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Cultural Possession, Imperial Control, and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
by Michael J. Franklin
The Yearbook of English Studies, 2002, Vol. 32, Children in Literature (2002), pp. 1-18
2002
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
This article focuses on the contrast between the attempts of Sir William Jones and those of his fellow Orientalist, Nathaniel Halhed, to introduce the Hindu deities and their native devotees to a Western audience, both within the colony and in Europe. Works written by imperial administrators in Bengal represent a distinctive discourse of Orientalism, and it will be considered to what extent they constitute a case of possessing India culturally [pace Edward Said] or of being culturally possessed by India.
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1750- 83) enjoyed his time at Oxford and the culmination of his literary and libertine researches was to publish with Richard Sheridan a verse translation of The Love Epistles of Aristaenetus (1771). Halhed, who used to sign his letters to Sheridan as LYD (lazy young dog), was sent out to India in 1772 to cure him of his riotous behaviour. In England he had been a rival with Sheridan for the hand of Elizabeth Linley and in Calcutta he lost no time in presenting his poetic and personal addresses to the most attractive women, married or single, of Fort William.1 [For an important and scholarly biography of Halhed, see Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millenmium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed 1751-1830 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).] In contrast with the conventional picture of the nabob, however, India ultimately exerted a maturing influence upon Halhed. The Calcutta catalyst proved to be Halhed's meeting with Warren Hastings, Governor and Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785.
A key plank of Hastings's rigorously Orientalist policies was to establish the authority of the British government in Bengal on Indian laws, which necessitated European judges' familiarity with native laws, and the reassurance of the British public concerning the sophistication of these laws. This had led to the employment of eleven learned Brahmans by the Revenue Board from 1773 to 1775 to compile for use in the courts of the province a Sanskrit law code that was subsequently rendered into Persian. In choosing Halhed to translate the Persian text into English, Hastings, always astute in recognizing and recruiting potential Indologists, cured him of his aimless dissipation. Halhed's A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) effectively marks the transformation of libertine into Orientalist; its preface reveals Halhed's intense fascination with Hindu culture. Two years later, having become expert in Bengali, the principal medium for commercial transactions, Halhed published A Grammar of the Bengal Language. Increasingly, Halhed's concerns were with the control of language and the language of control.
One of the first of Halhed's Indian poems, 'The Bramin and the River Ganges', written while he was at work on his translation of the Code, was sent to Hastings on 22 May 1774. As the first European privileged to receive the full cooperation of Hindu pandits, it is perhaps not surprising that, in this poem at least, he initially appeared to empathize with the 'care-worn Bramin':
In her response the river goddess Ganga, despite her 'oozy' environs, demonstrates an almost 'British' stiffness of upper lip/bank as she berates in pronounced 'masculine' tones this lamenting stereotype of the feminized Hindoo, this lethargic and torpid Gentoo:3 [For a more dynamic representation of the Brahman, as symbol of opposition to Company policies, see Eyles Irwin's 'Ramah: or, the Bramin', allegedly based upon a suicide he witnessed while revenue collector in the Carnatic. In protest at Hastings's military support for the Muslim nawab of Arcot's invasion of Tanjore (1777), a Brahman hurls himself, with Bard-like defiance, from the summit of a temple, to 'leave a lesson to the British throne!', not before prophesying the ultimate defeat of the Cross by the Crescent of Islam (Eastern Eclogues (London: Dodsley, 1780), pp. 24-25).]
Smile and obey, you are now under British imperial control. The 'unreasoning' Hindu is slow to recognize the benefits of 'the rule of reason', having been habituated to the rod of Asiatic despotism. But now, you lucky Hindu people, the East India Company is in control, and as Hegel was to write his Philosophy of History: 'The English, or rather the East India Company, the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires subjected to Europeans.'4 [G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 142-43.] A case, pace Gayatri Spivack, of white men saving brown men from other brown men. The goddess Ganga reminds forgetful Bramin of the successive waves of invasion and conquest that proved the unmaking of India:
The animus against the Muhammadan superstition absorbs his Eurocentricity to the extent that here Halhed allows of Indian rationality sufficient to people the groves of Hindu science. Nor does Halhed neglect to kick the Mughal empire while it is down. The rhetoric of this poem's polemical preoccupations problematizes the normal gendered relationship between East and West as the mighty Indian mother goddess is made the mouthpiece not of company propaganda but of a politically divisive fear of Islam, that fanatical cousin of Christianity.
But it must be remembered that Hastings, the dedicatee of the poem and object of Halhed's panegyric, might well have found such censure of Muslim law highly embarrassing. Apart from the political necessity for being (and appearing to be) even-handed towards both religious groups, Hastings actively engaged in sponsoring the translation of key Islamic law codes. In July 1774, only two months after the composition of this poem, Hastings obtained an Arabic text of the important Fatawa al-Alamgiri, originally compiled for the Emperor Aurangzeb, and was subsidizing its translation first into Persian and subsequently into English. 6 [See P. J. Marshall, 'Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron', in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. by Anne Whiteman and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 242-62, 246.]
Hastings's enthusiasm for Islamic art and literature is similarly well documented; his library contained 190 volumes in Arabic and Persian.7 [ P. Gordon, The Oriental Repository at the India House (London: Murray, 1835), p. 4.] He owned a beautifully illuminated Shah-nameh and an exquisite Kulliyat-i Sadi, and his interest in contemporary Muslim literature extended to patronage of the sufi poet Mir Kamar al-Din.8 [See Marshall, p. 245.] In his admiration for the memory of Akbar, whose legislation was remarkable for its justice and humanity and whose rule was marked by religious toleration and patronage of the arts, Hastings encouraged Francis Gladwin's translation of the A'in-i Akbari, which he saw as containing the original constitution of the Mughal empire.9 [Reprinted in Representing India: Indian Culture and Imperial Control in Eighteenth-Century British Orientalist Discourse, ed. by Michael J. Franklin, 9 vols (London: Routledge, 2000), v and vi.] Hastings, fully aware that it was knowledge from the Muslim elite that was of most practical use to the British in their conquest of parts of India, also valued the historical investigations of Jonathan Scott, his Private Persian Translator, which took their cue from Robert Orme's thesis that the reign of Aurangzeb and his successors was the key epoch of Mughal Indian history.10 [Jonathan Scott (not to be confused with John Scott of n. 5) concluded that a fuller understanding of recent history might be gained from an insight into the history of the Deccan, see An Historical and Political View of the Decan (London: Debrett, 1791), reprinted in Representing India, iv. C. A. Bayly demonstrates that those who first understood the importance of information to the empire also realized that it dictated the impermanence of empire, see Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. This understanding is crystal clear in Hastings's comment that: '[Indian writings] will survive when the British dominion in the East shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance' ('Letter to Nathaniel Smith' prefacing Charles Wilkins, The Bhagavat-Geeta (London: Nourse, 1785), reprinted in The European Discovery of India: Key Indological Sources of Romanticism, ed. by Michael J. Franklin, 6 vols (London: Ganesha, 2001), I).] Intent upon his mission to codify both Hindu and Muslim law as 'consonant to the ideas, manners and inclinations of the people for whose use it is intended', Hastings was concerned that the translation of Islamic legal texts was not keeping pace with Halhed's own work on the Hindu code.11 [In 1780 Hastings founded a Muslim college or madraseh meeting the costs of the site, the maulavi's stipend and his pupils' fees out of his own resources. See Marshall, 'Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron', pp. 246-47. Jones published The Mohamedan Law of Succession to the Property of Intestates (London: Dilly, 1782) before going to India.]
