Akbar Dream

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Perhaps the most dramatic indictment of the British Empire in Indiais that it provided Adolf Hitler with a model for his fantasy of a Germanimperium in eastern Europe and Russia: “What India was for England,the eastern territory will be for us,” he declared in August 1941. “TheRussian territory is our India,” he said a little later, “and just as theEnglish rule it with a handful of people, so will we govern this, ourcolonial territory.”1 Although it is true that Hitler’s understanding ofthe British Raj was limited, probably owing more to Hollywood movieslike The Lives of a Bengal Lancer than to any kind of direct experienceor sustained study, his admiration concentrates the mind. It confirmsthe accuracy of Partha Chatterjee’s observation that the Raj was “amodern regime of power destined never to fulfill its normalizingmission because the premise of its power was the preservation of thealienness of the ruling group.”2 It praises precisely what radical Vic-torian commentators like John Hobson had condemned: “Upon thevast majority of the populations throughout our Empire we havebestowed no real powers of self-government, nor have we any seriousintention of doing so, or any serious belief that it is possible to doso.”3 One of the principal means by which the more imaginative

1. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000),402, 945.

2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories(Princeton University Press, 1993), 18.

3. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; repr., Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1971), 114.

Akbar’s Dream:Moghul Toleration and English/British Orientalism

P A U L S T E V E N S

University of Toronto

R A H U L S A P R A

Ryerson University

We are grateful to Richard Strier and Modern Philology’s two anonymous readersfor their thoughtful and stimulating critiques of this essay. We are also grateful to AlanBewell, Richard Helgerson, Linda Hutcheon, and Lynne Magnusson for advice andencouragement.

M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y380

proponents of empire were able to protect themselves from these dis-quieting thoughts was by “Indianizing” the imperial government in thevery specific sense of historicizing it, inventing tradition and repre-senting the British Raj as the fulfillment of its shadowy Moghul type.4

For this reason, in 1877 Disraeli made the Queen of England Empressof India, and, as Balachandra Rajan has pointed out, Tennyson madehis Solomon-like Moghul emperor, Akbar, prophesy the coming ofthe Christlike English to rebuild his temple and reestablish religioustoleration: “From out the sunset poured an alien race,” so Akbardreams, “Who fitted stone to stone again, and Truth, / Peace, Loveand Justice came and dwelt therein.”5

This extraordinary act of nineteenth-century historicism, of appro-priating Indian history and assimilating it into the grand march ofWestern progress, is more important than it first seems for a numberof reasons. While Tennyson’s trope seeks to resolve the fundamentalcontradiction at the heart of late Victorian imperial policy—that is, thecontradiction between the desire both to preserve indigenous Indianculture intact and at the same time to recreate it in the image ofprogressive Western ideals—it also inadvertently reveals the degree towhich, even at the height of empire, appropriation could mean “trans-culturation” in its fullest sense.6 For even as the trope appropriatesIndian history, Indian history is made to appropriate European Chris-tianity, transforming it into a creed whose primary imperative is not in-dividual salvation in the next world but multiethnic religious tolerationin this one. The ramifications of these rhetorical moves are complex,but they immediately call into question the seamlessness of historicism’sdesire to make Western hegemony inevitable—whether in the political

4. For the invention of tradition, see, e.g., Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authorityin Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and TerenceRanger (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165–209. See also David Cannadine, Orna-mentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),41–57. For the Victorian interest in rehabilitating older methods of analogy like biblicaltypology in relation to Tennyson, see David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Vic-torian Age (London: Athlone, 1987), 188–230.

5. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Akbar’s Dream” [1892], lines 182–84, in The Poems ofTennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969); references hereafter citedin the text. See Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 222–23; and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule ofDarkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1994), 8–10.

6. For “transculturation,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing andTransculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–11.

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Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 381

form of “colonialism” or cultural form of “modernity.” That is, they callinto question the seamlessness of what Edward Said has describedas Orientalism’s power “for dominating, restructuring, and havingauthority over the Orient.”7

In order to explore this issue more fully we wish to examine the re-lation between religious toleration and transculturation by comparingthe Victorian literary fantasy of Akbar’s dream with its seventeenth-century reality—or at least what is represented as its reality in the tes-timony of those English people who actually experienced religioustoleration in Akbar’s empire. But first we need to define our terms andexplain what is at stake in the relation between historicism and Westernhegemony. The most economical way we can do this is by situating ourargument in relation to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe—a work we consider one of the most powerful and suggestive recentcontributions to postcolonial studies.8

H I S T O R I C I S M A N D H E G E M O N Y

In its most general, primary sense, historicism simply means the theorythat social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, thateach period in history has its own values that are not directly applic-able, or sometimes even comprehensible, to other periods or epochs.More than anything else, it is the emergence of this way of thinking thatdistinguishes modernity. Quite literally so, for the very words “modern”and “medieval” arise out of the self-conscious need to comprehendthe course of history in terms of a radical cultural shift or fissure, andonly with the advent of this way of thinking can we talk of the “his-toricity” of a phenomenon, or can things properly be called “ana-chronistic,” or indeed can the past be called a foreign country.9

Modernity, however, has its discontents, and to the degree thatmodernity comes to be seen as the peculiar achievement of the West,then historicism as one of the defining attributes of modernity turnsinto something more problematic. As postcolonial scholars from Saidto Chakrabarty have argued, nothing has been, and still is, more

7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000). References hereafter cited in the text.9. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989),

esp. 52–54; and Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold,1969). See also David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985; repr., CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003).


formidable in justifying the assumption of colonial or imperial powerthan the practice of historicizing cultural differences: the practice ofredirecting the focus of historicist analysis and, instead of simplylooking backward and comprehending the past in terms of culturalchange, looking outward and representing contemporary culturaldifferences in terms of historical change, development, or progress—looking out from the presumed center and representing distance inspace in terms of distance in time.10 In Tennyson’s case, the familiardictum “what they are, we were” becomes “what they might have been,we are.” Extravagant as Tennyson’s trope is, it foregrounds the extentto which this epistemological habit, in the form of Enlightenmenthistoricism, became one of the mainsprings of the West’s sense of itsown exceptionalism.

Historicism in this secondary sense, it needs to be emphasized, is nothistory, but a way of thinking that produces history. It is not simply arecord, reconstruction, or inquiry into the past, but a philosophy thatcomprehends past, present, and future as one, a process that assumesprogress and development, a master narrative that insists on an over-arching, unified meaning, and in some cases a science that hopes todiscover the laws of history.11 Secondary or Enlightenment historicismis not, then, disinterested. As Said pointed out, the one human storyhistoricism imagined always culminated in Europe or was observedfrom the vantage point of Europe.12 In 1817 when James Mill said,“progress is the natural law of society,” he meant European progress.13

What was neither observed nor documented by Europe was either lostor felt to be of no consequence. Non-European societies were withouthistory. They were routinely dismissed in Marx’s infamous words as

10. See, for instance, Said, Orientalism, esp. 31–36, and “Orientalism Reconsidered,”Race and Class 27 (1985): 1–15; Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” chap. 6in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 102–22; Anthony Pagden,“Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartholome de Las Casas,” inNew World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press,1993), esp. 95; Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990;repr., London: Routledge, 1993); and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

11. For Enlightenment historicism, see Collingwood, Idea of History, 86–133; andLowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, 74–124. See also Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 4th ed.(1978; repr., Oxford University Press, 1981), 89–116; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philo-sophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51–74.

12. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 10.13. James Mill, The History of British India (1817; repr., University of Chicago Press,

1975), quoted in Colin Paul Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire (Karachi:Area Study Centre for Europe, 2000), 210.

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“passive,” “unresisting and unchanging,”14 and, according to MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri, this “negative construction of non-Europeanothers” had, and still has, a certain kind of inevitability, for it “is finallywhat founds and sustains European identity.”15 In its relation to non-European societies, Enlightenment historicism has revealed itself as amonumental act of cultural solipsism. Historicism in this sense is atthe heart of what Said meant by the habit of representation he called“Orientalism.”

Academic awareness of historicism’s Eurocentric biases does notseem to have lessened its power in many areas of discourse. In con-temporary politics, for instance, its truths are still taken as self-evident.Just listen to Bush or Blair.16 Historicism, often at its most vulgar,enables Western governments and media outlets to opine endlesslyabout the backwardness of the Middle East, about civilizations clashingand nations failing, wondering why Islam went wrong and how exactlyvarious discrete cultures may best be led or coerced into “democracy.”Facile as these arguments often seem, the power of Western historicismis not to be underestimated. The importance of Chakrabarty’s re-markable 2000 book lies precisely in its ability to explain this power.Western historicism, he argues, to the extent that it is the narrativeaccount of the modern concepts we would not do without—includinghistoricism itself in its most general or primary sense—is very difficultto contest. “Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society,public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual,

14. Marx on India is the locus classicus for this view of Enlightenment historicism’sacts of oblivion: “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What wecall its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires onthe passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society” (“The Future Results ofBritish Rule in India” [1853], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First Indian War ofIndependence [Moscow: Progress, 1959], 32). For a telling critique of Said’s use of Marxon India, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New Delhi: Verso,1992), 221–42.

15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2000), 124.

