‘On the Oriental Renaissance’ (De la Renaissance Orientale) is the title that the French romanticist historian Edgar Quinet (1803-1875) gave to a chapter of his book Le Génie des Religion (1845). ‘La Renaissance Orientale’ is also the title of a later book by the French writer Raymond Schwab (1884-1956) on the same topic (Schwab, 1950). Both to the renewed scholarly interest in the countries, cultures, and languages located in the ‘Orient’s during the second and the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It was a moment that Victor Hugo celebrated, saying, “On s'occupe beaucoup plus de l'Orient qu'on ne l'a jamais fait. Les études orientales n'ont jamais été poussées si avant. Au siècle de Louis XIV, on était helléniste; maintenant on est orientaliste (...) Nous avons aujourd'hui un savant cantonné dans chacun des idiomes de l'Orient, depuis la Chine jusqu'à l'Égypte. Il résulte de tout cela que l'Orient, soit comme image, soit comme pensée, est devenu pour les intelligences autant que pour les imaginations une sorte de préoccupation générale (...).”

This period was thus the apex of ‘Orientalism.’ That is to say, according to Edward W. Said, a European discourse on an area with a coherent corpus with its own “vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, and doctrines” that is constitutive of a vision framed by colonial hierarchies.

Anglo-French rivalry in the Orient

In many regards, Orientalist scholarship was “born amid violence, imperialism, and Anglo-French rivalry”. In fact we can extend this statement that Donald M. Reid applied to Egyptology in his book ‘Whose Pharaohs?’ (Reid, 2003). The rivalry between France and Great Britain between the Seven Years War and the Wars of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars made the Orient a special concern for these two powers. Overseas trade was a continuation of politics and war, the continuation of trade. Global rivalries led the British and the French involved into Indian political games which results would be incalculable. This is how the British East India Company took control of Bengal and started a territorial expansion across the Indian subcontinent after defeating the local nawab and their French suppliers at Plassey (1753) and Buxar (1764).

Karl Marx later stated that “the events of the Seven Years-War transformed the East India Company from a commercial into a military and territorial power. It was then that the foundation was laid of the present British Empire in the East.” A company of tradesmen now had to face the urgent problem of creating an administrative apparatus in order to rule the Indian territories under its jurisdiction. Unsurprisingly, the company’s initial concern was the codification and protection of property rights, particularly those relative to land ownership. It is in this context that the then governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732-1818), devised an ‘orientalist policy.’

A set of institutions was established, like the Asiatic Society of Calcutta (now of Bengal), by Sir William Jones (1746-1794) in 1784 under Hastings' patronage. A learned society where European scholars were assisted by native personnel in the research and translation of Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts. With the expansion of the rule of the British East India Company over the Indian peninsula, other institutions were founded, like Calcutta’s Fort William College in 1800, to train officials in these languages and some vernaculars (mostly ‘Hindustani’—nowadays’ Hindi and Urdu—and Bengali), from which instructors were recruited among the members of the Asiatic society.

Anglo-French rivalry resumed with the Wars of the French Revolution. Again, Britain stood as France’s nemesis and fiercest enemy. The Directoire figured to attack Britain’s interests in India and support France’s local ally, Tipu Sultan of Mysore. They thus planned Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. Probably, the ‘Directeurs’ thought of sending young and ambitious general Napoleon Bonaparte as far away as India to have him out of French political games. Therefore, they gave him the command of the Armée d’Orient (a subdivision of the Armée d’Angleterre) with the order to cross the Egyptian desert and reach the Red Sea with (according to Bonaparte’s own correspondence) an “innumerable and invincible” army. The Armée d’Orient should then relieve ‘Citizen Tipoo’ from the British “iron yoke.”. These grandiose pretensions were as pitiable as was the Armée d’Orient’s eventual defeat. Bonaparte fled Egypt (23 August 1799). He eventually took power with his coup of the 18 Brumaire year VIII (8-9 November 1799). But propaganda was successful in transforming a shameful failure into a legendary triumph of science and knowledge, making Egypt a ‘passion française’.

The news that the French would come to India alarmed Richard Wellesley—then governor of the Indian presidencies—who sent his brother Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and the army to storm Tipu Sultan’s fortress and capital city, Seringapatam. This was Tipu’s last stand against ‘Albion.’ As K. Marx later put it, "At the end of the Eighteenth Century, and in the first years of the present one, there supervened the wars with Tippoo Saib, and in consequence of them a great advance of power… By 1820, the British Empire was the foremost military power in the world and the Indian dominion of the East India Company had no real challenger. Then started the days of the Pax Britannica.

