reveals the degree to which British attempts to catalog Indian society as “petrified in the merely natural classification” succeeded in giving legal form to colonial scholarship—locating the cause of India’s predicament to an imaginary past, even as colonial administrators argued elsewhere “in India, that haughty spirit, independence, and deep thought, which the possession of great wealth sometimes gives, ought to be suppressed.”

The Construction of Social Reality (1995) by John R. Searle

The creation of the Republic of India marked the culmination of a multigenerational freedom struggle—representing a new compact calling on the people of India “to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell,” tempered by a partition displacing millions in the Name of a Two Nation Theory, a coincidence of opposites underscoring competing ideas on national identity that continue to shape politics in India and abroad.

The Shadow of the Great Game (2005) by Narendra Singh Sarila

Thus the Great Game, “a condition of Warre of every one against every one,” has made the job of know thyself difficult for every one—the celebrants, for whom such “traumas are no more than occasions for it [the ego] to gain pleasure,” and the discontents, who take arms against “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,“ can rewriting world history from Indian point(s) of view serve as a panacea to the crisis of the modern world?

 Shrinivas Tilak | Koenraad Elst | Sharan Sanil

A rewriting of world history is necessary.

The Vedic context of religions of man

FOOTNOTES

  1. Regional designations such as India, Tartary, Arabia, and Persia recurred on European maps for centuries, but their geographical dimensions varied tremendously from author to author and from generation to generation. The career of the term India exemplifies this fluidity. As the ultimate Orient of classical European geography, “India” expanded with each new discovery throughout the Renaissance, until it encompassed, in some usages, the majority of the globe. Ortelius’s 1570 map of India, for example, included all of modern-day South, East, and Southeast Asia. In other cartographic representations, the Americas and even modern-day Ethiopia were placed within India’s bounds. Beginning in the 1700s, by contrast, the secular trend was one of gradual reduction, as India was limited first to South and Southeast Asia, and then, following the contours of British dominion, to South Asia alone. Its contraction would continue in the twentieth century, when India came to refer to a single South Asian state (Lewis and Wigen 161). ↩︎
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