Ganga, meanwhile, continues to spout anti-Muslim propaganda; the degenerate Mughals not only corrupted justice, but disrupted commerce and culture, whitening the deserts with the bones of Indian kings:
[fn12: It is instructive to compare competing representations of Islam from the metropolis, although of a slightly later date. Coleridge and Southey's 1799 collaboration on a poem entitled 'Mahomet' produced fourteen hexameters by Coleridge in which 'th 'enthusiast warrior of Mecca' is represented as a Unitarian imperialist and revolutionary tyrant:
For Francis Wrangham, in a poem dedicated to Lady Anna Maria Jones: ' 'Twas Mecca's star, whose orb malignant shed / It's baleful ray o'er India's distant head.' The Muslim invaders embodied 'the Lust of Empire and Religious Hate': 'Witness imperial Delhi's fatal day, / When bleeding Rajahs choked proud Jumna's way' (The Restoration of Learning in the East (London: Baldwin, 1816), pp. 436-37). Eight years later Josiah Conder, in more Coleridgean vein, admires the monotheistic 'zeal iconoclast' of the 'Saracen' which 'swept away the unhallow'd trumpery' of Hinduism, (The Star in the East (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), ll. 47-48).]
The mighty Ganga, her anger now in full flood at the memory of Mughal oppression, excoriates the base ingratitude of her grovelling acolytes:
There are, of course, piquant ironies inherent in Halhed's making the Vedic goddess Ganga insist that the Hindus must be guided like children by the modern rational West in the shape of the 'guardian' Governor-General, 'The parent, not the ruler of the state'. The idea that Hastings 'wakes to labour but that [the Hindu] may sleep' anticipates Hegel's characterization of Indian thought 'as imagination shorn of "distinct conceptions," that is, of rational ordering'.13 [Ronald Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', Modern Asian Studies, 20 (1986), 401-46, 407-08. Jones, on the other hand, was to view Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws as 'a proof of the similarity, or rather identity, which pure unbiassed reason in all ages and nations fails to draw. [...] Although the rules of the Pundits concerning succession to property, the punishment of offences, and the ceremonies of religion, are widely different from ours, yet, in the great system of contracts and the common intercourse between man and man, the POOTEE of the Indians and the DIGEST of the Romans are by no means dissimilar' (Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Dilly, 1781), p. 114).] Hegel compares it to the working of the mind asleep, and indeed thought as dream has been a dominant metaphor in the study of the subcontinent. The Hindu, irrational, illogical, unrealistic, and subjective requires the rational, scientific, and enlightened European 'to raise [his] grovelling functions from the dust'. Where now are 'the groves of science' (1. 23) burned by the 'bigot zeal' of Islam? It will be seen that Halhed's concern is not internal consistency, but to indicate the comprehensive advantages that accrue from Company rule, and from 'Him who broke despotic slav'ry's tie' (1. 58).
Halhed continues to utilize a favourite Rousseauistic image; that of the parental and animating hand of Hastings tending his Indian garden.14
[fn14: Halhed was to use this image again, in an untitled poem of 1784 also sent to Hastings in a letter. Here it is Calcutta itself that is the 'frail exotic' soon to lose its protective governor:
As well might the exotic sensitive plant resent the gardener's tender care as the recalcitrant Hindus complain of Hastings's rule.
Notwithstanding the fact that this renders Hastings vulnerable to the pejorative connotations of being something of an East Indian planter, Halhed, adopting the 'improving' ethic of the Enlightenment, favours the image in the knowledge of his patron's abiding interest in botany.15 ['At his new house at Alipur, near Calcutta, he created a garden for "curious and valuable exotics from all quarters", such as Cinnamon trees from Ceylon' (Marshall, p. 25). For Jones's pioneering and culturally sensitive botanical researches, see 'Botanical Observations', The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. by Anna Maria Jones, 13 vols (London: Stockdale and Walker, 1807), v, 62-162.] Thus an absolute contrast is established between Hastings and his predecessor Clive, who in the rhetoric of earlier anti-Company propaganda was frequently depicted as a despoiler of the paradisal garden that was India.16 [See, for example, Gentleman's Magazine, 42 (1772), 69.] The reductive comparison of Hindus with botanical specimens, however, would seem to anticipate later constructions of India involving 'a rationalization of the irrationality of the Indians by pointing to a natural cause. Indian civilization is conceived of on the analogy of an organism [...] fundamentally a product of its environment'.17 [Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', p. 441.]
Halhed (or should I say Ganga) returns to the benign paternalism of this gardening metaphor when he turns to the influence that Hastings will exert upon scientific researches:
Again at first the implication would seem to be that Western rationality and objectivity are required to graft scientific method on to the irrationality and subjectivity of the subcontinent. However, the references to concealed mysteries and 'learning's earliest sources' betray Halhed's growing realization that Hindu learning, in Hastings's words, 'comprises many of the most abstruse sciences, and those carried to a high degree of perfection many ages before the existence of the earliest writers of the European world'.18 [ I.O.R., B.R.C., 9 December 1783, Home Miscellaneous, 207, p. 172. Halhed himself wrote: 'The Raja of Kishenagur, who is by much the most learned antiquary which Bengal has produced within this century, has lately affirmed, that he has in his possession Shanscrit books which give an account of a communication formerly subsisting between India and Egypt; wherein the Egyptians are constantly described as disciples, not as instructors, and as seeking that liberal education and those sciences in Hindostan, which none of their own countrymen had sufficient knowledge to impart' (preface to Grammar of the Bengal Language (Calcutta: Hoogly Press, 1778), p. v).]
If Halhed's panegyric on Hastings can be seen to blur Halhed's appreciation of the antiquity of Hindu science, we must nevertheless acknowledge the truth of his large claims; this is not merely the partiality of the protege. According to Peter Marshall: 'That there was a coterie of potential scholars and a foundation of knowledge, which made the [Indological] feats of the 1780s and 1790s possible, was largely the achievement of Warren Hastings, Governor or Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785' (p. 243). Nor should we underestimate Halhed's own contribution in this field. He was the first beneficiary of systematic panditic instruction; the first to be involved in Hastings's great project of the codification of Indian law; the first European to gain a complete knowledge of Bengali; and his Grammar of the Bengal Language was the first book ever printed in Bengali script, earning its printer, Charles Wilkins, the title of the 'Caxton of India'. He was the ground breaker for both Wilkins and Sir William Jones, inspiring Wilkins to become the first European with a perfect knowledge of Sanskrit, and anticipating Jones's famous 1786 pronouncement (that the classical languages of India and Europe descend from a common source) by some eight years.19 [In the preface to his Grammar of the Bengal Language he wrote: 'I have been astonished to find the similitude of Shanscrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek: and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced; but in the main ground-work of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellation of such things as would be discriminated on the immediate dawn of civilization' (pp. iii-iv). He also uses the epithet 'refined' (p. xiii), a term Jones was to echo in describing the nature of Sanskrit; see 'The Third Anniversary Discourse' (1786) in my Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 381 (hereafter cited as Selected Works).]
Jones had been senior to Halhed at Harrow, and during the period of Halhed's studies of Persian at Oxford, the two men, with their common interest in the Middle East and their mutual acquaintance in Sheridan, had maintained a desultory correspondence. In I774, the date of Halhed's poem, William Jones was admitted to the bar, making his first appearance at Westminster Hall. Despite the fact that in that year he published his Latin commentary on Asiatic poetry, any thoughts of Bengal were far from his mind; the Welsh circuit towns of Cardigan and Carmarthen bulked larger in his thoughts than Calcutta.20 [Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum (London: Cadell, 1774).] In view of this it is interesting to consider how neatly Oriental Jones fits Halhed's prescriptive description of 'some vent'rous eye' animated by Hastings to 'ope the fountains of Sanscritian song' ('The Bramin and the River Ganges', l. 72). Both as translator of Kalidasa's Sakuntala (1789) and of Jayadeva's Gitagovinda (I789) and as the poet of 'Hymns to Hindu Deities' (1784-88) Jones accomplished exactly that. Remarkably similar imagery occurs in Jones's 'A Hymn to Surya', written twelve years after Halhed's poem in 1786, where the Vedic Sun-god is made to depict Jones liberating Sanskrit learning from the abysm of the past:
The year before in 1785 Jones, while he was learning Sanskrit with the aid of a pandit at the university of Nadia, had composed two hymns to two deified rivers, the Ganges and the Sarasvati. Perhaps with a fuller understanding of both the active maternal principle of the Hindu cosmos and the centrality of water to Hindu theology, Jones's 'A Hymn to Ganga' involves a more convincing evocation of the Vedic river goddess. Its propaganda is more subtle, lacking both the panegyric bias and the racial divisiveness of Halhed's poem, but its political message is equally clear. 'A Hymn to Ganga', as he explains in its prefacing argument, 'is feigned to be the work of a Brahmen, in an early age of Hindu antiquity, who, by a prophetical spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the BRITISH government, and concludes with a prayer for its peaceful duration under good laws well administered' (Selected Works, p. 124). Here, as in 'A Hymn to Surya', Jones poses as a Hindu poet, taking upon himself the sacred thread of the Brahman as interpreter of the Laws of Manu, emphasizing continuity and good government. Jones can thus be seen to apply a novel syncretic spin to the Saidian concept of appropriation. His imposture denies to Indians the power to represent themselves and appropriates that power to himself, but it is an appropriation that involves a characteristic blurring of Self and Other.