The post-Napoleonic period was essentially reactionary. Yet, intellectual life re-blossomed over Europe. Romanticism emerged as the main intellectual movement of this era. Thus, intellectual exchanges resumed among a new generation of scholars and literati who formed a new Republic of Letters across the globe. It is in this context that the Oriental Renaissance happened.

Some key features of the Oriental Renaissance

This period was marked by important ‘discoveries’ and considerable extension of European knowledge of Eastern civilizations. Sanskrit aside, this period was marked by the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by the Frenchman Champollion and the Brahmi scripts of Indian king Ashoka’s pillars by James Prinsep. It is this intense moment of exchanges celebrated by Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale. This book remains a precious source of knowledge about how Europe came to know the ‘Orient.’All in all, all of this was possible because of a capital of sources of ‘orientalist’ knowledge that the British accumulated between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.

The famous Rosetta Stone was transferred to the British Museum in 1802. The East India Company and its ‘academic’ departments (the Asiatic Societies, the Fort William College, and the Company’s own Oriental Library) had a monopoly on manuscripts and other sources of knowledge. A good lot of material was moreover violently obtained in the aftermath of the conquest of Seringapatam. Most books, manuscripts, and artifacts found in the library and collections of Tipu Sultan made their way to Calcutta and London. And this one became the capital city of orientalist Europe. Indological knowledge had passed to a ‘Calcutta Establishment’ of men who had made their way to the higher spheres of the East India Company and Indian affairs.

Sir William Jones died of a fever in 1794. In the early years of the 1810s, Jones was succeeded by one of his pupils and protégés, Henry Thomas Colebrooke. Colebrooke was probably the worthiest disciple of Sir William Jones, of whom he finished translations left unachieved. One of the most competent Sanskrit scholars of his time, Colebrooke was the first Englishman to obtain access to the Vedas. His essay on the Sati ritual, 'On the Duty of a Faithful Widow,' was used as a source for both adversaries and defenders of Sati at the end of the 1820s. Back in after serving in the highest offices of the colonial state in Calcutta, H.T. Colebrooke became one of the most authoritative scholars in Europe and a founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (established 1823).

These Asiatic Societies in Calcutta and London were soon part of a network of orientalist learned societies that were established during this period. It was a network that stretched at a global level and extended from Asia (Bombay/Mumbai and Madras/Chennai in India) to the Americas (the American Oriental Society, established in 1842), passing by Paris (Société Asiatique de Paris, established in 1822). In Germany, the Sanskrit chair was attributed to August W. Schlegel by the University of Bonn in 1818.

The relation between the latter and Colebrooke gives a good insight on the role and place of Britain in this network. Already a renowned indologist, Schlegel had the project of publishing a catalogue raisonné of the library of the East India Company. To do that, he needed Colebrooke to introduce him to the Company’s chief librarian, Charles Wilkins (1749–1836) . Wilkins had been a close friend of Sir William Jones’. A founding member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal he remains the first translator of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ into English.

In a letter dated 1 July 1823, Schlegel wrote to Colebrooke about his project: “Je me propose d'aller en Angleterre dans le mois d’août et d'y rester jusqu'à la fin d'octobre. […] Quand même les bibliothèques seraient fermées pour le public, n'y aurait-il pas moyen d'obtenir de l'accès pendant cette époque par une faveur particulière? Il s'agirait seulement de mettre de côté quelques manuscrits sur lesquels je voudrais travailler. C'est m. Wilkins, je pense, qui dispose de la Bibliothèque de la Compagnie des Indes, et Sir Humphrey Davy de celle du Musée Britannique.” (Colebrooke Papers, India Office Records)

Schlegel also had a keen interest in printing technologies. He designed new Nagari typescripts for printing works in Sanskrit and some Indian vernaculars, which he left in property to the British Government in gratitude for the granted favors. Schlegel and Colebrooke became good friends, and the latter eventually sent his son James to Germany asking Schlegel to teach him Latin and mathematics, French and German, besides civil law. James Colebrooke, however, passed away in 1825. In memory of his son, Colebrooke offered Schlegel one of James’ rings.

This anecdote illustrates how the ‘Calcutta Establishment’ was central to the Oriental Renaissance. Orientalism was not only a general obsession, as V. Hugo put it. There were channels of transmission and networks through which knowledge passed. The history of orientalist ideas is thus better understood if put in a less ethereal context and if their connection to European expansion in the ‘Orient’ is made more explicit. When considering orientalists, one may imagine scholars studying alone in their libraries, their head above mysterious manuscripts, wrapped in their arid solitude. Indeed, places like those Asiatic Societies or the ‘Oriental Club’ were spaces where linguists or archeologists met diplomats, policy makers, and businessmen whose investments were in the East and in colonial affairs.

