Greek came to India long before it came to Western Europe. Socrates's 'asebia' (impiety) was known to Indo-Greeks as 'adharma'. Even Latin filtered through. The Hindi word 'dakhiyanoos' meaning antiquated is of Roman origin. It is foolish to think 'the Classics' weren't already part of Indian culture long before any such subject as 'Classics' existed in Western Universities.
Phiroze Vasunia, a Classicist trying to make his discipline a tributary to the turgid, turd filled, Ganges of Grievance Studies, takes a different view.
Oddly, he invokes the Ruskin whose Newdigate Prize winning 'Salsette & Elephanta' was wholly Utilitarian & Evangelical. Sadly, neither stripe of substantivist shite would survive the tectonic shock of Geology or Biology getting unmoored from Teleology.
Before 'Darwin's revolutionary idea' and then the new Marxist or Socialist theories gained hold, the wanker, John Ruskin wrote in 'Unto this last'
The fact is, that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people.
Nonsense! The merchant buys cheap and sells dear. This is explained to small kids. Daddy says 'I won't buy you this bicycle from the bicycle shop. I will buy it straight from the warehouse or the factory because the price will be 40 percent cheaper. You will get the very same bike but I will have to shell out less money.' At an early age, we understand why Mummy buys vegetables at the open air market rather than the air-conditioned shop in the posh part of town. You get the same potatoes and peas but the 'mark up' is much less because of lower 'overheads' for the vendor.
I should like the reader to be very clear about this. Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed—three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation: The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
Scientists do a better job by inventing bombs and aeroplanes and submarines and nuclear weapons. Shooting people and being shot does not require much intellect.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
No. Teachers teach. Pastors pray and lead others in prayer. A pastor may have no intellect to speak of. What is required of him is Faith.
The Physician’s to keep it in health.
Medicine is intellectual iff it is scientific. Sadly, there are all sorts of quacks practicing non-allopathic medicine. Still, it is the pure scientist who does most to advance medicine.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
Nonsense! The police and bailiffs and bail bondsmen enforce justice. Lawyers argue a case or draft wills and contracts. Judges pronounce judgment. But enforcement is left to people with muscles who may have little in the way of intellect.
The Merchant’s to provide for it.
No. Producers provide. Farmers grow food, Industrialists produce goods, various different enterprises provide services. Merchants merely buy and sell what is produced.
And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.
No. Only a few professions- e.g. soldiers, police officers, fire-fighters- run a risk of death. True, a merchant or a pastor may enlist in the Army or the police force and thus run the risk of dying. But, in that case, he has changed profession.
“On due occasion,” namely:— The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.
There is no such duty if the physician has no cure for the thing. Like others he should run away from the place rather than risk spreading the disease himself.
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.
Be silent or quit the Church. You don't have to die to do either of these things.
The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.
Rubbish! The lawyer is welcome to appeal against a judgment he considers unjust. He is not expected to immolate himself as a protest.
The Merchant — what is his “due occasion” of death?
Getting hit by a bus.
It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
Nobody knows when to die. All the can do is embrace or avoid risky situations. Everybody knows how to live unless they are so stupid they think they can breathe under water or that they will feel warmer if they set themselves on fire.
Ruskin lived in an age when 'intellect', as applied to Socio-Economic problems, had taken the shape of quite advanced statistical and mathematical techniques. Florence Nightingale, whose poor health meant she could do little as a nurse, used her capacious mind and industrious collaborators to compile information such that her policy recommendations were superior to those contrived by the War Office. The Fabians carried on this tradition. In India, Dadhabhai Naoroji, Gokhale and the Servants of India similarly used statistics and detailed factual accounts to criticize British rule. By contrast, Ruskin and Carlyle were merely bombastic literary stylists incapable of making a reasoned argument. This is why they appealed to Gandhi.
Pheroze Vasunia, in his essay 'Gandhi & Socrates' (on which I have previously commented) writes
Since Gandhi was from a bania or merchant community and had studied law in London, he was arguably both a lawyer and a merchant and thus was familiar with two of the ‘five great intellectual professions’.
His pal, Pranjivan Mehta, was a Doctor and Barrister who made a lot of money as a gem merchant. Gandhi was a lawyer and a newspaper proprietor who became an important politician. Indeed, he contributed greatly to various pieces of legislation. Ruskin forgot that Politicians and Statesmen do 'brain work'. They are not expected to kill themselves or seek opportunities for martyrdom.