16. George W. Bush routinely represents the United States as “the greatest force forgood in history” (see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, andthe End of the Republic [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004], 103), and Tony Blair justas often dismisses Islamic resistance to Western concepts as “reactionary” (see, forinstance, his White House speech, August 2006). Both these politicians subscribe en-thusiastically to Bernard Lewis’s historicist contention that the “backwardness” of theMuslim world is rooted in its refusal to learn from “the theory and practice of Westernfreedom” (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response [New York:Oxford University Press, 2002], 159).


distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democ-racy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality and so on,”he explains, “all bear the burden of European thought and history” (4).It seems impossible to think without them. Chakrabarty’s sense of thisimpossible burden, so evident in the degree to which he focuses onthe overwhelming assimilative power of these Western concepts, doesmuch to explain the temptation to textual deconstruction during thesixties and seventies. The only way to liberate oneself and one’s cul-ture, many felt, was a root and branch deconstruction of Westernrationalism, what Derrida and Spivak called the “imperialism of thelogos.”17 For Chakrabarty, however, the Western concepts he lists areboth inadequate and indispensable. They are indispensable partlybecause they provide such a strong foundation on which to erectcritiques of socially unjust practices: “modern social critiques of caste,oppressions of women, the lack of rights for laboring and subalternclasses in India, and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialismitself—are unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlighten-ment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent” (4). They areinadequate because modernity erases the achievements and continu-ing potentialities of other cultures—it erases the possibility of valuingdifferent ways of being in the world. In its power to assimilate anddenigrate other cultures, so Chakrabarty’s argument implies, modernityeffectively erects a prison house of Western instrumentalist thought.18

However solipsistic it may be, it seems impossible to escape.While Chakrabarty’s analysis of modernity’s enabling concepts does

much to explain the enduring confidence of everyday political dis-course in historicism, he himself, it might be argued, tends to over-estimate the intractable nature of the impasse he describes. Almost inspite of himself, there are moments when he sounds like Foucaultat his most pessimistic or Greenblatt at his most Foucauldian. As faras the academic discourse of history is concerned, he says, “ ‘Europe’remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories.” The ubiq-uitous conceptual power of modernity is such that all histories,whether they be Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, or whatever, “tend to

17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3.

18. See Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991); and PaulStevens, “Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and theWork of Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 36 (2005): 425–37. By “instrumen-talism” we mean “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most eco-nomical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost-outputratio, is its measure of success” (Taylor, Malaise, 5).


become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘thehistory of Europe’ ” (27). Consequently, the project of decentering“Europe,” he feels, “must realize within itself its own impossibility.” Hetherefore looks to a history that “embodies this politics of despair” (45).There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us.19 Two ob-jections immediately come to mind. First, as academic discourse hasmade clear, modernity is not frozen in time, but its enabling conceptsare dynamic and capable of turning into something rich and strange,something “postmodern,” something that might enable a multitude ofnew ways of being in the world. This is Richard Helgerson’s pointwhen he suggests, in an important recent article, that the position con-temporary postcolonial scholars now find themselves in, one domi-nated by “Europe,” is not unlike the position early modern Europeanscholars lamented four hundred years ago when they felt themselvesdominated by classical antiquity—the analogy, itself a function of thehistoricism it would contest, suggests how modernity might transcenditself.20 The second objection is that historicism, as Chakrabarty surelyknows, was never quite as homogeneous or stable as his text recurrentlyimplies. Its enabling concepts were never simply, purely “European.”As scholars from Raymond Schwab to Balachandra Rajan have madeclear, Romanticism, for instance, and all it implies for modernity, isinconceivable without the impact of India.21 At the same time, AmartyaSen has drawn attention to India’s rationalist, dialogic traditions—tra-ditions that bore fruit in the science of the Gupta period and the publicreasoning of Akbar’s court, traditions that do so much to explain thedurability of present-day Indian secularism and democracy.22

How then are we to explain Chakrabarty’s emphasis on the impasse?While his perception of the enduring influence of modernity is ofcrucial importance, his despair seems excessive, even melodramatic.

19. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Sub-version,” Glyph 8 (1981): 40–61. See also Paul Stevens, “Pretending to Be Real: StephenGreenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,” New Literary History 33 (2002):491–519.

20. See Richard Helgerson, “Before National Literary History,” Modern LanguageQuarterly 64 (2003): 169–79.

21. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India andthe East (1950; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Rajan, UnderWestern Eyes.

22. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, andIdentity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), esp. 3–33, 139–60. Both Rajan’s analysis ofShelley’s Prometheus Unbound (Under Western Eyes, 157–73) and Sen’s opening accountof the influence of the Bhagavad Gita (3–6) emphasize the degree to which the impactof India on Romanticism was not simply a matter of exoticism.


And indeed, in a curious postscript, he actually renounces the “politicsof despair” that he has just reannounced (45–46). He first proposedthis politics in the core 1992 Representations article for his book.23 Inthe 2000 book itself he announces it again as quoted above (45) andthen immediately renounces it: “But the ‘politics of despair’ I onceproposed with some passion do not any longer drive the larger argu-ment presented here” (46). The self-conflict revealed in these pages canbe explained in a number of ways. On the one hand, Chakrabarty’sreluctance to relinquish his despair suggests a persistent sense ofloss. The substance of that loss is evident, for instance, in his movingaccount of Western historicism’s occlusion of peasant darshan—a kindof imagination that enables one to see the smiling face of the domesticgoddess Lakshmi and that, in refusing the customary Western separa-tion of instrumental and spiritual categories, played a major role intwentieth-century Indian nation formation (149–79). On the otherhand, the equally powerful need to cast aside despair indicates thedegree to which the postcolonial project of provincializing Europehas itself become an orthodoxy. As Helgerson points out, respondingdirectly to Chakrabarty, the world of former European colonies is nolonger powerless: “as a postcolonial perspective changes the way weunderstand Europe,” it is perfectly clear just how effectively “theempire has been striking back” and has been doing so for some timenow.24 So powerful is this process that the history of the West is rapidlybeing rewritten in the academy if not the White House.

Nor is this process unprecedented. It is a measure of Enlighten-ment historicism’s own contingency, its weak mightiness, that itshistory now seems not only solipsistic but more of an agon than atriumphal march. The “laws” of history imagined by Hegel or Marxhave turned out to be anything but binding, and when FrancisFukuyama announced in 1992 “the end of history,” no one outsidethe Washington beltway was listening.25 At the same time, however,the power of Orientalism as imagined by Said no longer seems soincontestable. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, “only the most obscurantist in-digenists and cultural nationalists” would now believe that “Europeanswere ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about

23. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” Representations 37 (1992):1–26.

24. Helgerson, “Before National Literary History,” 179.25. Not even he now takes it seriously—see Francis Fukuyama, America at the Cross-

roads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 53–54, for the somewhatsheepish qualification of his original argument in The End of History and the Last Man(New York: Avon, 1992).


non-Europe,” that is, of producing anything other than fantasies of theirown negative self-definition.26 The critical point is that the originalseamlessness of Said’s Orientalism had as its necessary condition theperceived seamlessness of Western historicism. As confidence inthe latter has faded, so has conviction in the totalizing claims of theformer.27 As Enlightenment historicism and its privileging of Europecontinues to be historicized, so it becomes increasingly possible to seemany contingencies, many other, earlier attempts to respond to theknowledge Ahmad recognizes, and so to provincialize Europe. This per-ception is at the heart of Mary Louise Pratt’s “heretical” conceptionof reverse transculturation: “while the imperial metropolis tends tounderstand itself as determining the periphery . . . , it habitually blindsitself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis.”28

Our aim in this essay is to analyze one of these patterns of reversetransculturation, to produce a work of “new” historicism, and to showhow even as the British Empire moved to westernize India under thepretense of Indianizing it, there was, as Tennyson’s trope suggests, ahistory of confusion and incipient heterogenization, of Europeansrecurrently, often inadvertently, calling into question the primacyof Europe. The focus of this phenomenon is religious toleration.Tennyson’s imperial poem and its risks lead us back to England’s ex-perience of religious toleration in Moghul India; religious tolerationis as important as it is in our story because, while it straddles the linebetween the instrumental and spiritual, it also functions as one ofthe primary registers of reverse transculturation. Indeed, in the con-fusion toleration engenders, it records the enduring power of Indiato resist a colonialism that, while primarily driven by economic gain,was routinely legitimized by Western historicism through all the argu-ments of modernity.

26. Ahmad, In Theory, 178. Ahmad’s skepticism is anticipated by Dennis Porter: “Arewe so positioned by a given historical and geopolitical conjuncture that misrepresentationis a structural necessity or is there a place of truth?” (“Orientalism and Its Problems,” inThe Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July1982, ed. Francis Barker et al. [Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983], 179).

27. Sen is not unusual in wanting to question Said’s emphasis on the Foucauldianrelation between knowledge and power: “the process of learning can accommodateconsiderable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of somegrosser kind. . . . We are now in some danger of ignoring other motivations altogetherthat may not link directly with the seeking of power” (Argumentative Indian, 143). Seealso the powerful critiques of C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), esp. 370–72; and Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1997), esp. 19–27.

28. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.


