Harish Trivedi
University of Delhi, India
There would seem to be a wide gap between current postcolonial discourse which is by definition all in English, and classics which are distinctly precolonial and certainly not in English. Besides, can one civilization’s classics, i.e. foundational texts, serve as another civilization’s classics even if backed by colonial authority, as contrasted with modern texts which the colonizer often adduces as evidence of its advancement and superiority?
I propose in this paper to look specifically at the unique situation in this regard in colonial India where, as Orientalist scholars beginning with Sir William Jones quickly (and often enthusiastically) discovered, we had classics of our own to pit against any classics that the West may have wished to bring to us. In fact, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, many Indian writers newly trained in English translated even-handedly Western as well as Indian classics into their own particular modern Indian languages; it was as if they wished to appease at once both the good angel and the bad angel.
Another complicating factor in India was the imperial assumption, first articulated
probably by Lord Macaulay, that English in India was going to be what the Greek
and Latin classics had been in the West. This assertion or aspiration may be
viewed in the larger, more widely classical claim that British rule in India
was as the Roman Empire had been in Europe.
Finally, I will survey the postcolonial situation in my own university where,
through a recent act of resistance, Sanskrit classics such as the Mahabharata
and Kalidasa are now taught alongside Western classics such as Homer and Euripides,
and at the cultural climate generally in the country where, after the Raj has
come and gone, the recent long-running serial TV versions of both the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata have earned the highest ratings of any TV broadcasts ever.