Asiatic Society of Bengal

Abstract

Composed of British scholars known as the Orientalists, the Asiatic Society of Bengal introduced England to India’s Sanskrit philosophy and literature during the turn of the 18th into the 19th century. The Asiatic Society was short-lived, a phenomenon of only fifty years; it was founded in 1784 by Sir William Jones and replaced by a movement called Anglicism in 1835, when Thomas Macaulay declared that there would be no more Sanskrit education. Nevertheless, through their renderings of Sanskrit and Persian as well as their original poetry and essays, the Orientalists influenced not only English literature, particularly informing the poetics of the English Romantic movement, but European literature and philosophy as well as American Transcendentalism. The Orientalists influenced generations of writers, philosophers, linguists, and theologians. Besides Jones, the principal scholars and translators of the Asiatic Society included Henry Colebrooke, John Gilchrist, William Hunter, Nathaniel Halhed, William Hunter, and Charles Wilkins. Many factors complicated the translations of the Orientalists, making it important for those studying their writings today to contextualize them historically. From a theological standpoint, their renderings of Hindu texts were often distorted by the deism that colored their translations. Eager to find commonality between ancient India and their English readers, the Orientalists asserted that, because the Sanskrit texts of the ancient Hindus were monotheistic, ancient India was therefore closer to the Judaeo-Christian tradition than previously thought by westerners who regarded the country’s principal religion as pantheistic. In claiming this, however, the Orientalists mistook deism’s dualistic separation of deity from nature for the Vedas’ nondualism in which deity is an all-pervading consciousness. Furthermore, the Asiatic Society’s scholarship was complicated politically by the members’ involvement with the East India Company, thereby blurring the lines between government, commerce, and scholarship. Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal and patron of the Asiatic Society, was accused of corruption regarding the East India Company’s abuses in India. Though he was impeached in 1787, Hastings was acquitted in 1795 because of a growing consensus that Edmund Burke, who managed Hastings’s trial, had scapegoated Hastings for abuses largely committed under his predecessor, Robert Clive. The intellectual pursuits of the Asiatic Society thus became enmeshed with the religio-philosophical beliefs of its members, their commercial interests, and their role in the transitional British empire.