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040 _aMSU
_cMSU
_erda
100 _aMORRISON, Alexander
245 _a“Applied Orientalism” in British India and Tsarist Turkestan
264 _aCambridge
_bCambridge University Press
_c2009
336 _2rdacontent
_atext
_btxt
337 _2rdamedia
_aunmediated
_bn
338 _2rdacarrier
_avolume
_bnc
440 _aComparative Studies in Society and History
_vVolume , number ,
520 _aWriting in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,” which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.
650 _aorientalism
650 _aBritish India
650 _atsarist turkestan
856 _u https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417509000255
942 _2lcc
_cJA
999 _c163403
_d163403