As a lawyer, Gandhi found no rest in South Africa and was constantly agitating for the rights of Indians and others. In these pages of Unto This Last, Ruskin
whose dad was a successful wine merchant. I suppose what sonny boy was hinting at was that Daddy should kindly top himself.
was nonetheless interested in the merchant more than the lawyer: he wrote that the merchant ought to be ready to suffer on behalf of his men and even to suffer more than his men; the merchant or manufacturer should give of himself ‘as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son’ .
This is nonsense. We don't want the boss to suffer. We want him to pay our wages. Still, I suppose there were a lot of Victorian gentlemen who wished Daddy would very kindly just top himself already so as to inherit his money.
In effect, Ruskin was showing Gandhi that a merchant could be a ‘hero and martyr’ if he were prepared to act in a spirit of self-sacrifice
A merchant who goes in for self-sacrifice ends up bankrupt. His employees lose their jobs. His creditors may themselves go bankrupt. Ruskin was writing nonsense.
In the preface to his (translated) version of the Apology, Gandhi writes that the Indian body politic is diseased.
It could not defend itself. It would soon not even be able to feed itself.
‘When the disease is diagnosed
This had happened long ago. Indians were aware that they could do nothing to stop European nations establishing enclaves along the coast. First came the Portuguese, then the Dutch and the French and English. The English were the best of the lot. Why? Because Britannica ruled the waves. If India wanted to be independent, it either needed a kick ass Navy or a Super-Power ally who could keep invaders and pirates and slave traders away from its coasts. Indians understood this well enough. They wanted 'home-rule' but a continuing alliance with the British Crown. This was the meaning of 'Dominion status' which Gandhi would confess he did not understand even though he himself had been born a 'British Protected Subject'. In South Africa, the one advantage the Indians had over the Chinese is that they were protected by the British Crown. If they were chucked out off the country, as the Chinese were, then the Crown would have to provide for them. In the Nineteen Twenties, an agreement for such repatriation was in fact reached between the Governments of India and South Africa. But few South African Indians wanted to return home. Thus, they stayed and had to put up with increasing apartheid.
and its true nature revealed in public, and when, through suitable remedies, the body [politic] of India is cured and cleansed both within and without, it will become immune to the germs of the disease, that is, to the oppression by the British and the others.’
Not having a Navy is not a disease. The Japs had got themselves a Navy quickly enough. But Navies cost money. Indians didn't want to pay taxes for a Navy. Let the Brits provide Naval protection while we grumble at the relatively small cost this imposes on India.
Readers can find ‘in the words of a great soul [Gandhi uses a form of mahatma] like Socrates, the qualities of an elixir’ .
Socrates was forced to drink hemlock by the Ecclesia (City Assembly) of Athens. Why? He had misled the youth of the City and thus weakened it. Gandhi, too, would be jailed for seditious libel- i.e. misleading Indian youth and creating public disorder of a dangerous type.
When they have drunk this elixir, or amrit,
actually hemlock- a poison-
Gandhi’s readers may be able to fight off the disease and cure the afflicted body.
They would die. Still, it must be said, Gandhi's 'fasts unto death' never resulted in his actually dying. In 1942, he issued the order 'Do or Die!' but nothing was done and nobody died. Sulking in a jail cell is not 'struggling'. It is just sulking. Thus it was Churchill and Roosevelt who prevented Japan enslaving India. Sad.
Gandhi/Socrates is a special kind of physician who will help his followers and disciples overcome the moral sickness that restricts their spiritual growth and hinders their intellectual development.
Plato wrote the Apology and set up an Academy which emphasized mathematical education. Nobody thought fit to pass a death sentence on him. Mathematics is a genuinely intellectual discipline. Ruskin and Gandhi wrote ignorant, ultracrepidarian, nonsense.
Ruskin also places the soldier in the five professions he mentions in Unto This Last, and it is interesting to see Gandhi, the professor of non-violence, give prominence to the soldier, or warrior, in the heading under which he offers his version of the Apology. The title that he uses is Ek satyavirni katha, which can be translated as ‘Story of a true soldier’ or ‘Story of a soldier of truth’, the latter being the form employed in the English edition of the Collected Works. ‘True soldier’ is arguably more martial than ‘soldier of truth’, but in any case the association of Socrates with ‘soldier’ in Gandhi’s version suggests that he thinks of Socrates as a figure who is ready to go to battle
Socrates had served in the Athenian infantry with credit.
and to give up his life for what he knows to be the truth.
