Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton's "Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah"

Abstract

ELIZABETH HAMILTON'S SUBTLE AND NUANCED ANALYSIS OF THE INTERSECTION of Hindu and British culture published in 1796 is a core text for our understanding of Romantic orientalism. is based on an extensive familiarity with Hindu law, literature, religious practice and politics, which Hamilton gained from her brother Charles, a self-taught and passionate orientalist who served under Warren Hastings in India from 1772-1786 before returning to Scotland to translate the Hindu legal code, the Hedaya, into English. is therefore particularly odd that this novel has been so neglected by scholars of Romantic-era British imperialism. Nigel Leask affords it only a passing (and not entirely accurate) glance in his British Romantic Writers and the East; Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson ignore it in their three-chapter synthetic overview of the issue in Romanticism and Colonialism, as do the other contributors to this volume; and Saree Makdisi makes no mention of Hamilton's novel in his Romantic Imperialism. (1) Nor does Leask rectify this omission of Hamilton's text in his chapter on women travel-writers and the East in his recent Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: 'From an Antique Land,' where he continues to cite her first name incorrectly. (2) Hamilton's novel deserves far more sustained attention than these critics have provided, since it constructs a very different picture of the relationship of Britain to India from the one promoted by such canonical Romantic writers as Byron, Percy Shelley, De Quincey, Coleridge and Scott. This is not to say that Hamilton's novel has been entirely ignored by academic critics and scholars. Both feminist and post-colonialist critics have been attracted to the novel's obvious engagement with the British presence in India presented by a woman. But these critics have tended to reduce the novel to imperialist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the full complexity of Hamilton's satire. Admittedly, at first glance Elizabeth Hamilton's Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) appears to be what Edward Said would call an orientalizing text. The novel's Hindu characters--Zaarmilla, Maandaara and Sheermal--arguably conform to Said's influential, if now contested, definition of the western production of the Orient as unscientific, irrational, feminine, childish, submissive, depraved, distant, in contrast to its representation of England as masculine, scientific, rational, Christian and above all civilized. (3) Critics who have chosen to focus on the novel's imperialist dimensions have stressed the Rajah Zaarmilla's naivete, his unreliability, his benighted racism, and above all his unthinking acceptance of the low status of Indian women, whom he eagerly trades in marriage, keeps subservient, denies a useful education, and condemns to sati. In this vein, one could also point out that Zaarmilla is effectively feminized in England, where in public he becomes the object rather than the possessor of the specular gaze, defined as an exotic display for English eyes. These critics, most notably Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, Claire Grogan and Susan Taylor, (4) have finally rested their case on the novel's imperialist endorsement, through the voice of Zaarmilla, of the British rule in India as the salvation of the Hindu people. As Zaarmilla enthuses, Benevolent people of England! it is their desire, that all should be partakers of the same blessings of liberty which they themselves enjoy. was doubtless with this glorious view, that they sent forth colonies to enlighten, and instruct, the vast regions of America. To disseminate the love of virtue and freedom, they cultivated the trans-Atlantic isles: and to rescue our nation from the hands of the Oppressor, did this brave and generous people visit the shores of Hindoostan. (5) As Grundy and Taylor further note, Zaarmilla even credits the British with restoring the laws (163) and saving the artifacts of Hindu culture: It is by these strangers that the annals of Hindostan, which her barbarian conquerors have sought to obliterate in the blood of her children, shall be restored! …