We propose to pursue our argument in two parts: first, by showingthat Tennyson’s emphasis on toleration was rooted in the impact Indianreligion had on the British Orientalists of the late eighteenth century;second, by showing that the incipient threat to Enlightenment histori-cism that this constituted reproduced the confusion or unmooring earlymodern English travelers felt at the dawn of historicism’s hegemony.The constant that causes this recurring pattern of transculturation isprecisely the force that Chakrabarty feels the West occludes—the non-instrumental alterity of Indian culture. In making this argument weconcentrate on two figures usually taken to exemplify European in-difference to the alterity of India, Sir William Jones and Sir ThomasRoe. Central to our argument is the conviction that Orientalism inSaid’s sense is primarily a function of historicism, but that neither his-toricism nor Orientalism were, or indeed are, entirely secure againstthe experience of contact—whether through direct converse or theinfluence of more etiolated forms of discourse.

P A R T I

Tennyson’s Imperial Poem and Its Risks

Hitler’s thoughts on India are illuminating not only because they insistupon British self-interest but because, by idealizing it, they draw atten-tion to the reality of its antithesis, British diffidence. Hitler was ananglophile, and his admiration for the Raj was long-standing and em-phatic. As early as Mein Kampf (1924), he credits the British with anadmirable will to purity and power—an “Anglo-Saxon determination”to eschew all forms of “hybridization” and monopolize politicalagency.29 He cannot imagine that the British will ever let India go“without risking the last drop of blood” (956). He feels sure thatIndian rebels will never overcome England by the sword—after all, “weGermans have learned well enough how hard it is to force England”(956). In the event, of course, as overwhelming support for variousdevolutionary concessions and the final collapse of the Raj suggest, itwas not remotely as hard as Hitler imagined to force England. Evenin the period of what Kipling calls the “post-Mutiny reconstruction,”30

British imperial policy, however self-serving, was distinguished not so

29. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. John Chamberlain et al. (1925; repr., New York:Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 956, 938. References hereafter cited in the text.

30. Rudyard Kipling, commendatory letter, in Sir William Lawrence, The India WeServed (London: Cassell, 1928), vii.

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much by a superhuman will to power as by a somewhat bathetic con-fusion of purpose. As Bernard Cohn has pointed out, Queen Victoria’s1858 proclamation of direct rule articulated two contradictory aims:on the one hand, imperial policy sought “to maintain India as a feudalorder,” while, on the other, it looked “towards changes that would in-evitably lead to the destruction of this feudal order.”31 On the onehand, says the proclamation, it sought to maintain “the ancient rights,usages, and customs of India,” while on the other, it looked toward“prosperity and . . . social advancement.”32 British diffidence had pro-duced a policy that was at once profoundly conservative and optimis-tically progressive.33

It is precisely this contradiction that Tennyson’s “Akbar’s Dream”seeks to address. It sets out to valorize the indigenous culture of Indiaby suggesting that it has a real history and that its “medieval” past, whenproperly understood, points to the possibility of a progressive future.Progress is not a violation of Indianness but a manifestation of itsoccluded past. Inspired by Benjamin Jowett, who, like Tennyson him-self, had lost a number of beloved family members in the service ofBritish India,34 the poem is so carefully researched that its extensivenotes constitute an integral part of its overall design as a politicalspeech act. Like the great Imperial Assemblage at Delhi in 1877 toproclaim the Queen Empress and, in the words of the Viceroy, LordLytton, to place her “authority upon the ancient throne of theMoguls,” the poem invokes the power and glory of the ancient in-digenous empire—which was an astonishingly complex compromisebetween Hindu, Moslem, and other cultures and subcultures.35 The

31. Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 166.32. Royal Proclamation, November 1, 1858, in The Evolution of India and Pakistan,

1858 to 1947, ed. C. H. Philips et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 10–11.33. For a cogent account of how this fundamental contradiction regularly produced

vacillation in imperial policy over the period 1858–1914, see Robin J. Moore, “ImperialIndia, 1858–1914,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed.Andrew Porter (Oxford University Press, 1999), 422–46.

34. Jowett’s brothers, William and Alfred, both officers in the East India Company’sarmy, died of disease in 1850 and 1858, respectively. Tennyson’s son, Lionel, a civilservant in the India Office, died in 1886 on his way home from India. As Jowettadvised another relative, “I hope you know how to live and not die in India, which Ibelieve greatly to be an art” (The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, ed. Evelyn Abbott,2 vols. [London, 1897], 1:19).

35. Lytton, quoted in Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 187. See, for instance, AzizAhmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964),and An Intellectual History of Islam in India (Edinburgh University Press, 1969); and JohnF. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 34–40.


poem eschews the Enlightenment stereotype of oriental despotism andinsists on the Moghul empire’s achievements: “Akbar’s rapid conquestsand the good government of his fifteen provinces with their completemilitary, civil and political systems,” Tennyson’s note assures us, “makehim conspicuous among the great kings of history” (line 25n). Butunlike the Imperial Assemblage, the poem imagines the empire as apolitical form that has the potential to transcend itself from within: itis not timeless, unresisting, or unchanging, but, under the leadership ofa hero like Akbar, capable of development and dramatic improvement.

For Tennyson, what most gives India a history, in the sense that Hegelor Marx would have understood, is the Moghul empire’s progresstoward religious toleration. Akbar effects real change. He rejects theinsistence of the ulema (line 45) on one faith. He despises these clericaljurists who “sitting on green sofas contemplate / The torment of thedamned” (lines 46–47) and reveals himself as a visionary capable ofunderstanding that all religions are one—“There is light in all,” hemuses, “And light, with more or less of shade, in all / Man-modes ofworship” (lines 43–45). The symbol of this new all-embracing “DivineFaith” is the sun (lines 98–102). At this point, it becomes clear thatTennyson’s Akbar is, to some extent at least, rehearsing contemporaryBritish policy, for in identifying the sun in all its religious manifes-tations with Christ “the Sun of Righteousness” (line 80), Tennyson isinvoking a specific understanding of Christianity as the religion oftoleration.36 As Akbar stumbles on his conception of a new religionof toleration by listening to a Portuguese Jesuit quoting Christ (lines71–82), so Disraeli had come to realize that the best way to representthe Raj’s religious policy was to declare that “neutrality & toleration inmatters of religious faith are part & parcel of the system of Christianitywhich this Country & its Queen professes.”37 Akbar comes to perceiveChrist’s injunction to bless even our persecutors as “a purer gleam /Than glances from the sun of our Islam” (lines 75–76). Guided bythis light in a way that suggests why the conventionally progressiveAnglo-Indians in a work like Forster’s Passage to India admire him so

36. For the similar use of Christian solar imagery—the political use of Sol Iustitiae,the “Sun of Righteousness” (Mal. 4:2)—to identify Christ the Son of God with the solardeities of the late Roman Empire, see Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 258–65.

37. Sir Philip Rose to Disraeli, August 12, 1858, in Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J. A. W.Gunn and M. G. Wiebe, 7 vols. (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 7:231n. We are in-debted to Mel Wiebe for this reference. Although Disraeli was at this time chancellorof the exchequer, he played a major role in formulating and passing the 1858 India Act.See Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York University Press, 1966), 386.


much,38 Akbar determines “to hunt the tiger of oppression out / Fromoffice; and to spread the Divine Faith / Like calming oil on all theirstormy creeds” (lines 150–52). But, when he discovers in his dream thathe will fail, and that it will be the English, coming from out of thesun, who will rebuild his temple and complete his reforms, he says:“All praise to Alla by whatever hands / My mission be accomplished!”(lines 188–89). Thus, while Tennyson’s story simultaneously paysdeference to Indian culture and reminds the Raj of its progressiveobligations, it remains an act of self-serving appropriation, seeking tosuggest the authenticity of the English as Indians and the legitimacyof their rule as the means by which India will fulfill the promise ofits past. Though it comes nowhere near meeting the objections of adetermined anti-imperialist like John Hobson on the issue of self-government (quoted in our opening paragraph), the poem offers itsaudience a way of believing in the idealism and coherence of Britishimperial policy and so sustaining their identity as essentially truthfuland just. But this is only half the story.

“The appropriation of a past by conquest,” says Ranajit Guha, thedoyen of the subaltern studies group, “carries with it the risk of re-bounding upon the conquerors.”39 Appropriation cannot escape risk,because every act of appropriation is both a taking possession and aletting go.40 As boundaries are crossed, appropriation even by the mostpowerful conquerors or colonizers risks reverse transculturation. The“hybridization” transculturation produces in the colonized may, asHomi Bhabha has argued, actually constitute a form of resistance.Under a tree outside Delhi in 1817, for instance, Hindu converts toChristianity refuse to believe that the Bible could have come fromflesh-eating Europeans and, in their insistence that it was a revela-tion from an angel at Hurdwar Fair, transform their new religion intowhat might appear to Western eyes as a form of mimicry that mockstheir own cultural identity.41 The mighty weakness of the colonizedstands in sharp contrast to the weak mightiness of the colonizer. That

38. Akbar allows Miss Quested to believe in her future as an Anglo-Indian: as she ex-plains to Aziz, “Some women are so—well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, andI should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them. . . . That’s why I want Akbar’s‘universal religion’ or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible. Do you see whatI mean?” (E. M. Forster, A Passage to India [1924; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin,2000], 157).

39. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.

40. See Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981), 192. We are grateful to Adam Hammond for this reference.