He was not able to convince the Court that he tried to inculcate civic virtue in his young friends. All we can say is that Socrates was unjustly condemned. But the same thing could happen to a person wrongly convicted of having been a spy.
Gandhi’s Socrates is religious and pious,
He has 'eusebia'- the word Greeks used to translate 'dharma'.
a man who says he believes in God, and a philosopher who has a soldier’s toughness to withstand the hostility that he encounters in many quarters.
A soldier shows his toughness by beating up people. That's how you withstand hostility.
Rather than choose words or terms that might connect Socrates simply or uniquely to a philosophical, spiritual, or religious tradition, Gandhi refers to the Athenian as a satyavir and by that expression emphasizes his willingness to fight unto death for his cause.
Socrates had fought for Athens in numerous military expeditions. He bowed to the majesty of the law, though he considered the judgment passed against him to be wrong, and accepted death when, perhaps, it would have been easy enough for him to escape and live in exile.
By making a soldier a part of his title, Gandhi may also be recalling the terms used by Plato in his Apology. Socrates uses military language to describe his own pursuit of philosophy in the face of threats to his wellbeing;
because he had a well deserved reputation for courage in battle.
he suggests that when he stands fast at his trial and declines to run away he is acting like a solider at his post; and he also implies that his own obedience to god is comparable to the obedience of the soldier to his commanding officer.
Socrates is saying that he does not support the oligarchs. He was a friend of Aspasia and thus part of the circle around Pericles. His 'eusebia' or pious regard was for the Ecclesia which was too Democratic for elite tastes. Though condemned for 'asebia' (impiety) he shows his pious devotion to the foremost Athenian institution by submitting to its judgment when, perhaps, he could have fled easily enough.
In Henry Cary’s translation, Socrates says, ‘I should then be acting strangely, O Athenians, if, when the generals whom you chose to command me assigned me my post at Potidaea, at Amphipolis, and at Delium, I then remained where they posted me, like any other person, and encountered the danger of death, but when the deity as I thought and believed, assigned it as my duty to pass my life in the study of philosophy, and in examining myself and others, I should on that occasion, through fear of death or any thing else whatsoever, desert my post’ .
But if Athena had appeared to him at Potidaea and said 'run away' and he had run away and was arrested and executed for desertion, his position would be the same. We might say 'strange are the ways of Olympus! No mortal can guess as to why this pious man has been brought low, and suffered infamy, by the apparition of the Goddess. Perhaps, Zeus hungers for the conversation of this charming man and has arranged this fate for him so as to the more quickly gain his companionship.'
Following Socrates, Gandhi is reframing the figure of the soldier or warrior and reclaiming him for his own particular cause and struggle.
Why is he doing so? The Courts would only condemn him to death if he waged war on the King Emperor. That, he was not prepared to do.
Solider, physician, pastor, lawyer, and merchant: Gandhi had affinities with all five
No. Soldiers fight. Gandhi was a Sergeant in the Ambulance Corps- a non combatant. He wasn't a doctor. Giving enemas and administering mud packs does not make you a physician. He was a lawyer but gave up his practice. He was never a merchant. That's why his Ashrams were money-pits.
and discerned in Ruskin’s prose the exhortation to give up his own life if that were required of him.
It wasn't. Still, his own people might beat or shoot him.
This emphasis on martyrdom and death is arguably even stronger in Gandhi’s version of the Apology than in Plato’s text. Gandhi writes in his preface that Socrates ‘had no fear of death’ and he goes on to describe the last moments of the Athenian philosopher.
Who died in obedience to a judgment given by his own, free, people. Socrates could not be an exemplar for a conquered race. Had Persians been ruling Athens, Socrates would have been trying to kill Persian soldiers.
We are told about the hemlock that he administers to himself and the speech that he delivers in the presence of Phaedo. Gandhi adds, ‘It is said that up to the very last moment Socrates showed no fear, and that he took the poison smilingly. As he finished the last sentence of his discourse, he drank the poison from the cup as eagerly as we might drink sherbet from a glass.’