Cultural Possession, Imperial Control, and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Brassey Halhed
by Michael J. Franklin
The Yearbook of English Studies, 2002, Vol. 32, Children in Literature (2002), pp. 1-18
2002
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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This article focuses on the contrast between the attempts of Sir William Jones and those of his fellow Orientalist, Nathaniel Halhed, to introduce the Hindu deities and their native devotees to a Western audience, both within the colony and in Europe. Works written by imperial administrators in Bengal represent a distinctive discourse of Orientalism, and it will be considered to what extent they constitute a case of possessing India culturally [pace Edward Said] or of being culturally possessed by India.
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1750- 83) enjoyed his time at Oxford and the culmination of his literary and libertine researches was to publish with Richard Sheridan a verse translation of The Love Epistles of Aristaenetus (1771). Halhed, who used to sign his letters to Sheridan as LYD (lazy young dog), was sent out to India in 1772 to cure him of his riotous behaviour. In England he had been a rival with Sheridan for the hand of Elizabeth Linley and in Calcutta he lost no time in presenting his poetic and personal addresses to the most attractive women, married or single, of Fort William.1 [For an important and scholarly biography of Halhed, see Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millenmium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed 1751-1830 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983).] In contrast with the conventional picture of the nabob, however, India ultimately exerted a maturing influence upon Halhed. The Calcutta catalyst proved to be Halhed's meeting with Warren Hastings, Governor and Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785.
A key plank of Hastings's rigorously Orientalist policies was to establish the authority of the British government in Bengal on Indian laws, which necessitated European judges' familiarity with native laws, and the reassurance of the British public concerning the sophistication of these laws. This had led to the employment of eleven learned Brahmans by the Revenue Board from 1773 to 1775 to compile for use in the courts of the province a Sanskrit law code that was subsequently rendered into Persian. In choosing Halhed to translate the Persian text into English, Hastings, always astute in recognizing and recruiting potential Indologists, cured him of his aimless dissipation. Halhed's A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) effectively marks the transformation of libertine into Orientalist; its preface reveals Halhed's intense fascination with Hindu culture. Two years later, having become expert in Bengali, the principal medium for commercial transactions, Halhed published A Grammar of the Bengal Language. Increasingly, Halhed's concerns were with the control of language and the language of control.
One of the first of Halhed's Indian poems, 'The Bramin and the River Ganges', written while he was at work on his translation of the Code, was sent to Hastings on 22 May 1774. As the first European privileged to receive the full cooperation of Hindu pandits, it is perhaps not surprising that, in this poem at least, he initially appeared to empathize with the 'care-worn Bramin':
Silent and sad (where Ganges' waters roll)
A care-worn Bramin took his pensive way,
Prescient of ill, in agony of soul
Tracing his country's progress to decay.
Age on his brow her furrow stamp had wrought,
While sorrow added to th' impression deep:
And melting Nature at each pause of thought
Snatch'd the indulgent interval to weep.
Thus straying, as he wearied out with pray'r
Each fabled guardian of that hallow'd wave;
To soothe the misery of vain despair
The river's goddess left her oozy cave. (1. I)2 [See Rosane Rocher, 'Alien and Empathic: The Indian Poems of N. B. Halhed', in The Age of Partnership. Europeans in Asia before Dominion, ed. by Blair B. Kling and M. N. Pearson (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979), pp. 215-35, 217- 9. The poem is quoted here from London, British Library, Add. MS 39,899, ff. 2-3, from which Rocher's text shows slight deviations.]
In her response the river goddess Ganga, despite her 'oozy' environs, demonstrates an almost 'British' stiffness of upper lip/bank as she berates in pronounced 'masculine' tones this lamenting stereotype of the feminized Hindoo, this lethargic and torpid Gentoo:3 [For a more dynamic representation of the Brahman, as symbol of opposition to Company policies, see Eyles Irwin's 'Ramah: or, the Bramin', allegedly based upon a suicide he witnessed while revenue collector in the Carnatic. In protest at Hastings's military support for the Muslim nawab of Arcot's invasion of Tanjore (1777), a Brahman hurls himself, with Bard-like defiance, from the summit of a temple, to 'leave a lesson to the British throne!', not before prophesying the ultimate defeat of the Cross by the Crescent of Islam (Eastern Eclogues (London: Dodsley, 1780), pp. 24-25).]
'O lost to thought and obstinately blind!
Weak man!' she cried, 'thy baseless passion cease:
Rouse from this torpid lethargy of mind,
And wake at last to comfort and to peace.
Smile, that no more ambitious spoilers range
Thy labour's fruits relentless to devour:
Smile to obey (and hail the happy change)
The rule of reason for the rod of pow'r.' (1. 13)
Smile and obey, you are now under British imperial control. The 'unreasoning' Hindu is slow to recognize the benefits of 'the rule of reason', having been habituated to the rod of Asiatic despotism. But now, you lucky Hindu people, the East India Company is in control, and as Hegel was to write his Philosophy of History: 'The English, or rather the East India Company, the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires subjected to Europeans.'4 [G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 142-43.] A case, pace Gayatri Spivack, of white men saving brown men from other brown men. The goddess Ganga reminds forgetful Bramin of the successive waves of invasion and conquest that proved the unmaking of India:
Hast thou forgot how Tartar fury spurn'd
The suppliant meekness of the patient sage;
How bigot zeal the groves of science burn'd,
While superstition sanctified the rage? (l. 21)
The animus against the Muhammadan superstition absorbs his Eurocentricity to the extent that here Halhed allows of Indian rationality sufficient to people the groves of Hindu science. Nor does Halhed neglect to kick the Mughal empire while it is down. The rhetoric of this poem's polemical preoccupations problematizes the normal gendered relationship between East and West as the mighty Indian mother goddess is made the mouthpiece not of company propaganda but of a politically divisive fear of Islam, that fanatical cousin of Christianity.
Hast thou forgot each prostitute decree,
Each venal law the pliant Coran sold:
While the fleec'd suitor famish'd on his plea,
And judges wallow'd in extorted gold? (1. 25)5 [Occasionally the picture looked different from the metropolis. John Scott (of Amwell), a admirer of Sir William Jones, saw the East India Company as the criminal and avaricious tyrant, creating the devastating 'artificial' famine of 1769-70. By contrast: 'When Timur's House renown'd, Delhi reign'd, / 'Distress, assistance unimplor'd obtain'd'. Scott's footnote reads: 'The famous Mahometan tyrant, Auranzebe, during a famine which prevailed in different parts of India, exerted himself to alleviate the distress of his subjects. "He remitted the taxes that were due; he employed those already collected in the purchase of corn, which was distributed among the poorer sort. He even expended immense sums out of the treasury, in conveying grain, by land and water, into the provinces, from Bengal, and the countries which lie on the five branches of the Indus." [Dow's Indostan, vol. iii. p. 340.]' ('Serim; or, The Artificial Famine', The Poetical Works (London: Buckland, 1782), p. 141).]