41. See Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 102–22.


latter weakness is evident not only in the “terror” hybridization mayproduce but much more clearly in the doubts new ways of seeing thingsmay sow. Weakness in this sense is more than evident in Tennyson’spoem, for while his politics are clear, his religion is not. As Tennyson’scopious notes suggest, over a century of scholarly inquiry into Indianreligion had had an enormous impact on his understanding of Chris-tianity. Most important, Christianity is no longer seen as God’s ex-clusive revelation but as merely one religion among many. Christ’sassertions that “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” that “no mancometh to the Father, but by me” ( John 14:6), are quietly dismissedas solipsistic: “every splintered fraction of a sect / Will clamour ‘Iam on the Perfect Way, / All else is to perdition’ ” (lines 33–35). Theidealization of Akbar’s Divine Faith indicates the degree to which, forVictorian intellectuals like Jowett and Tennyson, the Deist concept that“all religions are one” now bears the added burden of Indian thoughtand history. If the poem is British as a political speech act, it is Indianas a religious one. It grants the authority of toleration’s origin toIndia not Europe—Akbar’s “tolerance of religions and abhorrence ofreligious persecution,” says Tennyson, “put our Tudors to shame” (head-note).42 The poem also implicitly questions the totalizing confidenceof so many Christian missionaries actively at work in Victorian India.In this, it effectively reopens the early nineteenth-century debatebetween Orientalists and Occidentalists.

Sir William Jones and Lakshmi’s Smile

The Occidentalist position, exemplified by Macaulay’s infamous 1835“Minute on Indian Education,” maintained that England had nothing tolearn from India and that in order to rule India, its principal concernshould be the production of a subaltern class of cultural interpreters,“Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in moralsand in intellect.”43 The older, Orientalist position as exemplified by thenumerous works of Sir William Jones, one of the East India Company’sSupreme Court Justices in Calcutta, maintained the opposite. Jonesthought that England had everything to learn from India and that ifit was to govern its new dominion effectively, it had to produce the

42. In this Tennyson inadvertently recovers something of the decentering medievaltradition of travelers’ stories from the East; see, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt’schapter on Mandeville in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Universityof Chicago Press, 1991), 26–51.

43. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney(University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249.


cultural knowledge that would best enable it to give its “Indiansubjects the benefit of their own beloved and revered laws.”44 FromJones’s founding of the Asiatic Society in 1784, and despite theeventual triumph of the Occidentalists, the British pursued a sys-tematic attempt to recover India’s past. In his debts to the AsiaticSociety, Tennyson was the heir of Jones and the Orientalist tradition.The books and articles that Jowett fed Tennyson from Balliol CollegeLibrary for his work on “Akbar’s Dream” were based on researchinspired by the Asiatic Society. Even such an early oriental poem asTennyson’s 1827 “Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan” wasbased on Jones’s own history of the shah. For admirers like GarlandCannon, Jones remains “one of the greatest intellectual explorersof all time,”45 the polymath who first conceived the Indian origin ofEuropean languages and first determined the chronology of ancientIndian history. For postcolonial scholars like Said, however, Jonesexemplifies the hegemonic nature of “Orientalist” scholarship. Heappears as the Baconian conqueror of an empire of knowledge, deter-mined to “rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident,”to “gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turnit into a province of European learning.”46 Said’s representation ofJones seems now dismissively one-sided, for Jones was even moreintensely conflicted between the instrumental and the spiritual thanTennyson was. Indeed, it is the Occidentalist not the Orientalistposition that best, though certainly not exclusively, illustrates the sub-stance of what Said means by “Orientalism.”47

In terms of instrumental categories like law and governance, thereis clearly much to Said’s view. Jones was a liberal rationalist, an En-lightenment philosophe. Indians should certainly have their ownlaws, he felt, but only after they had been digested—recovered andreordered—by reason, that is, by Western rationalism. Indians them-selves were unfit for the task. As Jones explained to an American friend,they “are incapable of civil liberty; few of them have any idea of it;and those who have, do not wish it. They must (I deplore the evil, butknow the necessity of it) they must be ruled by an absolute power.”48

What they are, we were. Most disturbingly, this historicist arrogance

44. The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,1970), 2:720 (October 24, 1786).

45. Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Fatherof Modern Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 361.

46. Said, Orientalism, 78.47. See Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 23–24.48. Jones, Letters, 2:712–13 (October 1, 1786).


is contaminated by surprisingly virulent moments of racism. In aletter to another friend, he confides, “I was forced to borrow of ablack man [a local Bengali money lender], and it was like touchinga snake or the South American eel.”49 In terms of noninstrumentalcategories like literature and religion, however, this highly emotionalirrationalism takes an unpredictable turn. The culture of Hinduism—later so hated by the Occidentalists—Jones loved, and he loved it in sucha way that it responds directly to one of Chakrabarty’s key questions:“If the nation, the people, or the country were not just to be observed,described, and critiqued but loved as well, what would guarantee thatthey were indeed worth loving unless one saw in them something thatwas already lovable?” (149).

Jones is visibly moved by his experience of Bengal—its sights andsounds provide an extraordinary stimulus to his imagination: “We areliterally lulled to sleep by Persian nightingales,” he writes from thegardens of Allipore, “and cease to wonder, that the Bulbul, with athousand tales, makes such a figure in Oriental poetry.”50 His responseis profoundly affective. His own culture’s desire for sensibility, foraestheticized emotion—benevolence, on the one hand, and “noveltyand wildness,” on the other—makes him especially susceptible to Hinduculture.51 As he reads the Hindu scriptures in Persian translation—translations made possible by Akbar’s sixteenth-century policy of re-ligious toleration—Jones becomes increasingly enthralled: “I am inlove with the Gopia, charmed with Crishen, an enthusiastick admirerof Ram, and a devout adorer of Brimha-bishen-mehais; not to men-tion, that Judishteir, Arjen, Corno, and the other warriours of theM’hab’harat appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, andAchilles appeared, when I first read the Iliad.”52 As he learns the sacredlanguage of Sanskrit, he comes to know Lakshmi herself, the goddessof domestic well-being whose loss is lamented by Chakrabarty in Pro-vincializing Europe—the figure whom the historian feels epitomizes theWest’s inability to comprehend darshan, a vision of things that is notsubject-centered, not contingent on any concept of mind, but com-munal, sedimented into the language and other cultural structures, andmost evident in the uncanny sensation of language thinking throughus or quotidian practices living through us. Jones certainly feels hecan see the smiling figure of Lakshmi—though we may wonder if whathe sees is exactly the same as the goddess that Chakrabarty imagines.

49. Ibid., 2:694 (February 27, 1786).50. Ibid., 2:648 (April 26, 1784).51. Ibid., 2:649 ( June 22, 1784).52. Ibid., 2:652.


In Jones’s 1788 “Hymn to Lacshmi,” she at first seems irredeemablywesternized—she is associated with Ceres and hailed as Milton mighthave saluted her had she appeared in L’Allegro. Even so, it soonbecomes apparent that this is not just another act of appropriation.The association of Lakshmi with Ceres is precisely Jones’s attempt toarticulate something like darshan—in this case, a moment of percep-tion in which the divinity of a timeless natural world and the cultureJones associates with it is seen to be living through its creatures:

Such were thy gifts, Pedmala [Lakshmi], such thy pow’r!For, when thy smile irradiates yon blue fields,Observant Indra sheds the genial show’r,And pregnant earth her springing tribute yields. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The rivers broad, like busy should’ring bands,

Clap their applauding hands;The marish dances and the forest sings. . . . . . . . . . . . . .And shouting hills proclaim th’ abundant year,That food to herds, to herdsmen plenty brings,

And wealth to guardian kings.53

Without knowing it, Jones is imitating what generations of Moslemshad done before him. The desire to experience and understand pre-cipitates acculturation. As M. L. Roy Choudhary pointed out in 1952,Lakshmi had long since ceased to be a purely Hindu goddess, and hersongs [are to this day] “still sung by Moslem Faqirs in Western Bengalvillages.”54

The “Hymn to Lacshmi” is one of Jones’s many responses to readingthe Bhagavad-Gita. He read the poem in the company of indigenousscholars, many of whom he came to revere—the Brahmin, “who read itwith me, was frequently stopped by his tears.”55 Jones knows that heis on sacred ground, but he also knows that he is in the presence of thequotidian. As he sets out to compose the poem, Bengal is overtakenby famine, and he understands the pain of Lakshmi’s absence. As helater wrote,“the Goddess of Abundance, indeed, has not been kind thisyear; for we are just escaped from a famine; thousands have perishedin the late dearth, and thousands are fed every day in Calcutta, whererice is distributed by English gentlemen, most of whom have subscribed

53. William Jones, “Hymn to Lacshmi,” in Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. MichaelJ. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), lines 199–214.

54. M. L. Roy Choudhary, The Din-i-Lahi, or the Religion of Akbar (Calcutta: Das Gupta,1952), 6.

55. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 154.