Indians were drinking sherbet from glasses because the Brits were keeping them safe. Smuts- a barrister like Gandhi- had taken up the sword against the British. Kitchener took a shine to him and advised him to agree to what Milner wanted because Milner's days were numbered. Thus Smuts became top dog in South Africa- when the Boers would let him- and successfully used the 'Yellow Peril' and 'coolie labour' argument to gain the whip-hand over the big Mining barons. In the Twenties, ludicrously, there was affirmative action- for Whites!
Socrates was ‘a great satyagrahi’ and a role model to Indians in the subcontinent as well as in South Africa: ‘We must learn to live and die like Socrates.’
Why? Athens was free. If it had been occupied by the Persians, 'Suqrat' would have joined the army of some independent Greek state in the hope of liberating his beloved polis.
Gandhi ends his article on Socrates thus
‘We pray to God, and want our readers also to pray, that they, and we too, may have the moral strength which enabled Socrates to follow virtue to the end and to embrace death as if it were his beloved. We advise everyone to turn his mind again and again to Socrates’ words and conduct’
Suqrat and Aflatoon (Socrates and Plato) were known to Indian Muslims. Some Christian missionaries were promoting the view that Socrates was 'naturaliter' Christian. He was the 'pharmakos' or scapegoat who prefigures Christ, the Paschal lamb, who takes on our sins. The problem here is that Jain-Vaishnavs have a horror of animal sacrifice. Also, it is better to give up sex rather than 'embrace your beloved'.
Socrates's credo was that it was wrong 'for the sake of avoiding danger, to do any thing unworthy of a freeman'. Athens was a Democracy. It had no King. India had a King-Emperor. True, legal procedures were far less arbitrary than in ancient Athens. But the fact remained, Indians were not 'free'. They were subjects. If what they said and did was seditious- e.g. Tilak protesting against British measures to halt the spread of the plague- then they could be sent to jail. But they would not be executed.
Why does Gandhi keep banging on about death? The answer is obvious. There were Revolutionary cells popping up all over India. Young people were moths to the flame of shedding their blood for 'Swaraj'. Gandhi was offering the same martyrdom but one free of the inconvenience of actually dying. The Merchant, after all, can raise his profit margin by adulterating what he sells. In this case, no great harm is done. The consumer quaffs sherbet saying 'lo! I drain this bitter hemlock so as to die a martyr to Truth, Justice and Freedom!' The good news is that he will be back in the market for sherbet quite soon. Repeat business is the best sort of business.
Vasunia takes a different view-
The emphasis on death in the Apology, however, need not be taken to refer to some sort of naive or starry-eyed outlook on the part of Gandhi. He may have been deeply influenced by ‘a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, planchette, and the Esoteric Christian Union’,
All that was irrelevant. Gandhi was a 'Naram Dal' follower of Gokhale trying to compete with the 'Garam Dal'- Lal, Bal & Pal- and Jugantaar and the Savarkars and the Ghaddarites etc.
but he was also uncannily successful in his dealings with political opponents .
No. They were uncannily successful in getting him to give them everything they wanted even when he had them over a barrel. That's why Smuts spoke well of him. Reading however was not impressed. He had genuinely wanted to do something more for India- hoping it would avoid Ireland's fate. Gandhi's unilateral surrender meant his successor would face a big problem from Hindu-Muslim riots.
Both his South African and his British opponents were unnerved by the moral certainty and conviction that he showed in his dealings with them
No. It was Jinnah who was seen as adamant. Gandhi you could always hoodwink.
and they would have been rattled by the notion that they were dealing with an activist who was prepared to wage his battle unto the last breath.
He could have fasted to death. He didn't.
Jail sentences scarcely troubled him, and he wrote, in 1922, that ‘the prison cell where Socrates drank the poison cup was undoubtedly the way to bliss’ .
It took the bullets fired by a Hindu to get him to that bliss.
Secondly, although Gandhi wrote his version of the Apology before he threw himself fully into the independence movement in India, he had already begun to develop the concept of satyagraha, and it is possible to see in his words nascent support for those Indians who were, literally and otherwise, soldiers in the war against British colonialism.
Gandhi recruited soldiers for Britain's war against the Kaiser. Sadly, his fellow Gujaratis chased him away.
As Ajay Skaria (2010, p. 217) observes, ‘. . . the heroic nationalists who gave their life to the nation also practiced a certain living by dying, where they gave themselves to their very death for a cause.