But it must be remembered that Hastings, the dedicatee of the poem and object of Halhed's panegyric, might well have found such censure of Muslim law highly embarrassing. Apart from the political necessity for being (and appearing to be) even-handed towards both religious groups, Hastings actively engaged in sponsoring the translation of key Islamic law codes. In July 1774, only two months after the composition of this poem, Hastings obtained an Arabic text of the important Fatawa al-Alamgiri, originally compiled for the Emperor Aurangzeb, and was subsidizing its translation first into Persian and subsequently into English. 6 [See P. J. Marshall, 'Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron', in Statesmen, Scholars, and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History Presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland, ed. by Anne Whiteman and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 242-62, 246.]
Hastings's enthusiasm for Islamic art and literature is similarly well documented; his library contained 190 volumes in Arabic and Persian.7 [ P. Gordon, The Oriental Repository at the India House (London: Murray, 1835), p. 4.] He owned a beautifully illuminated Shah-nameh and an exquisite Kulliyat-i Sadi, and his interest in contemporary Muslim literature extended to patronage of the sufi poet Mir Kamar al-Din.8 [See Marshall, p. 245.] In his admiration for the memory of Akbar, whose legislation was remarkable for its justice and humanity and whose rule was marked by religious toleration and patronage of the arts, Hastings encouraged Francis Gladwin's translation of the A'in-i Akbari, which he saw as containing the original constitution of the Mughal empire.9 [Reprinted in Representing India: Indian Culture and Imperial Control in Eighteenth-Century British Orientalist Discourse, ed. by Michael J. Franklin, 9 vols (London: Routledge, 2000), v and vi.] Hastings, fully aware that it was knowledge from the Muslim elite that was of most practical use to the British in their conquest of parts of India, also valued the historical investigations of Jonathan Scott, his Private Persian Translator, which took their cue from Robert Orme's thesis that the reign of Aurangzeb and his successors was the key epoch of Mughal Indian history.10 [Jonathan Scott (not to be confused with John Scott of n. 5) concluded that a fuller understanding of recent history might be gained from an insight into the history of the Deccan, see An Historical and Political View of the Decan (London: Debrett, 1791), reprinted in Representing India, iv. C. A. Bayly demonstrates that those who first understood the importance of information to the empire also realized that it dictated the impermanence of empire, see Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. This understanding is crystal clear in Hastings's comment that: '[Indian writings] will survive when the British dominion in the East shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance' ('Letter to Nathaniel Smith' prefacing Charles Wilkins, The Bhagavat-Geeta (London: Nourse, 1785), reprinted in The European Discovery of India: Key Indological Sources of Romanticism, ed. by Michael J. Franklin, 6 vols (London: Ganesha, 2001), I).] Intent upon his mission to codify both Hindu and Muslim law as 'consonant to the ideas, manners and inclinations of the people for whose use it is intended', Hastings was concerned that the translation of Islamic legal texts was not keeping pace with Halhed's own work on the Hindu code.11 [In 1780 Hastings founded a Muslim college or madraseh meeting the costs of the site, the maulavi's stipend and his pupils' fees out of his own resources. See Marshall, 'Warren Hastings as Scholar and Patron', pp. 246-47. Jones published The Mohamedan Law of Succession to the Property of Intestates (London: Dilly, 1782) before going to India.]
Ganga, meanwhile, continues to spout anti-Muslim propaganda; the degenerate Mughals not only corrupted justice, but disrupted commerce and culture, whitening the deserts with the bones of Indian kings:
What could Mahommed's race degen'rate teach,
Themselves to spoil alone and ruin taught?
Neglected Commerce wept her silent Beach,
And Arts affrighted distant dwellings sought.
Think then on what ye were -- destruction's prey --
How low, how worthless in the scale of things!
While havock stain'd with Indian gore her way,
And deserts whiten'd with the bones of kings. (I. 29)12
[fn12: It is instructive to compare competing representations of Islam from the metropolis, although of a slightly later date. Coleridge and Southey's 1799 collaboration on a poem entitled 'Mahomet' produced fourteen hexameters by Coleridge in which 'th 'enthusiast warrior of Mecca' is represented as a Unitarian imperialist and revolutionary tyrant:
Prophet and priest, who scatter'd abroad both evil and blessing,
Huge wasteful empires founded and hallow'd slow persecution,
Soul-withering, but crush'd the blasphemous rites of the Pagan
And idolatrous Christians.
For Francis Wrangham, in a poem dedicated to Lady Anna Maria Jones: ' 'Twas Mecca's star, whose orb malignant shed / It's baleful ray o'er India's distant head.' The Muslim invaders embodied 'the Lust of Empire and Religious Hate': 'Witness imperial Delhi's fatal day, / When bleeding Rajahs choked proud Jumna's way' (The Restoration of Learning in the East (London: Baldwin, 1816), pp. 436-37). Eight years later Josiah Conder, in more Coleridgean vein, admires the monotheistic 'zeal iconoclast' of the 'Saracen' which 'swept away the unhallow'd trumpery' of Hinduism, (The Star in the East (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1824), ll. 47-48).]
The mighty Ganga, her anger now in full flood at the memory of Mughal oppression, excoriates the base ingratitude of her grovelling acolytes:
Ingrateful Hindus! when a tender hand
Pours balm into your wound; is't right to weep?
Your guardian's anxious efforts to withstand,
Who wakes to labour but that you may sleep!
Are murmurs, then, and tears the tribute just,
Are plaints, to wisdom and to mercy due,
That raised your grovelling functions from the dust,
And open'd life and freedom to your view? (l. 38).
There are, of course, piquant ironies inherent in Halhed's making the Vedic goddess Ganga insist that the Hindus must be guided like children by the modern rational West in the shape of the 'guardian' Governor-General, 'The parent, not the ruler of the state'. The idea that Hastings 'wakes to labour but that [the Hindu] may sleep' anticipates Hegel's characterization of Indian thought 'as imagination shorn of "distinct conceptions," that is, of rational ordering'.13 [Ronald Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', Modern Asian Studies, 20 (1986), 401-46, 407-08. Jones, on the other hand, was to view Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws as 'a proof of the similarity, or rather identity, which pure unbiassed reason in all ages and nations fails to draw. [...] Although the rules of the Pundits concerning succession to property, the punishment of offences, and the ceremonies of religion, are widely different from ours, yet, in the great system of contracts and the common intercourse between man and man, the POOTEE of the Indians and the DIGEST of the Romans are by no means dissimilar' (Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: Dilly, 1781), p. 114).] Hegel compares it to the working of the mind asleep, and indeed thought as dream has been a dominant metaphor in the study of the subcontinent. The Hindu, irrational, illogical, unrealistic, and subjective requires the rational, scientific, and enlightened European 'to raise [his] grovelling functions from the dust'. Where now are 'the groves of science' (1. 23) burned by the 'bigot zeal' of Islam? It will be seen that Halhed's concern is not internal consistency, but to indicate the comprehensive advantages that accrue from Company rule, and from 'Him who broke despotic slav'ry's tie' (1. 58).
Halhed continues to utilize a favourite Rousseauistic image; that of the parental and animating hand of Hastings tending his Indian garden.14
[fn14: Halhed was to use this image again, in an untitled poem of 1784 also sent to Hastings in a letter. Here it is Calcutta itself that is the 'frail exotic' soon to lose its protective governor:
Say can a frail exotic's tender frame
Repel the torrent, or defy the flame?
Your animating hand first gave it root,
Your quick'ning influence bade its buds to shoot;
Can it but wither, when those beams are gone,
In air ungenial, and a foreign sun?'
(British Library, Add. MS 39,899, f. 6)
As well might the exotic sensitive plant resent the gardener's tender care as the recalcitrant Hindus complain of Hastings's rule.
