REVIVAL OF SANSKRIT

It would be quite misleading, however, to suppose that the agents of the EIC were all about making a profit for shareholders, amassing fortunes for themselves and intimidating Indian opponents. John Malcolm was not the only company man to take a serious interest in learning about his cultural environment. Warren Hastings, for example, achieved fluency in Bengali and had a decent working knowledge of Urdu and Persian. Fascinated by India’s Hindu and Buddhist past, which had faded from sight during seven centuries of Muslim rule, he pioneered the revival of Sanskrit and sponsored the first ever English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In 1784 he supported the prodigiously polyglot Sir William Jones in founding the Calcutta Asiatic Society, which became the centre of a cultural revival that would blossom into the Bengal Renaissance, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So great was Hastings’ cultural enthusiasm that he once declared, ‘In truth, I love India a little more than my own country.’
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 In general, when people encounter a foreign culture, they are bound to try and understand it in their own, familiar terms. In so doing, they become aware of elements that do not fit and at that point they recognise cultural difference, which might alarm and repel them, but equally might fascinate and attract them. In this particular case, Hastings clearly admired what he encountered. Besides, it is quite hard to see how his translation of the Bhagavad Gita served to entrench British domination. On the contrary, the comparative philology developed by William Jones undermined the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Graeco-Roman language and civilisation. According to Nirad Chaudhuri, in rescuing classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion, Hastings, Jones and other European Orientalists ‘rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler.’ It gave him the material out of which to build ‘the historical myth’ of a Hindu civilisation that was superior to Europe’s.

Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (40-42). [2023] HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

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