That may be said of Bhagat Singh or Ramprasad Bismil. It can't be said of Gandhi & Co. To be a soldier you have to fight. Sulking in jail is not fighting.
This very giving of themselves to their death authorized a living on and an evading of death so that their cause, the nation, could be better pursued.’
Why stop there? Why not say 'Gandhi used to chop off his own head every morning so as to dedicate it to the Goddess Bhavani. Then he would slaughter at least a dozen British soldiers before sitting down to his breakfast.'
Gandhi’s rendering of the Apology is, in this sense, consistent with the behaviour of anti-colonial nationalists and it clarifies their actions.
No it isn't. Athens wasn't a colony. It had colonies. Socrates was himself a member of the Assembly which condemned him.
And third, Gandhi’s attitudes to death and mortality were part of a complicated if mostly consistent spiritual and political programme.
A program of stunning puerility.
This programme evolved somewhat over the course of Gandhi’s life, was shaped by such things as his experience of religion, Indian diaspora communities, and colonialism, and nurtured satyagraha and ahimsa, with their distinctively Gandhian attributes. Gandhi’s willingness to accept death was intimately connected to his philosophy,
Who wanted to kill Gandhi? The Boers? Maybe. But this might help the Indians in South Africa and so Smuts would ensure it did not happen. Who else? Indians. After Gandhi spent a few weeks in jail, he decided Smuts was right. Indians should carry a pass. What was objectionable was that the thing was compulsory. He got out of jail to persuade Indians to voluntarily acquire passes. Sadly, some Indians thought Gandhi had taken a bribe. So they beat the shit out of him. Gandhi then realized that if you have led your people down the garden path, you need to spend at least a few months in jail. If you get out after a few weeks, your people may kick your head in.
to his way of being in the world, and in particular to the principles of ahimsa and satyagraha that he espoused and followed until the end ).
During the Second War, he did become a Pacifist- probably because he thought Japan would win. But he supported India in the first Kashmir war.
The initial context of publication also explains why Gandhi’s Ek satyavirni katha becomes a vehicle for civil disobedience from an early date.
The Tatas did provide money for the South African agitation. Non-violence means money.
I have touched on some of the circumstances above, but it is worth noting that the instalments appeared in Indian Opinion, a bilingual (initially, multilingual) English and Gujarati newspaper that was, at the same time, not a newspaper in the conventional sense of the word (Hofmeyr 2013). In the issue (9 May 1908) that contained the sixth instalment of Gandhi’s Apology, Indian Opinion ran articles or editorials on government Bills that affected the rights of Indians in the region; the colour question; the poll tax; the ‘Asiatic Question’; ‘Asiatic Passive Resistance’; and ‘A Progressive Indian’, to name a few topics. As these examples show, Indian Opinion was concerned with the predicament of Indian immigrants around the Empire and took a stand against racial injustice and political oppression, especially when these affected Indians.
Gandhi had been asked to stay on in South Africa as the representative of his community. He was just doing what he was paid to do by fellow Gujaratis. The problem was that Muslims began to feel that his policies hurt them while helping Hindus. That is why some of them tried to get Jinnah to come to South Africa to provide them with leadership. The better course would have been for them to join forces with the Cape Coloureds whose leader was a Muslim Doctor of Malay descent.
The newspaper informed the Indian diaspora community in South Africa but was also, in its overseas location, contributing to an evolving sense of Indian nationhood .
Nonsense! It is a different matter that Indians wanted to participate in the benefits of Empire in East and South Africa. At a later point, the Aga Khan demanded Tanganika be handed over to the Ismailis! The problem was that, as the after-math of the Boer War showed, either indigenous people or White 'settlers' would get power and treat Indian immigrants badly. In the end, Nationalist Indian meddling tended to cut off profitable avenues of emigration- i.e. the thing backfired.
The Gandhian provenance of Plato’s Apology made it suspect in the eyes of the British authorities, who, in 1910, banned the pamphlet in Bombay.
There was a theory, at that time, that Gokhale and Tilak were in cahoots because they had attended the same school and came from the same sub-caste.
According to a notice in The Bombay Government Gazette , the translation of the Apology was seized by officers since it deployed ‘words which are likely to bring into hatred and contempt the Government established by law in British India and to excite disaffection to the said Government’.
This could have been appealed. It wasn't because the charge was true enough.