The frail exotic might as well accuse
Th' officious kindness of the planter's care,
That shelters it from autumn's sickly dews,
And blunts the keenness of December's air. (1. 45)
Notwithstanding the fact that this renders Hastings vulnerable to the pejorative connotations of being something of an East Indian planter, Halhed, adopting the 'improving' ethic of the Enlightenment, favours the image in the knowledge of his patron's abiding interest in botany.15 ['At his new house at Alipur, near Calcutta, he created a garden for "curious and valuable exotics from all quarters", such as Cinnamon trees from Ceylon' (Marshall, p. 25). For Jones's pioneering and culturally sensitive botanical researches, see 'Botanical Observations', The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. by Anna Maria Jones, 13 vols (London: Stockdale and Walker, 1807), v, 62-162.] Thus an absolute contrast is established between Hastings and his predecessor Clive, who in the rhetoric of earlier anti-Company propaganda was frequently depicted as a despoiler of the paradisal garden that was India.16 [See, for example, Gentleman's Magazine, 42 (1772), 69.] The reductive comparison of Hindus with botanical specimens, however, would seem to anticipate later constructions of India involving 'a rationalization of the irrationality of the Indians by pointing to a natural cause. Indian civilization is conceived of on the analogy of an organism [...] fundamentally a product of its environment'.17 [Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', p. 441.]
Halhed (or should I say Ganga) returns to the benign paternalism of this gardening metaphor when he turns to the influence that Hastings will exert upon scientific researches:
Yet, not confin'd to legislation's sphere,
'Tis He shall bid fair science too take root;
Shall nurture ev'ry plant that she may rear,
And teach her tender scyons how to shoot:
And haply animate some vent'rous eye
T' explore the mysteries concealed so long:
To trace where learning's earliest sources lie,
And ope the fountains of Sanscritian song. (1. 65)
Again at first the implication would seem to be that Western rationality and objectivity are required to graft scientific method on to the irrationality and subjectivity of the subcontinent. However, the references to concealed mysteries and 'learning's earliest sources' betray Halhed's growing realization that Hindu learning, in Hastings's words, 'comprises many of the most abstruse sciences, and those carried to a high degree of perfection many ages before the existence of the earliest writers of the European world'.18 [ I.O.R., B.R.C., 9 December 1783, Home Miscellaneous, 207, p. 172. Halhed himself wrote: 'The Raja of Kishenagur, who is by much the most learned antiquary which Bengal has produced within this century, has lately affirmed, that he has in his possession Shanscrit books which give an account of a communication formerly subsisting between India and Egypt; wherein the Egyptians are constantly described as disciples, not as instructors, and as seeking that liberal education and those sciences in Hindostan, which none of their own countrymen had sufficient knowledge to impart' (preface to Grammar of the Bengal Language (Calcutta: Hoogly Press, 1778), p. v).]
If Halhed's panegyric on Hastings can be seen to blur Halhed's appreciation of the antiquity of Hindu science, we must nevertheless acknowledge the truth of his large claims; this is not merely the partiality of the protege. According to Peter Marshall: 'That there was a coterie of potential scholars and a foundation of knowledge, which made the [Indological] feats of the 1780s and 1790s possible, was largely the achievement of Warren Hastings, Governor or Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785' (p. 243). Nor should we underestimate Halhed's own contribution in this field. He was the first beneficiary of systematic panditic instruction; the first to be involved in Hastings's great project of the codification of Indian law; the first European to gain a complete knowledge of Bengali; and his Grammar of the Bengal Language was the first book ever printed in Bengali script, earning its printer, Charles Wilkins, the title of the 'Caxton of India'. He was the ground breaker for both Wilkins and Sir William Jones, inspiring Wilkins to become the first European with a perfect knowledge of Sanskrit, and anticipating Jones's famous 1786 pronouncement (that the classical languages of India and Europe descend from a common source) by some eight years.19 [In the preface to his Grammar of the Bengal Language he wrote: 'I have been astonished to find the similitude of Shanscrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek: and these not in technical and metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced; but in the main ground-work of language, in monosyllables, in the names of numbers, and the appellation of such things as would be discriminated on the immediate dawn of civilization' (pp. iii-iv). He also uses the epithet 'refined' (p. xiii), a term Jones was to echo in describing the nature of Sanskrit; see 'The Third Anniversary Discourse' (1786) in my Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 381 (hereafter cited as Selected Works).]
Jones had been senior to Halhed at Harrow, and during the period of Halhed's studies of Persian at Oxford, the two men, with their common interest in the Middle East and their mutual acquaintance in Sheridan, had maintained a desultory correspondence. In I774, the date of Halhed's poem, William Jones was admitted to the bar, making his first appearance at Westminster Hall. Despite the fact that in that year he published his Latin commentary on Asiatic poetry, any thoughts of Bengal were far from his mind; the Welsh circuit towns of Cardigan and Carmarthen bulked larger in his thoughts than Calcutta.20 [Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum (London: Cadell, 1774).] In view of this it is interesting to consider how neatly Oriental Jones fits Halhed's prescriptive description of 'some vent'rous eye' animated by Hastings to 'ope the fountains of Sanscritian song' ('The Bramin and the River Ganges', l. 72). Both as translator of Kalidasa's Sakuntala (1789) and of Jayadeva's Gitagovinda (I789) and as the poet of 'Hymns to Hindu Deities' (1784-88) Jones accomplished exactly that. Remarkably similar imagery occurs in Jones's 'A Hymn to Surya', written twelve years after Halhed's poem in 1786, where the Vedic Sun-god is made to depict Jones liberating Sanskrit learning from the abysm of the past:
He came; and, lisping our celestial tongue,
Though not from Brahma sprung,
Draws orient knowledge from its fountains pure,
Through caves obstructed long, and paths too long obscure.
(Selected Works, p. 152, l. 184)
The year before in 1785 Jones, while he was learning Sanskrit with the aid of a pandit at the university of Nadia, had composed two hymns to two deified rivers, the Ganges and the Sarasvati. Perhaps with a fuller understanding of both the active maternal principle of the Hindu cosmos and the centrality of water to Hindu theology, Jones's 'A Hymn to Ganga' involves a more convincing evocation of the Vedic river goddess. Its propaganda is more subtle, lacking both the panegyric bias and the racial divisiveness of Halhed's poem, but its political message is equally clear. 'A Hymn to Ganga', as he explains in its prefacing argument, 'is feigned to be the work of a Brahmen, in an early age of Hindu antiquity, who, by a prophetical spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the BRITISH government, and concludes with a prayer for its peaceful duration under good laws well administered' (Selected Works, p. 124). Here, as in 'A Hymn to Surya', Jones poses as a Hindu poet, taking upon himself the sacred thread of the Brahman as interpreter of the Laws of Manu, emphasizing continuity and good government. Jones can thus be seen to apply a novel syncretic spin to the Saidian concept of appropriation. His imposture denies to Indians the power to represent themselves and appropriates that power to himself, but it is an appropriation that involves a characteristic blurring of Self and Other.
A Hymn to Surya
THE ARGUMENT.
A PLAUSIBLE opinion has been entertained by learned men, that the principal source of idolatry among the ancients was their enthusiastick admiration of the Sun; and that, when the primitive religion of mankind was lost amid the distractions of establishing regal government, or neglected amid the allurements of vice, they ascribed to the great visible luminary, or to the wonderful fluid, of which it is the general reservoir, those powers of pervading all space and animating all nature, which their wiser ancestors had attributed to one eternal Mind, by whom the substance of fire had been created as an inanimate and secondary cause of natural phenomena. The Mythology of the East confirms this opinion; and it is probable, that the triple Divinity of the Hindus was originally no more than a personification of the Sun, whom they call Treyitenu, or Three-bodied, in his triple capacity of producing forms by his genial heat, preserving them by his light, or destroying them by the concentrated force of his igneous matter: this, with the wilder conceit of a female power united with the Godhead, and ruling nature by his authority, will account for nearly the whole system of Egyptian, Indian, and Grecian polytheism, distinguished from the sublime Theology of the Philosophers, whose understandings were too strong to admit the popular belief, but whose influence was too weak to reform it.
SURYA, the PHEBUS of European heathens, has near fifty names or epithets in the Sanscrit language; most of which, or at least the meanings of them, are introduced in the following Ode; and every image, that seemed capable of poetical ornament, has been selected from books of the highest authority among the Hindus: the title Arca is very singular; and it is remarkable, that the Tibetians represent the Sun's car in the form of a boat.