500 rupees to purchase it: I subscribed 1000 & will double my sub-scription, if the dearth be not removed by the approaching harvest.”56

At a time when the East India Company still employed a full-timeBrahmin in its salt warehouses “to perform prayers to the goddessLaxmi ‘to secure the Company’s trade in salt against loss,’ ”57 Jonespoints to the centrality of the goddess in understanding everyday lifein India. He sees that England in India needs to do something morethan follow the dictates of cost-effective instrumentalism. Against thegathering power of Occidentalist bureaucrats and missionaries, heurges his readers to consider “that the allegories contained in the‘Hymn to Lacshmi’ constitute at this moment the prevailing religionof a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believedby millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whosemanners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearlyaffect all Europeans, who reside among them.”58

When Jones’s work on Indian religion and literature is placed inthe context of the prevailing Orientalist mood of the 1770s and 1780s,the mood William Dalrymple has so brilliantly evoked in his book WhiteMughals, it can be seen to constitute an argument for limited hetero-genization—for Hindu manners and the way in which they have beenassimilated into Indian Islam to affect all Europeans. In Jones’s casehis understanding of Christianity itself begins to change: “I am noHindu; but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning a futurestate to be incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likelyto deter men from vice, than the horrid opinions inculcated by Chris-tians on punishment without end.”59 Just as Tennyson’s Akbar comes todespise Moslem jurists for the pleasure they take in the torture of thedamned, so Jones does his Christian coreligionists. In his high esti-mation of Hindu religion, he echoes the 1775 response of the CriticalReview to Nathaniel Halhead’s translation of what Halhead took to beHindu law: “This is a sublime performance,” writes the anonymous re-viewer; “the most amiable part of modern philosophy is hardly upona level with the extensive charity, the comprehensive benevolence, of afew rude, untutored Hindoo Bramins.”60 In comparison, Europe seemsprovincial.

As their imaginations became increasingly Indianized, Orientalistscholars like Jones, Halhead, or Charles Wilkins, and even more so

56. Jones, Letters, 2:813 (September 19, 1788).57. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

(London: HarperCollins, 2002), 47–48.58. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 154.59. Jones, Letters, 2:766 (September 4, 1787).60. Quoted in Dalrymple, White Mughals, 40.


Orientalist soldiers like David Ochterlony, Charles Stuart, or JamesKirkpatrick, were more than willing to compromise on their culturaldifference, on what Chatterjee calls “the alienness of the rulingclass.”61 Had they been able to do so, the British Raj might havebecome indigenized as the Moghuls had become before them. In this,the example of Jones is crucial. It illuminates the historical substanceof Akbar’s dream—that it was not the gleam of Jesuit revelation that ledthe historical emperor to religious toleration but the peculiar nature ofIndian heterogeneity, the impact not only of Hindu manners, “inter-woven with their religious opinions,” but of the unusually diversifiedforms of Indian Islam on India’s central Asian Moghul invaders.The great Indian historian Romila Thapar describes the impact of“Hinduism” ’s diversity on the British Orientalists: “In the course ofinvestigating what came to be called Hinduism, together with variousaspects of its belief, ritual and custom, many were baffled by a religionthat was altogether different from their own. It was not monotheistic,there was no historical founder, or single sacred text, or dogma or eccle-siastical organization—and it was closely tied to caste.”62 The Moghulsand earlier Islamic invaders were equally confused, and the effect wasthat in early modern India, “diverse and multiple religions were prac-ticed, with royal patronage extending to more than one” (3). The veryheterogeneity of Hindu and Indian Islamic culture encouraged thediversity and transculturation that is so apparent in Akbar’s empire.63

It is this historical possibility, then, the Moghul Empire as a pre-cedent for what might have happened to the British Raj, that makesthe experience of the first English travelers to Moghul India in thelate sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries so important. Theirexperience in witnessing such a heterogeneous and tolerant polity isremarkable. It allows us to see nascent Western historicism at both itsmost formidable and most fragile. The New World afforded no suchpolity as did Moghul India. On the one hand, these travelers’ ex-perience suggests the degree to which historicism encourages Orien-talism in Said’s sense regardless of the West’s immediate, actual power;it suggests that Orientalism is not simply a function of materialpower, a view that is implicit in recent works like Richmond Barbour’s

61. For a rejection of the idea that Jones’s imagination is ever fully engaged with India,see Jenny Sharpe, “The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; or How Sir WilliamJones Discovered India,” boundary 2 20 (1993): 26–45. Needless to say, we disagree withher conclusions.

62. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002), 3. References hereafter cited in the text.

63. See Sen, Argumentative Indian, esp. 41–42.


otherwise persuasive book Before Orientalism.64 On the other hand,the experience of the early modern travelers suggests how easily thathistoricist sense of superiority may be undone. In comparing the ex-perience of eighteenth-century British Orientalists and that of earlyseventeenth-century English travelers, it becomes increasingly evidentthat when Indian religion encouraged toleration and transculturation,it did so by inadvertently appealing to noninstrumental cultural needsor imperatives that already animated the colonizers and travelers. IfJones were made open to Hindu religion by his own culture’s pre-occupation with affect, sensibility, and benevolence, early Englishtravelers were similarly made open to Moghul toleration by a pre-occupation with civility—a conception of civility that undermines theforce of their own incipient historicism.

P A R T I I

Religious Toleration in Moghul India

In November 1558, two years after Akbar became Moghul emperor,Elizabeth Tudor became Queen of England. Five years later, in 1563,the year in which Akbar revoked the tax on Hindu pilgrims, Elizabethcompleted the first phase of her religious settlement with a new Act ofUniformity. These two polities, Moghul India and Protestant England,are classic examples of what Hardt and Negri, deeply engaged with thearguments of Benedict Anderson, mean by patrimonial and nationalempire states.65 In European history, these neo-Marxist critics argue,the latter is built on the terrain of the former, and the two kinds ofempire are most easily distinguished from each other by the displace-ment of sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the conceptof “the people.” They quote Hobbes to establish the point: “The peoplerules in all governments. For even in monarchies the people com-mands; for the people wills by the will of one man . . . (however itseem a paradox) the king is the people.”66 For Hardt and Negri, the“people” is merely a cypher for the state, but for contemporary re-publican thinkers like James Harrington, the displacement of powerto ordinary citizens seemed substantial. For Harrington writing in

64. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626(Cambridge University Press, 2004).

65. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, esp. 93–113; and Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London:Verso, 1991).

66. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, quoted in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 103.


his 1656 Oceana, the beginnings of this process of displacement wereto be located in the time of the Tudors, specifically in the reign ofElizabeth. The queen, Harrington argues, was too wise not to seethat the Reformation, especially the dissolution of the monasteries, hadprecipitated a radical shift in power to the people, and accordinglyshe converted her “reign through the perpetuall Love-tricks that passedbetween her and her people into a kind of Romanze,” enabling theHouse of Commons “to raise that head which since hath been so highand formidable unto their princes.”67 For a liberal scholar like LiahGreenfeld, this displacement of sovereignty is at the heart of theargument that Protestant England is the prototype of the modernnation-state, the embryo out of which modern Western democracies,with their emphatic distinction between religious and secular spheresof action, developed.68 However persuasive these master narrativesmight be—both of them variations on the great theme of Western his-toricism—popular sovereignty and religious toleration were not obviouscharacteristics of Elizabethan England. The irony we need to returnto is Tennyson’s—that is, at precisely the time when a “new” Westernnation-state reembarked on a policy of rigorous and increasingly brutalreligious uniformity,69 an “old” patrimonial eastern empire initiateda policy of toleration. In comparison with “medieval” India, earlymodern England seems remarkably provincial.

Unlike Babur, the central Asian monarch who founded the Moghulempire, Babur’s grandson Akbar was a native of India—Jalal-ud-DinMuhammad Akbar was born in Amarkot in Sindh on October 15, 1542.Although Akbar spent much of his childhood in Afghanistan, he feltat home in India, and in his late teens married into a distinguishedRajput family without insisting that his bride, Man Moti, convert toIslam.70 Man Moti became the mother of Akbar’s son and successor,

67. Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1957), 140.

68. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992), esp. 14–17, 29–87. Greenfeld’s thesis is now hotly disputed. See,for instance, Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood inthe Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Krishan Kumar,The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also PaulStevens, “Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100(2001): 247–68.

69. See, for instance, John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press,1988), 290–308; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion inEngland, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 565–93.

70. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (1902; repr., New Delhi:Atlantic, 1989), 2:240–43. For the life and beliefs of Akbar, see Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi;


Jahangir. For the old Timurid emperor, Babur, India was always aforeign country: “Hindostan is a place of little charm,” he complained.“There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, nopoetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. . . .The peasantry and common people parade around stark naked.”71 “Itis a strange country,” he felt. “Compared to ours, it is another world.”72

Akbar felt differently. He was fascinated by India and extended hispatronage to all religious groups that were prepared to live peaceablywithin his empire. To Sikhs, whose religion most dramatically exem-plified the synthesis of Hindu and Moslem traditions, he gave the cityof Amritsar; to Christians, he allowed the freedom to build churchesand proselytize; to Jains, he gave his protection; but most important,to Hindus, he gave enormous material relief and also devoted timeand energy to understanding and recovering their traditions. Persiantranslations of Hindu classics like the Mahabharata, the very transla-tions through which, as we have seen, Sir William Jones first becamefamiliar with Hindu literature, were the work of Akbar’s scholars. AsTennyson was the cultural heir of Jones’s Indian scholarship, so Joneshimself in an immediate and tangible way was the legatee of Akbar’sopenness to transculturation. Scholars like Akbar’s servant Abdul QadirBadauni worked on Sanskrit texts in exactly the same way that Jonesdid—eking out his growing knowledge of Sanskrit with the aid of aHindu pundit. Badauni is especially interesting because he is more thanwilling to explain what he perceives as the dangers of transculturation.He describes Akbar’s interest in other religions as a process of con-fusion, unmooring, and loss: “Doubt accumulated on doubt and theobject of his search was lost. The ramparts of the law and the truefaith were broken down, and in the course of five or six years not asingle trace of Islam was left in him.”73 Akbar’s minister and biog-rapher, Abu’l Fazl, sees this process somewhat differently. Through thediscussions that Akbar initiated at the House of Worship at Fatehpur-Sikri, “the degrees of reason and the stages of vision were tested, and

71. Zahir al-Din Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans.and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 350.