Writing the colonial world

Edward W. Said’s book Orientalism was a critique of the close relation between European colonial expansion in South Asia and the Near East, between the late eighteenth century and the second quarter of the nineteenth, and the Oriental Renaissance. This relation is now more evident and explicit. Later examples of the formation of such imperial culture can be mentioned besides South Asia and Egypt. Think, for example, of the ‘discovery’ of the different dialects of Berber (Tamazight) by French scholars following Captain Hanoteau, a French official stationed in Draa El-Mizan in Kabylia during the 1840s but whose interest eventually extended to the Sahara and the dialects of the Tuareg People (Kel Tamasheq). Louis Faidherbe—an officer of the French Army and colonial administrator involved in the conquest of Algeria and Senegal and laid out the basis of the French colonies of Western Africa—pioneered studies of West African languages.

Modern orientalism was part of a cosmography that Europeans started to write when they conquered the Americas and kept doing beyond the nineteenth century. It was a long-standing operation of surveying, cataloguing, classifying, compending, and inquiring on “Man and nature; whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other (W. Jones)”. In the lands they conquered, Europeans had to cope with otherness. Otherness had to be tamed, domesticated, and disciplined. It had to fit into boxes or fill blank pages by the pens of naturalists, philologists, and other scientific figures who somehow nearly felt as almighty as Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein. Relevantly, Romila Thapar considered indology as ‘the study of India by non-Indians.’. Indeed, Orientalists would have never attained such success without the aid of pundits (native scholars of Sanskrit) and munshis (scholars of Persian). But Thapar’s statement relevantly applies to other branches of oriental studies.

Following Donald M. Reid’s ‘Whose Pharaohs?’ It is possible to wonder: Whose Vedas? Whose Sanskrit? Remaining stuck on the superficial definition of history as an exclusive Western (therefore, ‘modern’) way to write about the past, it could be easy to say ‘They’, the colonized, had ‘a past but no history as an eulogist of the Asiatic Society of Bengal once wrote. Having no history implies that the ‘natives’ cannot evolve in the modern world. To carry them through it is this ‘Burden of the White Man’ celebrated by Kipling.

However, this attitude was soon challenged by native intellectuals. The Egyptian Nahda and the Bengali Naba-Jagara (Egyptian and Bengali ‘Awakenings’) were coeval to the Oriental Renaissance. Caught between recovering their social-historical identity and the imperative of modernization, many indigenous intellectuals used orientalist scholarship and reframed it within a patriotic discourse. Egyptology contributed to the differentiation of Egyptian nationalism from Pan-Arabism. A similar statement applies to the role of Sanskrit scholarship in the formation of Indian nationalism. The first Indian president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Rajendra Lal Mitra was also chairman of one of the earliest meetings of the Indian National Congress in 1885.

Conclusion

The story of the Oriental Renaissance as a romantic adventure and a romanticist utopia shadows its connection with colonial expansion. In North Africa, West and South Asia. But one side effect is that the Oriental Renaissance also provided elements for a response to Western dominance. It was not a simple mimicking but a response to moral and existential questions. Orientalist scholarship contributed to a challenging process of reappropriation of the past that moreover keeps on going. Postcolonial societies in the West are still not done with this issue, as shown by the many attempts to restore Egypt’s Africanness and ‘négritude,’ for example. As Said wrote in ‘Culture and Imperialism,’ it is thus necessary to consider the ‘cultural terrains in which colonizers and colonized coexisted and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories.”

Notes

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Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Oxford (U.K): Blackwell Publishers, 1990.
Kejariwal, Om Prakash. The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the discovery of India's past. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Kiernan, Victor. The Lords of Humankind: black man, yellow man, and white man in an age of empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969-1986.
Krader, Lawrence. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Van Gorcum, 1972-74.
Laurens, Henry. Les Origines Intellectuelles de l'Expédition d'Égypte. Paris/Ankara: Institut Français d'études anatoliennes, 1987.
Reid, Donald Malcolm. Whose Pharaohs? Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Rocher, Rosane and Ludo. The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. London: Routledge, 2011.
Rodinson, Maxime. La Fascination de l'Islam. Paris: Maspéro, 1980.
Said, Edward Wadie. Orientalism; New York/London, Penguin books 2003; Culture and Imperialism; London, Chatto and Windu 1993, originally published: New York: Pantheon, 1978; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Schwab, Raymond. La Renaissance Orientale. Paris: Payot, 1950.