It will be necessary to explain a few other particulars of the Hindu Mythology, to which allusions are made in the poem. Soma, or the Moon, is a male Deity in the Indian system, as Mona was, I believe, among the Saxons, and Lunus among some of the nations, who settled in Italy: his titles also, with one or two of the ancient fables, to which they refer, are exhibited in the second stanza. Most of the Lunar mansions are believed to be the daughters of Casyapa, the first production of Brahma's head, and from their names are derived those of the twelve months, who are here feigned to have married as many constellations: this primeval Brahman and Vinata are also supposed to have been the parents of Arun, the charioteer of the sun, and of the bird Garuda, the eagle of the great Indian Jove, one of whose epithets is Madhava.
After this explanation, the Hymn will have few or no difficulties, especially if the reader has perused and studied the Bhagavadgita, with which our literature has been lately enriched, and the fine episode from the Mahabharat, on the Productionof the Amrita, which seems to be almost wholly astronomical, but abounds with poetical beauties. Let the following description of the demon Rahu, decapitated by Narayan, be compared with similar passages in Hesiod and Milton:tach ch'hailasringapratiman danavasya siro mahat
chacrach’hinnam c'hamutpatya nenadíti bhayancaram,
tat cabandham pepatasya visp’hurad dharanitale
sapervatavanadwípan daityasyacampayanmahím.
The Hymn
FOUNTAIN of living light,
That o'er all nature streams,
Of this vast microcosm both nerve and soul;
Whose swift and subtil beams,
Eluding mortal sight,
Pervade, attract, sustain th' effulgent whole,
Unite, impel, dilate, calcine,
Give to gold its weight and blaze,
Dart from the diamond many-tinted rays,
Condense, protrude, transform, concoct, refine
The sparkling daughters of the mine;
Lord of the lotos, father, friend, and king,
O Sun, thy pow'rs I sing:
Thy substance Indra with his heav'nly bands
Nor sings nor understands;
Nor e'en the Vedas three to man explain
Thy mystick orb triform, though Brahma tun'd the strain.
Thou, nectar-beaming Moon,
Regent of dewy night,
From yon black roe, that in thy bosom sleeps,
Fawn-spotted Sasin hight;
Wilt thou desert so soon
Thy night-flow'rs pale, whom liquid odour steeps,
And Oshadhi's transcendent beam
Burning in the darkest glade?
Will no lov'd name thy gentle mind persuade
Yet one short hour to shed thy cooling stream?
But ah! we court a passing dream:
Our pray'r nor Indu nor Himansu hears;
He fades; he disappears --
E'en Casyapa's gay daughters twinkling die,
And silence lulls the sky,
Till Chatacs twitter from the moving brake,
And sandal-breathing gales on beds of ether wake.
Burst into song, ye spheres;
A greater light proclaim,
And hymn, concentrick orbs, with sev'nfold chime
The God with many a name;
Nor let unhallow'd ears
Drink life and rapture from your charm sublime
'Our bosoms, Aryama, inspire,
'Gem of heav'n, and flow'r of day,
'Vivaswat, lancer of the golden ray,
'Divacara, pure source of holy fire,
'Victorious Rama's fervid sire,
'Dread child of Aditi, Martunda bless'd,
'Or Sura be address'd,
'Ravi, or Mihira, or Bhanu bold,
'Or Arca, title old,
'Or Heridaswa drawn by green-hair'd steeds,
'Or Carmasacshi keen, attesting secret deeds.
'What fiend, what monster fierce
'E'er durst thy throne invade?
'Malignant Rahu. Him thy wakeful sight,
'That could the deepest shade
'Of snaky Narac pierce,
'Mark'd quaffing nectar; when by magick sleight
'A Sura's lovely form he wore,
'Rob'd in light, with lotos crown'd,
'What time th’ immortals peerless treasures found
'On the churn'd Ocean's gem-bespangled shore,
'And Mandar's load the tortoise bore:
'Thy voice reveal'd the daring sacrilege;
'Then, by the deathful edge
'Of bright Sudersan cleft, his dragon head
'Dismay and horror spread
'Kicking the skies, and struggling to impair
'The radiance of thy robes, and stain thy golden hair.
'With smiles of stern disdain
'Thou, sov'reign victor, seest
'His impious rage; soon from the mad assault
'Thy coursers fly releas'd;
'Then toss each verdant mane,
'And gallop o'er the smooth aerial vault;
'Whilst in charm'd Gocul's od'rous vale
'Blue- ey'd Yamuna descends
'Exulting, and her tripping tide suspends,
'The triumph of her mighty sire to hail:
'So must they fall, who Gods assail!
'For now the demon rues his rash emprise,
'Yet, bellowing blasphemies
'With pois'nous throat, for horrid vengeance thirsts,
'And oft with tempest bursts,
'As oft repell'd he groans in fiery chains,
'And o'er the realms of day unvanquish'd Surya reigns.'
Ye clouds, in wavy wreathes
Your dusky van unfold;
O'er dimpled sands, ye surges, gently flow,
With sapphires edg'd and gold!
Loose-tressed morning breathes,
And spreads her blushes with expansive glow;
But chiefly where heav'n's op'ning eye
Sparkles at her saffron gate,
How rich, how regal in his orient state!
Erelong he shall emblaze th' unbounded sky:
The fiends of darkness yelling fly;
While birds of liveliest note and lightest wing
The rising daystar sing,
Who skirts th' horizon with a blazing line
Of topazes divine;
E'en, in their prelude, brighter and more bright,
Flames the red east, and pours insufferable light.* [See Gray's Letters, p. 382, 4to. and the note.]
First 'er blue hills appear,
With many an agate hoof
And pasterns fring'd with pearl, sev'n coursers green;
Nor boasts yon arched woof,
That girds the show'ry sphere,
Such heav'n-spun threads of colour'd light serene,
As tinge the reins, which Arun guides,
Glowing with immortal grace,
Young Arun, loveliest of Vinatian race,
Though younger He, whom Madhava bestrides,
When high on eagle-plumes he rides:
But oh! what pencil of a living star
Could paint that gorgeous car,
In which, as in an ark supremely bright,
The lord of boundless light
Ascending calm o'er th' empyrean sails,
And with ten thousand beams his awful beauty veils.
Behind the glowing wheels
Six jocund seasons dance,
A radiant month in each quick-shifting hand;
Alternate they advance,
While buxom nature feels
The grateful changes of the frolick band:
Each month a constellation fair
Knit in youthful wedlock holds,
And o'er each bed a varied sun unfolds,
Lest one vast blaze our visual force impair,
A canopy of woven air.
Vasanta blythe with many a laughing flow'r
Decks his Candarpa's bow'r;
The drooping pastures thirsty Grishma dries,
Till Versha bids them rise;
Then Sarat with full sheaves the champaign fills,
Which Sisira bedews, and stern Hemanta chills.
Mark, how the all-kindling orb
Meridian glory gains!
Round Mrru's breathing zone he winds oblique
O'er pure cerulean plains:
His jealous flames absorb
All meaner lights, and unresisted strike
The world with rapt'rous joy and dread.
Ocean, smit with melting pain,
Shrinks, and the fiercest monster of the main
Mantles in caves profound his tusky head
With sea-weeds dank and coral spread:
Less can mild earth and her green daughters bear
The noon's wide-wasting glare;
To rocks the panther creeps; to woody night
The vulture steals his flight;
E'en cold cameleons pant in thickets dun,
And o'er the burning grit th' unwinged locusts run!
But when thy foaming steeds
Descend with rapid pace
Thy fervent axle hast'ning to allay,
What majesty, what grace
Dart o'er the western meads
From thy relenting eye their blended ray!
Soon may sense th' undazzled sensen behold
Rich as Vishnu's diadem,
Or Amrit sparkling in an azure gem,
Thy horizontal globe of molten gold,
Which pearl'd and rubied clouds infold.