72. Ibid., 332.73. Quoted in Wheeler M. Thackston, “Literature,” in The Magnificent Mughals, ed.

Zeenut Ziad (Oxford University Press, 2002), 105.

A. L. Srivastava, Akbar the Great: Political History, 1542–1605, 2 vols. (Agra: Shiva LalAgarwala, 1962), 1:61–63; Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar and Religion (Delhi: Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1989); Shirin Moosvi, ed., Episodes in the Life of Akbar: ContemporaryRecords and Reminiscences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994); and Irfan Habib, ed.,Akbar and His India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).


all the heights and depths of intelligence were traversed, and the lampof perception was brightened.”74

Extraordinary as Akbar clearly was, his sympathy for his Hindusubjects was not simply a matter of his individual genius—it grew outof a sensitivity to a long-standing process of cultural integration andassimilation. As John Richards has pointed out, in sixteenth-centuryIndia, after generations of contact, in both Hinduism and Islam “manymystics, scholars, intellectuals, and more ordinary folk were activelyseeking some form of synthesis.” Especially “in folk culture,” Richardscontinues, “there was substantial sharing of customs, ceremonies, andbeliefs between ordinary Muslims and Hindus. Such practices as theworship of the smallpox goddess Sitla were often practiced as ardentlyby Muslims as Hindus in the countryside.”75 For many members of theimperial elite, though certainly not all, Hindus as Hindus had becomemembers of the “imagined community”—a community not defined innational but in increasingly universalist terms. Akbar’s friend, Abu’lFazl, explains the universalism that drove the emperor’s reforms. Thepoll tax or jizya on non-Moslems was abolished in 1564 “as the foun-dation of the arrangement of mankind” in “the administration of theworld.”76 The tax on Hindu pilgrims was revoked the year beforebecause “although the folly of a sect might be clear, yet as they hadno conviction they were on the wrong path, to demand money fromthem, and to put a stumbling block in the way of what they had madea means of approach to the sublime threshold of Unity and consideredas the worship of the Creator” was contrary to both “the discriminatingintellect” and “the will of God.”77 These reforms were only the begin-ning, and what they suggest is a polity confident enough in its wealthand efficiency not to be dominated by narrowly conceived instrumen-talist concerns but to tolerate and respond imaginatively to the culturaldiversity it had inherited. This toleration—rooted in the experience ofdiversity, precipitated by a genuinely religious desire for synthesis,and idealized in various forms of political universalism—was more than

74. Abdul Qadir Badauni, quoted in Thackston, “Literature,” 104.75. Richards, Mughal Empire, 34. See also Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi; Nizami, Akbar and

Religion, 28–77; and Ahmad, Intellectual History, esp. 29–30.76. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:316.77. Ibid., 2:295. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar sounds strikingly like Thomas More’s King Utopus:

as soon as Utopus had conquered the island, “he decreed that every man might culti-vate the religion of his choice, and proselytize for it too, provided he did so quietly,modestly, rationally, and without bitterness to others.” Utopus did this “not simply for thesake of peace, which he saw was being destroyed by constant quarrels and implacablehatreds, but also for the sake of religion itself” (Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M.Logan and Robert M. Adams [Cambridge University Press, 1989], 97).


evident when English travelers began to arrive in Moghul India in thelate sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The travelers we would draw attention to are members of the groupnow familiar to students of the English in Moghul India, the group thatfound itself at the court of Akbar’s son, Jahangir, between 1615–19:James I’s ambassador and the East India Company’s agent, Sir ThomasRoe; Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry; and their acquaintance, “the famousunwearied walker,” Thomas Coryat.78 It is important to emphasizethat, despite their powerlessness, these travelers first arrived with thesame sense of cultural superiority to Asian Indians that their fellowEuropeans routinely showed to American Indians. The ambassador,Roe, a friend of the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh, was in fact a NewWorld explorer, having unsuccessfully attempted in 1610–11 to con-firm his mentor’s claims about gold in Guiana. In traveling to India,he and others were convinced that they were traveling back in time—if not to the “savagery” of America then at least to the “medieval” worldtheir own historicism had just begun to create and from which theirsocieties felt themselves to be emerging.79 The very theatricality of theMoghul court that preoccupies Barbour in his account of Roe suggeststhe inauthenticity, false appearance, and corruption of the “middle” agethat fell between ancient and modern.80 For Roe, a former memberof James I’s obstinate “addled” Parliament of 1614, the theatricalityof the Moghul court masks a slavery worse than feudal since, so hebelieved, Moghul subjects hold nothing in fee—they have no property,

78. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul,1615–1619, ed. Sir William Foster, 2 vols. (1899; repr., Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint,1967), 1:103. For various Orientalist accounts of these travelers, see Kate Teltscher,India Inscribed: English and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1995); Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: Discoveriesof India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996); John Michael Archer,Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing(Stanford University Press, 2001); Richmond Barbour, “Power and Distant Display:Early English Ambassadors in Moghul India,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1999):343–68, and Before Orientalism. For a different perspective, see Rahul Sapra, “A Peace-able Kingdom in the East: Favourable Early Seventeenth-Century Representations ofthe Moghul Empire,” Renaissance and Reformation 27 (2003 [pub. 2006]): 5–36.

79. Roe’s deep-rooted sense of cultural superiority is evident throughout his letters,but this passage imagining a new history of India is especially striking. The new historywould culminate, he says to his friend, George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury,in “the arrival of our Nation on this coast, [with] their fortunate or blessed victoryesouer their enemyes [the Portuguese] that not only sought to possesse these quarters bythemselves, and to forbid all others that Nature had left free . . . but alsoe to abuse thispeople” (Roe, Embassy, 1:309).

80. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 167–85.


“for as all his Subjects are slaves, so is he [the emperor] in a kind ofreciprocall bondage,”81 having to obey the endless theatrical customsof public appearance and deliberation. To claim as Roe does, to areadership as sensitive to the role of the law in governance as theEnglish in 1616, that “they have no written Law,” that “the King byhis owne word ruleth,”82 is to medievalize Moghul India long beforeJames Mill’s supremely Occidentalist 1817 history.83 But what makesRoe and his fellow travelers so interesting is not so much their in-clination to historicize cultural differences as their confusion whenconfronted by the actual experience of Moghul India.

Transculturation and English Confusion

Unlike their reaction to so much they encountered in Moghul India,the response of these travelers to the experience of religious tolerationwas profoundly conflicted. On the one hand, it was quite literally dis-missed as “Confusion,”84 while on the other, it was welcomed andgrudgingly admired. After explaining in some detail the “medievalism”implicit in the religion of both Moslems and Hindus, that they “groundtheir opinions on tradition, not reason,” Terry, for instance, concludedwith a sense of security bordering on satisfaction that “all religions[in Jahangir’s empire] are tolerated, and their priests [held] in goodesteeme. My selfe often received from the Mogol himselfe the appel-lation of Father, with other many gracious words, [and] with placeamongst his best nobles.”85 Thirty years before, one of the first Englishtravelers to India, Ralph Fitch, had expressed the same sense of security.

81. Roe, Embassy, 1:107–8.82. Ibid., 1:110.83. Monarchy unrestrained by written law is not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but in

seventeenth-century England, through the influence of theories like the “Norman Yoke,”it became a defining characteristic. In 1598, for instance, the future James I providedhis future adversaries with ammunition by insisting that England after the NormanConquest had been an absolute monarchy and what law there was was largely a matterof royal condescension (see The True Law of Free Monarchies, ed. Daniel Fischlin and MarkFortier [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996], 70–72). Inhis 1654 Second Defence of the English People, Milton sees the sources of this “medieval”absolutism as analogous to those of Indian idolatry: while Hindus “worship as gods themalevolent demons whom they cannot exorcize,” the common people of England had,in “blind superstition,” accepted the Norman Yoke, established “as gods . . . the mostimpotent of mortals,” and made a “sacred institution” of monarchy (Complete Prose Worksof John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1953–82], 4:551).

84. Roe, Embassy, 1:312.85. Terry, quoted in William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London:

Oxford University Press, 1921), 325, 331.


