Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830 by Andrew Rudd

Abstract

Andrew Rudd. Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 216. $102. Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 begins with the failure of imaginative sympathy. Facts coming from afar made little impression, Alexander Dow reflects in The History of Hindostan (1768). [We] heard, without emotion, of the great actions of some of our countrymen; and, if we listened to any detail of oppressions committed by others, it was with a phlegmatic indifference, unworthy of our boasted humanity, Dow adds (1). Andrew Rudd's monograph seeks to explain how in an age when India became an object of humanitarian concern (2) to the British public, and consequently revived a sentimental mode of writing, Dow's and others' indifference towards colonial matters, well, matters. Exploring the intersection of aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses that marked this transformative period, Rudd makes persuasive connections between British literary culture and the colonial project in India. Moving chronologically through a range of texts, Rudd traces a familiar narrative of British imperialism in India--from the syncretic Orientalism associated with figures such as Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings in the last decades of the eighteenth century, to the influence of evangelical missionaries and the rigid Anglicanism of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay into the nineteenth century. Rudd provides a framework for his understanding of sympathy based on the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Echoing Hume's skeptical claim that imaginative sympathy meets its affective limit at the national border, Rudd contends that the British were fundamentally incapable of meaningfully engaging with India due to its geographic remoteness and cultural otherness. His book investigates the aesthetic and ethical problems caused by the failure of the sympathetic imagination, as well as the evolution of the strategies of representation through which India was brought before the British public. In his first chapter, Rudd examines Edmund Burke's failed use of imaginative sympathy as a rhetorical strategy in his parliamentary speeches against Warren Hastings, former Governor General of Bengal. According to Rudd, Burke superimposes classical rhetoric onto eighteenth-century models of sentimental distress to depict the atrocities perpetrated onto hapless Indian victims by East India Company men. Rudd argues that Burke fails to establish an emotional connection between Britain and India precisely because of the impossibility to engage with a remote object, his audience more readily identifying with Hastings than with suffering Indians. Rudd engages productively with Sara Suleri's discussion of Burke's sublime rhetoric, but seeks to redress Suleri's influential interpretation of Burke's irony and pessimism, emphasizing instead Burke's insistence on the humanitarian capacity of the imagination. In the course of its consideration of Burke, the chapter gives a comprehensive social and cultural portrait of Burke's milieu, presenting writers and texts ranging from contemporary literary representations of the nabob to satirical prints, philosophical discourse, parliamentary speeches, and trial commentaries. Chapter 2 moves from London to Calcutta to consider how, like Burke, Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society attempted to assimilate India into the British imagination, this time by reconfiguring Orientalism as a cosmopolitan and neoclassical aesthetic that could inspire transnational bonds. Rudd suggests that Jones and Burke rely equally on the power of sympathy to ensure imaginative engagement. An analysis of Jones's translations and adaptations of Hindu verses, as well as his Asiatic Society discourses allows Rudd to elucidate Jones's theory of cross-cultural poetic sympathy. Influenced by Nigel Leask's notion of costume poetry, Rudd demonstrates how Jones, adapting Eastern poems to European sensibilities through classical allusion, tries to elicit the reader's sympathetic response toward a universal spiritual desire. …