It sinks; and myriads of diffusive dyes
Stream o'er the tissued skies,
Till Soma smiles, attracted by the song
Of many a plumed throng
In groves, meads, vales; and, whilst he glides above,
Each bush and dancing bough quaffs harmony and love.
Then roves thy poet free,
Who with no borrow'd art
Dares hymn thy pow'r, and durst provoke thy blaze,
But felt thy thrilling dart;
And now, on lowly knee,
From him, who gave the wound, the balsam prays.
Herbs, that assuage the fever's pain,
Scatter from thy rolling car,
Cull'd by sage Aswin and divine Cumar;
And, if they ask, “What mortal pours the strain?"
Say (for thou seest earth, air, and main)
Say: “From the bosom of yon silver isle,
"Where skies more softly smile,
“He came; and, lisping our celestial tongue,
“Though not from Brahma sprung,
“Draws orient knowledge from its fountains pure,
“Through caves obstructed long, and paths too long obscure."
Yes; though the Sanscrit song
Be strown with fancy's wreathes,
And emblems rich, beyond low thoughts refin'd,
Yet heav'nly truth it breathes
With attestation strong,
That, loftier than thy sphere, th' Eternal Mind,
Unmov'd, unrival'd, undefil'd,
Reigns with providence benign:
He still’d the rude abyss, and bade it shine
(Whilst Sapience with approving aspect mild
Saw the stupendous work, and smil'd);
Next thee, his flaming minister, bade rise
O'er young and wondering skies.
Since thou, great orb, with all-enlight’ning ray
Rulest the golden day,
How far more glorious He, who said serene,
Be, and thou wast -- Himself unform'd, unchang'd, unseen!
-- The Works of Sir William Jones, With the Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth, in Thirteen Volumes, Volume XIII, 1807, p. 277-287
A Hymn to Ganga
THE ARGUMENT.
THIS poem would be rather obscure without geographical notes; but a short introductory explanation will supply the place of them, and give less interruption to the reader.
We are obliged to a late illustrious Chinese monarch named Can-hi, who directed an accurate survey to be made of Potyid or (as it is called by the Arabs) Tebbut, for our knowledge, that a chain of mountains nearly parallel with Imaus, and called Cantese by the Tartars, forms a line of separation between the sources of two vast rivers; which, as we have abundant reason to believe, run at first in opposite directions, and, having finished a winding circuit of two thousand miles, meet a little below Dhaca, so as to inclose the richest and most beautiful peninsula on earth, in which the British nation, after a prosperous course of brilliant actions in peace and war, have now the principal sway. These rivers are deified in India; that, which rises on the western edge of the mountain, being considered as the daughter of Mahadeva or Siva, and the other as the son of Brahma; their loves, wanderings, and nuptials are the chief subject of the following Ode, which is feigned to have been the work of a Brahmen, in an early age of Hindu antiquity, who, by a prophetical spirit, discerns the toleration and equity of the British government, and concludes with a prayer for its peaceful duration under good laws well administered.
After a general description of the Ganges, an account is given of her fabulous birth, like that of Pallas, from the forehead of Siva, the Jupiter Tonans and Genitor of the Latins; and the creation of her lover by an act of Brahma's will is the subject of another stanza, in which his course is delineated through the country of Potyid, by the name of Sanpo, or Supreme Bliss, where he passes near the fortress of Rimbu, the island of Palte or Yambro (known to be the seat of a high priestess almost equally venerated with the Goddess Bhawani) and Trashilhumbo (as a Potya or Tebbutian would pronounce it), or the sacred mansion of the Lama next in dignity to that of Potala, who resides in a city, to the south of the Sanpo, which the Italian travellers write Sgigatzhe, but which, according to the letters, ought rather to be written in a manner, that would appear still more barbarous in our orthography. The Brahmaputra is not mentioned again till the twelfth stanza, where his progress is traced, by very probable conjecture, through Rangamati, the ancient Rangamritica or Rangamar, celebrated for the finest spikenard, and Sríhat or Siret, the Serratae of Elian, whence the fragrant essence extracted from the Malobathrum, called Sadah by the Persians, and Trjapatra by the Indians, was carried by the Persian gulf to Syria, and from that coast into Greece and Italy. It is not, however, positively certain, that the Brahmaputra rises as it is here described: two great geographers are decidedly of opposite opinions on this very point; nor is it impossible that the Indian river may be one arm of the Sanpo, and the Nau-cyan, another; diverging from the mountains of Asham, after they have been enriched by many rivers from the rocks of China.
The fourth and fifth stanzas represent the Goddess obstructed in her passage to the west by the hills of Emodi, so called from a Sanscrit word signifying snow, from which also are derived both Imaus and Himalaya or Himola. The sixth describes her, after her entrance into Hindustan through the straits of Cupala, flowing near Sambal, the Sambalaca of Ptolemy, famed for a beautiful plant of the like name, and thence to the once opulent city and royal place of residence, Canyacuvja, erroneously named Calinipaxa by the Greeks, and Canauj, not very accurately, by the modern Asiaticks: here she is joined by the Calinadi, and pursues her course to Prayaga, whence the people of Bahar were named Prasii, and where the Yamuna, having received the Sereswati below Indraprestha or Dehli, and watered the poetical ground of Mathura and Agara, mingles her noble stream with the Ganga close to the modern fort of Ilahabad. This place is considered as the confluence of three sacred rivers, and known by the name of Triveni, or the three plaited locks; from which a number of pilgrims, who there begin the ceremonies to be completed at Gaya, are continually bringing vases of water, which they preserve with superstitious veneration, and are greeted by all the Hindus, who meet them on their return.
Six of the principal rivers, which bring their tribute to the Ganges, are next enumerated, and are succinctly described from real properties: thus the Gandac, which the Greeks knew by a similar name, abounds, according to Giorgi, with crocodiles of enormous magnitude; and the Mahanadi runs by the plain of Gaura, once a populous district with a magnificent capital, from which the Bengalese were probably called Gangaridae, but now the seat of desolation, and the haunt of wild beasts. From Prayaga she hastens to Casì, or as the Muslimans name it, Benares; and here occasion is taken to condemn the cruel and intolerant spirit of the crafty tyrant AURANGZIB, whom the Hindus of Cashmir call Aurangasur, or the Demon, not the Ornament, of the Throne. She next bathes the skirts of Pataliputra, changed into Patna, which, both in situation and name, agrees better on the whole with the ancient Palibothra, than either Prayaga, or Canyacuvja: if Megasthenes and the ambassadors of Seleucus visited the last-named city, and called it Palibothra, they were palpably mistaken. After this are introduced the beautiful hill of Muctigiri, or Mengir, and the wonderful pool of Síta, which takes its name from the wife of Rama, whose conquest of Sinhaldwip, or Silan, and victory over the giant Rawan, are celebrated by the immortal Valmici, and by other epick poets of India.
The pleasant hills of Caligram and Ganga-presad are then introduced, and give occasion to deplore and extol the late excellent AUGUSTUS CLEVLAND, Esq. who nearly completed by lenity the glorious work, which severity could not have accomplished, of civilizing a ferocious race of Indians, whose mountains were formerly, perhaps, a rocky island, or washed at least by that sea, from which the fertile champaign of Bengal has been gained in a course of ages. The western arm of the Ganges is called Bhagirathi, from a poetical fable of a demigod or holy man, named Bhagiratha, whose devotion had obtained from Siva the privilege of leading after him a great part of the heavenly water, and who drew it accordingly in two branches; which embrace the fine island, now denominated from Kasimbazar, and famed for the defeat of the monster Sirajuddaulah, and, having met near the venerable Hindu seminary of Nawadwip or Nediya, flow in a copious stream by the several European settlements, and reach the Bay at an island which assumes the name of Sagar, either from the Sea or from an ancient Raja of distinguished piety. The Sundarabans or Beautiful Woods, an appellation to which they are justly entitled, are incidentally mentioned, as lying between the Bhagira'hi and the Great River, or Eastern arm, which, by its junction with the Brahmaputra, forms many considerable islands; one of which, as well as a town near the conflux, derives its name from Lacshmi, the Goddess of Abundance.