Fitch is every bit as contemptuous as Terry of indigenous religion, buthis escape from the Christian colony of Goa to the many-religionedrealm of Akbar reads like a fable of liberation. In April 1584, fleeingfrom arbitrary imprisonment and the threat of the Portuguese strapado,Fitch eventually found his way into the empire—“It is a marveillousgreat and a populous countrey,” he exclaims, and its capital, Agra, is“greater then London,” “a very great citie and populous, built withstone, having faire and large streetes, with a faire river running byit. . . . Here bee many Moores and Gentiles” and “the King is calledZelabdim Echebar.”86 Terry is especially interesting because in travelingto India he travels back to a melange of medieval and biblical times.Over and again, images of what strike Terry as a medieval culture alsorealize Old Testament scenes: for instance, sati or the superstitious prac-tice of widow burning, he explains, is not unlike “the custome of theAmmonites, who, when they made their children passe through thefire to Moloch, caused certain tabret or drums to sound, that their crymight not be heard.”87 At the same time, however, despite this in-tense drive to derogate by historicizing difference, Terry continues toenjoy and applaud the empire’s religious freedom. After describing adaring public affront to Islam made by Coryat, an affront that in anyother Moslem country would have cost Coryat his life, Terry confidentlyreflects: “But here every man hath libertie to professe his owne religionfreely and, for any restriction I ever observed, to dispute against theirswith impunitie.”88 This confidence in toleration is important not simplybecause it offers security or opportunities to proselytize but becauseit reveals how toleration appeals to these humanist-educated travelers’sense of civility. Civility, it needs to be emphasized, is a cultural im-perative every bit as powerful as historicism in early modern Europe,and the irony here is that the intermittently recognized civility of theMoghul state’s policy of religious toleration complicates Western his-toricism’s tendency to represent the East as an image of its own medi-eval or barbaric past. The civility of the empire of Akbar and Jahangir

86. Fitch, quoted in ibid., 16–18. There may be a memory here of Marco Polo’sresponse to the capital of the Great Khan. From Marco Polo through the seventeenthand into the eighteenth century, there is a recurrent tendency to idealize China. Milton’selderly adversary, Joseph Hall, for instance, puts it this way in his youth: “who ever ex-pected such wit, such government in China? Such arts, such practice of all cunning?We thought learning had dwelt in our part of the world; they laugh at us for it, and wellmay” (The Discovery of a New World [London, 1608], 13). Roe himself expresses dis-appointment that India, certainly in terms of commodities or “rarietyes,” turns out tobe something less than China (see Roe, Embassy, 1:134).

87. Terry, quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 323.88. Ibid., 315.


functions not as a shadowy type of what the Victorians will providebut as a real model of what so many early modern Europeans actuallydesired, especially those spirits like the Montaigne of the essay oncannibals or the John Donne of Satyre III who hunger and thirst afterrelease from wars of religion or Elizabethan persecution.89

The force of this irony seems unavailable to most scholarship onEngland in Moghul India. Even a critic as acute as Kate Teltscher seesthe early modern mode of understanding and representing India as aclosed system. Travel writers, she argues, know their readers, and thosereaders “only believe what they want to be told; they want to hear of thestrangeness, difference and barbarity of abroad to flatter their ownsense of civilization at home”—that is, they want cultural differenceto be historicized.90 A writer like Sir Thomas Roe, she feels, howeverpotentially open to experiences that might decenter his own cultureand provincialize Europe, is always conscious of just how unreceptivehis public might be and so is careful to censor his own text. But if thisis the case, then it is not clear why Roe and others talk in the way theydo about religious toleration to the closed-minded “public” Teltscherimagines for them. A more immediate problem with this argument,however, is that the text of Roe that Teltscher uses is from Purchas HisPilgrimes.91 There Roe is certainly censored—but not by himself so muchas by the Reverend Samuel Purchas. What most obviously gets lost inPurchas’s edition is any clear sense of Roe’s text as a journal—a text inwhich entries are written day by day as they occur, not for the pleasureof the public but primarily for the practical use of the East India Com-pany. Because of this, events and observations in Sir William Foster’sscholarly edition of Roe often read quite differently. Most important,the one example of cultural instability in Roe that Teltscher concedesturns out in Foster’s edition to be a story as much about civility asabout Christian humility.

The passage Teltscher focuses on is Roe’s moving account of Ja-hangir’s encounter with a “professed Poore holy” beggar on December18, 1616.92 There, she argues, because Jahangir’s act of humility in con-versing and eating with the beggar and then raising up his filthy bodyin his arms realizes the biblical ideal of Yahweh raising up the poor in

89. For a fine analysis of Donne’s Satyre III and its relation to the powerful humanisttradition of religious toleration, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radi-calism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118–64.

90. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 28.91. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625;

repr., Glasgow: MacLehose and Sons, 1905–7).92. See ibid., 4:386–87; and Roe, Embassy, 1:364–67.


Hannah’s song against the arrogance of the mighty (1 Sam. 2:8), theheathen prince’s extraordinary virtue seems to unsettle Roe’s con-fidence in “Christian certainties.”93 In Foster’s more faithful edition,however, this incident appears not so much as a “submerged challenge”but as the occasion of an explicit and angry denunciation of Christianfailure: “I mention [this incident],” Roe says, “with envye and sorrow,that wee having the true vyne should bring forth Crabbes, and a bastardstock of grapes: that either our Christian Princes had this devotion orthat this Zeale were guided by the true light of the Gospell.”94 The de-nunciation opens a disturbing fissure that Purchas moves to contain.He deletes Roe’s angry sentence and adds a marginal gloss: “Humilitieand Charity superstitious, and therefore blind.”95 He may not be ableto close the fissure entirely, but he does mask Roe’s anger. That angeris important, because in the context of the sequence of daily eventsedited out by Purchas it indicates why the company’s business is fail-ing. Roe comes across Jahangir and the beggar because he is on his wayto see the emperor about a breakdown in relations between Moghulofficials and the East India Company, factors at Surat reported to himon December ninth—a breakdown occasioned by the incivility of theEnglish. Roe lays it down as a rule that “wee can never live withoutquarrell . . . untill our Commanders take order that noe man come toSuratt but on Just occasion and of Civil Carriage. . . . For what CivilTown will endure a stranger to force open in the streetes the closeChayres wherin their weomen are Carried (which they take for a dis-honor equall to a ravishment)?” (365). No matter how strange theircustoms are, Roe insists, civility demands they be respected. In thiscontext, the civility of Jahangir, the respect and “kindnes” he showsthe beggar (366) together with the many “just and gratious” words heoffers Roe himself and others (416), stands as a model to be emulatedby the English.

It is true that Roe’s confidence in Jahangir will wane as the possibilityof securing a comprehensive trade treaty fades, but at this point, hefeels sure that both his hope and security rest in the civility of the em-peror—“I stand on very fickle termes [here],” he writes to his friendGeorge Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on October 30, 1616,“though in extraordinarie Grace with the King, who is gentle, soft, andgood of disposition” (310). Roe despises the emperor’s weakness fordrink, but at this point even in drink Jahangir’s idealism is remembered

93. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 27.94. The phrase “submerged challenge” is Teltscher’s (ibid.); Roe’s denunciation can

be found in Embassy, 1:367.95. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:386.


warmly as Roe makes it clear that one of the chief marks of Moghulimperial sovereignty is the civility of religious toleration: “The goodking fell to dispute of the lawes of Moses, Jesus and Mahomet,” Roesays, “and in drinck was so kinde that he turned to mee, and said:Am I a king? You shall be wellcome: Christians, Moores, Jewes, heemeddled not with their faith: they Came all in love and hee wouldprotect them from wrong: they lived under his safety and none shouldoppresse them” (382). Our point is that civility, and the security itaffords, is the cultural imperative that enables Terry and Roe to valuethe Moghul policy of toleration even while they despise most of theactual religions it tolerates and are unaware of the degree to which itwas driven by the Islamic ruling elite’s heterogeneous Indian context.Civility is the countervailing tendency that disrupts, if it does not com-pletely prevent, their inclination to derogate by historicizing culturaldifferences. Most important, while for Roe civility certainly has an in-strumental dimension, it also points to something noninstrumental,something deeply sedimented in his own culture, as his reference to the“Gospel” indicates, and in his personal sense of being. The experienceof reading these travelers is not one of encountering a closed systembut one of listening to people who seem unmoored, unable to make uptheir minds, caught between instrumental and imaginative impera-tives.96 This is evident even in a protestant Christian as vehement anddemonstrative as Thomas Coryat.

Coryat is best remembered for the audacious public challenges hemade to Islam. While he considered Hinduism a self-evident abomina-tion, a matter of superstition and impiety among the “brutish ethnicks,”he thought Islam to be more dangerous because it appeared so muchlike a parody of Christianity.97 In the particular story Terry tells, Coryatchallenges local Moslems in Agra by imitating the mullah’s call toprayer. He responds to the mullah’s call, “No God but one God, andMahomet the ambassadour of God,” with his own cry from an adjacentminaret in Arabic, “No God but one God, and Christ the Sonne ofGod.” He “further added that Mahomet was an imposter” (315). Coryatis saved, as Terry points out, by the Moghul policy of toleration, but it isclear that this and other acts of confrontation by Coryat outrage thesense of civility of Terry’s master, Roe. Coryat’s letters home are fullof irritation at Roe’s disapproval, and for the ambassador’s part, the

96. On early modern “unmooring,” see Benedict Anderson, “Exodus,” Critical In-quiry 20 (1994): 314–27.

97. Coryat is quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 269. References hereafter citedin the text.


zealous Coryat, however sincere, is little more than an embarrass-ment, a “poor wretch” (286). Confrontational as Coryat is, however,the symmetry of his challenges suggests that he is not quite as closedas he appears. In the course of one public dispute, recorded in aletter to his mother, Coryat somewhat startlingly proclaims himself aMoslem or “Musulman,” arguing that because the appellation means“true believer,” he as a follower of Christ is more entitled to it thanany follower of Mohammed—his adversary in the dispute is merely apseudo-Moslem. In establishing this distinction, however, Coryat simul-taneously shows how much he and his adversary are not-so-secretsharers—in their desire to see themselves as true believers in the oneGod. This is even more evident in Coryat’s admiration for the deceasedinfidel, Akbar, and his son, Jahangir.

