Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell

Abstract

Scottish Orientalists and India: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire, by Avril A. Powell. Worlds of the East India Company series. Rochester, New York, Boydell Press, 2010. xviii, 318 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). In this richly contextualised double biography of two very different men from nineteenth-century Scotland, both Orientalist scholars and employees of the English East India Company and then the British Raj in India, Avril Powell has returned to examine characters who were bit-players in her first book Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (Richmond, Surrey, 1993). By reconstructing the common origins, connected if divergent careers and interests, and the strikingly different personalities and opinions of the Sanskritist John Muir and the Arabist and Islamist William Muir, Powell makes an empirically substantiated argument regarding the complexity of Orientalist scholarship and its fraught relationship with the power dynamics of imperialism. In continuity with her lifelong interest in inter-cultural and inter-religious contact, especially between evangelically-minded British Christians and Urdu-speaking Muslim elites of north India, the book connects these two scholar-administrators with their Scottish intellectual heritage on one side, and their Indian interlocutors on the other, thus also making a significant new contribution to the much-studied field of Islamic modernism in India, and its best-known exponent, Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan. The book begins with a reconstruction of the Muir brothers' origins in the dense networks of familial relations, patronage, globalized commercial links and imperial rule, and their education within the Scottish Academy and University systems, where the traditions of Enlightenment scholarship lingered into the nineteenth century. The book then proceeds to trace the origins of their Orientalist interests through a deft reconstruction of the linguistic training provided at the Haileybury College for East India Company recruits. The story then moves to India where the distinct interests and personalities of the brothers emerge. While both brothers articulated a religious commitment to the moral improvement of India, and both asserted the need for the acculturation of pedagogic schemes and material, John Muir emerged as the reclusive Sanskritist with a distaste for inter-cultural denunciation, while the more careerist, combative but also sociable William Muir became the Evangelical Arabist, using his specialist knowledge to engage in public debates over the relative values of Christianity and Islam. In their respective mid-nineteenth-century magnum opus, each scholar-administrator is shown to have expressed his fully-developed social vision--John Muir rejecting, on the basis of linguistic theories popularised in the eighteenth century, the biological racism of the mid-nineteenth, and William Muir expressing the doctrinally rigid view that Islam was a false religion preached by a deluded, if historical man whose increasing personal degeneration set the pattern for the institutionalisation of an irredeemably socially damaging set of religious values. Their lives and careers diverged more widely around the time of the rebellion of 1857, with John retired and already ensconced in a life of scholarship in Edinburgh, while William remained to observe and comment on one of the biggest challenges to British rule and India, and formulate educational and social policies in post-pacification northern India. …