It will soon be perceived, that the form of the stanza, which is partly borrowed from Gray, and to which he was probably partial, as he uses it six times in nine, is enlarged in the following Hymn by a line of fourteen syllables, expressing the long and solemn march of the great Asiatick rivers.
THE HYMN.
HOW sweetly GANGA smiles, and glides
Luxuriant o'er her broad autumnal bed!
Her waves perpetual verdure spread,
Whilst health and plenty deck her golden sides;
As when an eagle, child of light,
On Cambala's unmeasur'd height,
By Potala, the pontiff's throne rever'd,
O'er her eyry proudly rear'd
Sits brooding, and her plumage vast expands,
Thus GANGA o'er her cherish'd lands,
To Brahma's grateful race endear'd,
Throws wide her fost'ring arms, and on her banks divine
Sees temples, groves, and glitt'ring tow'rs, that in her crystal shine.
Above the stretch of mortal ken,
On bless'd Cailasa's top, where ev'ry stem
Glow'd with a vegetable gem,
MAHESA stood, the dread and joy of men;
While Parvati, to gain a boon,
Fix'd on his locks a beamy moon,
And hid his frontal eye, in jocund play,
With reluctant sweet delay:
All nature straight was lock'd in dim eclipse
Till Brahmans pure, with hallow'd lips
And warbled pray’rs restor'd the day;
When GANGA' from his brow by heav'nly fingers press’d
Sprang radiant, and descending grac’d the caverns of the west.
The sun's car blaz'd, and laugh'd the morn;
What time near proud Cantesa's eastern bow'rs,
(While Devata's rain'd living flow'rs)
A river-god, so Brahma will’d, was born,
And roll’d mature his vivid stream
Impetuous with celestial gleam;
The charms of GANGA, through all worlds proclaim'd,
Soon his youthful breast inflam'd,
But destiny the bridal hour delay'd;
Then, distant from the west'ring maid,
He flow'd, now blissful Sanpo nam'd,
By Palte crown’d with hills, bold Rimbu's tow'ring state,
And where sage Trashilhumbo hails her Lama's form renate.
But she, whose mind, at Siva's nod,
The picture of that sov’reign youth had seen,
With graceful port and warlike mien,
In arms and vesture like his parent God,
Smit with the bright idea rush'd,
And from her sacred mansion gush'd,
Yet ah! with erring step -- The western hills
Pride, not pious ardour, fills:
In fierce confed'racy the giant bands
Advance with venom-darting hands,
Fed by their own malignant rills;
Nor could her placid grace their savage fury quell:
The madding rifts and should'ring crags her foamy flood repell.
"Confusion wild and anxious wo
"Haunt your waste brow, she said, unholy rocks,
"Far from these nectar-dropping locks!
"But thou, lov'd Father, teach my waves to flow."
Loud thunder her high birth confess'd;
Then from th' inhospitable west
She turn'd, and, gliding o'er a lovelier plain,
Cheer'd the pearled East again:
Through groves of nard she roll'd, o'er spicy reeds,
Through golden vales and em'rald meads;
Till, pleas'd with Indra's fair domain,
She won through yielding marl her heav'n-directed way:
With lengthen'd notes her eddies curl'd, and pour'd a blaze of day.
Smoothly by Sambal's flaunting bow'rs,
Smoothly she flows, where Calinadi brings
To Canyacuvja, seat of kings,
On prostrate waves her tributary flow'rs;
Whilst Yamuna, whose waters clear
Fam'd Indraprestha's vallies cheer,
With Sereswatí knit in mystick chain,
Gurgles o'er the vocal plain
Of Mathura, by sweet Brindavan's grove,
Where Gopa's love-lorn daughters rovę,
And hurls her azure stream amain,
Till blest Prayaga's point beholds three mingling tides,
Where pilgrims on the far-sought bank drink nectar, as it glides.
From Himola's perennial snow,
And southern Palamau's less daring steep,
Sonorous rivers, bright though deep,
O'er thirsty deserts youth and freshness throw,
'A goddess comes,' cried Gumti chaste,
And roll'd her flood with zealous haste:
Her follow'd Sona with pellucid wave
Dancing from her diamond cave,
Broad Gogra, rushing swift from northern hills,
Red Gandac, drawn by crocodiles,
(Herds, drink not there, nor, herdsmen, lave!)
Cosa, whose bounteous hand Nepalian odour flings,
And Mahanadi laughing wild at cities, thrones, and kings.
Thy temples, Casi, next she sought,
And verd’rous plains by tepid breezes fann'd,
Where health extends her pinions bland,
Thy groves, where pious Valmic sat and thought,
Where Vyasa pour'd the strain sublime,
That laughs at all-consuming time,
And Brahmans rapt the lofty Veda sing.
Cease, oh! cease — a ruffian king,
The demon of his empire, not the grace,
His ruthless bandits bids deface
The shrines, whence gifts ethereal spring:
So shall his frantick sons with discord rend his throne,
And his fair-smiling realms be sway'd by nations yet unknown.
Less hallow'd scenes her course prolong;
But Cama, restless pow'r, forbids delay:
To Love all virtues homage pay,
E'en stern religion yields. How full, how strong
Her trembling panting surges run,
Where Patali's immortal son
To domes and turrets gives his awful name
Fragrant in the gales of fame!
Nor stop, where Rama, bright from dire alarms,
Sinks in chaste Síta's constant arms,
While bards his wars and truth proclaim:
There from a fiery cave the bubbling crystal flows,
And Muctigir, delightful hill, with mirth and beauty glows.
Oh! rising bow'rs, great Cali's boast,
And thou, from Ganga nam'd, enchanting mount,
What voice your wailings can recount
Borne by shrill echoes o’er each howling coast,
When He, who bade your forests bloom,
Shall seal his eyes iron gloom?
Exalted youth! The godless mountaineer,
Roaming round his thickets drear,
Whom rigour fir’d, nor legions could appall,
I see before thy mildness fall,
Thy wisdom love, thy justice fear:
A race, whom rapine nurs’d, whom gory murder stains,
Thy fair example wins to peace, to gentle virtue trains.
But mark, where old Bhagírath leads
(This boon his pray’rs of Mahadev obtain:
Grace more distinguish'd who could gain?)
Her calmer current o'er his western meads,
Which trips the fertile plains along,
Where vengeance waits th' oppressor's wrong;
Then girds, fair Nawadwip, thy shaded cells,
Where the Pendit musing dwells;
Thence by th' abode of arts and commerce glides,
Till Sagar breasts the bitter tides:
While She, whom struggling passion swells,
Beyond the labyrinth green, where pards by moonlight prowl,
With rapture seeks her destin'd lord, and pours her mighty soul.
Meanwhile o'er Potyid's musky dales,
Gay Rangamar, where sweetest spikenard blooms,
And Siret, fam'd for strong perfumes,
That, flung from shining tresses, lull the gales,
Wild Brahmaputra winding flows,
And murmurs hoarse his am'rous woes;
Then, charming GANGA seen, the heav'nly boy
Rushes with tumultuous joy:
(Can aught but Love to men or Gods be sweet?)
When she, the long-lost youth to greet,
Darts, not as earth-born lovers toy,
But blending her fierce waves, and teeming verdant isles;
While buxom Lacshmi crowns their bed, and sounding ocean smiles.
What name, sweet bride, will best allure
Thy sacred ear, and give thee honour due?
Vishnupedì? Mild Bhishmasu?
Smooth Suranimnaga? Trisrota pure?
By that I call? Its pow'r confess;
With growing gifts thy suppliants bless,
Who with full sails in many a light-oar'd boat
On thy jasper bosom float;
Nor frown, dread Goddess, on a peerless race
With lib'ral heart and martial grace,
Wafted from colder isles remote:
As they preserve our laws, and bid our terror cease,
So be their darling laws preserv'd in wealth, in joy, in peace!
-- The Works of Sir William Jones, With the Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth, in Thirteen Volumes, Volume XIII, 1807, p. 321-333