When Coryat’s “Observations” are put together with his letters home,it is difficult not to see the representation of Akbar’s love for hismother in the “Observations” as a projection of Coryat’s feelings forhis own “deare and wellbeloved Mother” (261) in the letters.98 Akbaris admired for both the civility of his filial piety toward his mother, acivility reminiscent of Aeneas’s piety toward his father, and for hisstrength of character in standing up to her. After a report that thePortuguese in Ormus had tied a copy of the Koran around the neckof a dog and proceeded to beat the dog about the town, Akbar’smother, Miriam-Makani, insists that the emperor do the same to theBible: “But hee denyed her request, saying that if it were ill in thePortugal’s to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King torequite ill with ill, for that the contempt of any religion was the con-tempt of God, and he would not be revenged upon an innocentbooke” (278). For Coryat, the moral is “that God would not suffer thesacred booke of His truth to be contemned amongst the infidels” (278).This may be the moral that a conventional sensitivity to divine historyor Christian providence demands, but it is not the moral that the rhe-torical organization of the anecdote suggests. The emotional forceof the story lies in Akbar’s willingness to stand against those he lovesmost on a matter of tolerationist principle—just as Coryat himselfis willing to stand against his mother’s desires in order to fulfill hisvocation and complete his travels: “Sweet mother, pray not let thiswound your heart, that I say [my return will be] four yeares hence,and not before” (260). The effect of this secret sharing is to foregroundthe principle on which Akbar stands, that is, that contempt for any re-

98. The letters were first published as pamphlets in 1616/17 and 1618 and the “Ob-servations” in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.


ligion is contempt for God. Through Coryat’s admiration for Akbar’scivility, his filial piety, and his strength of character, Coryat effectivelyvalorizes this principle of tolerance in a way that undermines the ex-clusivity of his own religious conviction. That exclusivity becomes evenmore unsettled in his representation of the Moslem Jahangir as aChristlike figure. In the penultimate anecdote of the “Observations,”Jahangir realizes the New Testament scene of the feeding of the fivethousand (Matt. 14:21): “For a close of this discourse,” says Coryat, “Icannot forget that memorable pietie, when at Asmere hee [ Jahangir]went afoot to the tombe of the prophet Hod. . . . [There he with hiswife, Normahal, kindled a fire under an immense brass pot] and madekitcherie for five thousand poore, taking out the first platter with hisowne hands and serving one; Normahal the second; and so his ladies allthe rest. Cracke mee this nut, all [ye] Papall charitie vaunters” (279–80).

When Terry looks back in 1655 over his experience of England inMoghul India, he travels back in time to the Old Testament experienceof Israel in Egypt. But what comes to mind is not the epic story ofIsrael’s exodus from the house of bondage; it is rather the romancestory of Joseph and his clan reunited in an empire of extraordinarypromise. Jahangir may have been difficult to deal with in businessmatters, but Terry concedes, “we Englishmen did not at all suffer bythat inconstancy of his, but there found a free trade, a peaceableresidence, and a very good esteem with that King and people; andmuch better (as I conceive) by reason of the prudence of my LordAmbassador, who was there (in some sense) like Joseph in the Courtof Pharoah [sic], for whose sake all his nation there seemed to fare thebetter.”99 This image epitomizes the unmooring we have been tryingto suggest. Over the course of the Hebrew scriptures, especially asthey are reproduced in the Christian Old Testament, pharaonic Egyptfunctions as one of the principal representations of the demonic otheragainst which Israel defines itself, but in the story of Joseph and hisbrothers, the story Terry finds most appropriate to explain his ex-perience, the teleological momentum of Israel’s divine history is dis-rupted by the contingency of Egypt’s plenitude and Pharaoh’s civility.At that moment, the moment when Pharaoh welcomes Joseph’s familyand Jacob blesses Pharaoh (Gen. 47:1–12), Egypt is no longer Israel’sdefining other. Similarly, in the innumerable moments of conflicted-ness, moments felt in response to the unexpected experience of tol-eration and civility, the old patrimonial empire of the Moghuls ceasesto function as the new English nation-state’s defining other. Historicismitself—in the sense of historical analysis—reveals that in the testimony

99. Quoted in Roe, Embassy, xlv.


of these English travelers the drive to derogate by historicizing cul-tural difference is anything but inevitable and indeed is left in somedisarray among the fragmentary glimpses of a peaceable kingdom.

To an extent that has received surprisingly little attention, there isevidence to suggest that those glimpses did affect England’s future.Coryat’s letters circulated among the group of intellectuals that hadbegun meeting at Sir Robert Cotton’s library from 1612 onward—agroup that included members of his Mermaid Tavern fraternity likeBen Jonson and the most eloquent spokesman for religious tolerationin the early seventeenth century, John Selden. At the same time, Roebecame increasingly interested in toleration, expressing outrage at theLaudian persecution of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton in 1637 andcommitting himself wholeheartedly in the early 1630s to John Dury’splans to develop a tolerant reunion of Protestant factions acrossEurope.100 For Akbar and Jahangir, toleration was an intensely re-ligious response to the experience of diversity. For Akbar’s minister,Abu’l Fazl, it was also pragmatic. He explains how economically un-necessary the poll tax on non-Moslems was: “the prime cause of levyingthe tax in old times was the neediness of the rulers and their assistants.At this day when there are thousands of treasures in the store-chambersof the world-wide administration . . . why should a just and discrimi-nating mind apply itself to collecting this tax?”101 In 1641, echoing thepragmatism of Abu’l Fazl, Roe made a speech to Parliament arguingthe economic cost of intolerance: he held that “the decline of theclothing trade in England could not be halted until ‘the pressure ontender consciences’ . . . had been relaxed.”102

C O N C L U S I O N

Dipesh Chakrabarty closes Provincializing Europe with the story of tworenowned Indian scientists, both of whom were entirely rational intheir science and deeply spiritual in their immersion in the habitus oftheir culture. The one was both an accomplished astronomer and alearned astrologer; the other a Nobel prize winner who would take aritual bath before observing a solar eclipse. For Chakrabarty, these menexemplify the ability to live in radically divided and distinguishedworlds. Both are equally moved by an instrumentalist commitment toWestern historicism or progress, by a sense of what will be, and at the

100. See W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols.(1932–40; repr., Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1965), 2:364–65.

101. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:317.102. Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration, 4:344.


same time, by an affective commitment to the diverse, spiritual possi-bilities implicit in the practices of their own habitus, by a sense ofwhat might be. This sense of a future that is not singular or unitary,Chakrabarty feels, is crucially important. It arises not out of a historyof abstract reason but out of something much more vital—out of paststhat continue to exist “in taste, in practices of embodiment, in thecultural training of the senses over generations . . . in practices I some-times do not even know I engage in” (251). Chakrabarty’s scientists,in their ability to hold these two modes of being in dialogue, providean image of how his countrymen and countrywomen are to preservetheir cultural identities and escape the prison house of Western in-strumentalism—how they are to get “beyond historicism” (249).

Our argument is meant to suggest that in his preoccupation with theinfluence of the West on India, Chakrabarty tends to underestimate thepower of reverse transculturation and to overestimate the seamlessnessof historicism. We suggest that Jones and his fellow Orientalists, Roeand his fellow travelers, and many other Europeans in India learned tolive in worlds every bit as divided and distinguished as those of Chakra-barty’s exemplary scientists. In their experience of religious diversityand toleration in India, many of these colonizers and travelers, thoughcertainly not all, became increasingly conflicted. Although sensibilityand civility are not the same as astrology, India animated and re-animated powerfully imaginative, noninstrumental ways of being inthe world—ways of being often only dormant in the cultures of theseEuropean outsiders. To the extent that Jones’s affective response toIndian diversity and Roe’s civil response to Moghul toleration arerooted both directly and indirectly in the experience of Akbar’speaceable kingdom, they outline a shadowy genealogy of reverse trans-culturation. This genealogy can re-orient (literally) our understand-ing of Tennyson’s act of Enlightenment historicism, in such a way thatthe poem no longer seems the simple act of appropriation it firstappeared to be but a register of new ways of understanding or lettinggo. A crucial part of that letting go is the realization that religious tol-eration, one of Western modernity’s essential, self-defining concepts,is neither peculiarly Western nor modern. If this is true, then it is evi-dence of the way historical analysis (or historicism in its primary sense)may undo the master narrative of Western progress (or historicism inits secondary sense) and so help provincialize Europe. In this it pointsto the crucial role research and analysis in the humanities have to playin reshaping our world, in contesting the present hegemony of instru-mentalist thought in the West that really lies at the heart of so muchdiscontent.

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Akbar Dream