These expressions were formulaic and evoked the strictures of the Press Act of 1910. The Gazette also disclosed that three other works were banned by the government, namely, Hind Swaraj, Sarvodaya, and a copy of a speech delivered by Mustafa Kamal Pasha. The last was a reference to a speech given by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, in October 1907, in Alexandria, a few months before his death, which occurred, in February 1908, in Cairo.
Egypt was a 'veiled protectorate'. De jure, it had a King whose suzerain was the Ottoman Caliph.
Gandhi, who was sympathetic to the Egyptian, had translated the speech into Gujarati and published it in Indian Opinion in June 1908 (Indian Opinion 27 June 1908; CWMG vol. 8, p. 326). The text of Plato’s Apology now belonged to a literature that, in the language of the Press Act, contained ‘words, signs or visible representations which are likely or may have a tendency, directly or indirectly, whether by inference, suggestion, allusion, metaphor, implication or otherwise’ to threaten the British government of India. The inclusion of a translation of Plato’s Apology in the list of banned works was slightly anomalous in so far as it is the only one of the four that went back to antiquity. Clearly, the source of the publication and the identity of the ‘translator’ set off alarm bells in the British administration.
No. Some official read it and noted that British rule was described as a 'disease'. That was sedition pure and simple.
Gandhi’s version was not the first translation of the Apology into an Indian language; it was not even the first version into Gujarati. ‘Ala alDin Sharif Salih Muhammad published the second edition of his Gujarati account of Socrates—which admittedly draws on various dialogues by Plato and not just the Apology—in Bombay as early as 1897 .
In other words, it puts the Apology in its proper context. Gandhi does not do so. The proper parallel, for Indians, would be that Princess of Udaipur who consented to kill herself rather than remain a bone of contention between rival Princes seeking her hand in marriage. This occurred in the early nineteenth century and was the theme of the first play written by an Indian in English. My point is, Socrates was a freeman freely choosing to obey the judgment of his own people.
Indian treatments of Greek philosophy
were plentiful in Arabic and Persian and had begun appearing in Urdu and other Indian languages
were permitted to circulate by the colonial authorities (e.g. the Urdu discussion of Ihsan Allah published in 1883), as were other translations of Plato.
Plato was taught in Indian Colleges.
In Gandhi’s lifetime, the British administrator Frank Lugard Brayne wrote Socrates in an Indian Village and a series of related titles as part of his programme of rural development in the Punjab.
That is irrelevant.
In 1931, more strikingly, Sir John Gilbert Laithwaite, a British civil servant and later private secretary to the Viceroy, wrote a pseudo-Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Gandhi, for the entertainment of another civil servant, Sir (Samuel) Findlater Stewart, the permanent under secretary of state for India .
Again, this is wholly irrelevant.
It was not Socrates or Plato who troubled the officers of the British government in India; it was Gandhi’s portrayal of Socrates that was the source of the grievance.
No. Gandhi said 'British rule is oppressive'. India must throw off this disease. That's sedition.
The notice in the Bombay Government Gazette did not pass unremarked on by Gandhi, who responded with a short piece in Indian Opinion (7 May 1910) and pointed out that the ‘Defence of Socrates or The Story of a True Warrior is a Gujarati rendering of Plato’s immortal work printed in order to illustrate the virtue and the true nature of passive resistance’.
He said British rule is oppressive. It is a disease. India must rid itself of it. Passive resistance may not amount to sedition. But publicizing the need for it, is sedition if the current Government is termed oppressive and like a disease which enfeebles the body.
He also wrote that the banned publications, with the exception of Hind Swaraj, had been with the reading public for some time. These publications, Gandhi writes, ‘are intended to impart a lofty, moral tone to the reader and are, in our opinion, works capable of being put into children’s hands without any danger whatsoever’.
Would a Court of law concur with this opinion? Why not bring a test case?
The government was trying ‘to stop the circulation of literature that shows the slightest independence of spirit’ and was likely to consumed by excessive zeal.
One can show independence of spirit without saying the Government is oppressive and similar to a disease which saps the health and vitality of the body politic.
Gandhi goes on to present himself and his associates as champions of passive resistance and maintains that they will not be affected by the government’s repression. He agrees with the authorities that violence is unacceptable and adds that ‘the only way we know to eradicate the disease is to popularize passive resistance of the right stamp. Any other way, especially repression, must inevitably fail in the long run’
Passive resistance by Dissenters to the use of Local Authority Rates to finance Church of England schools had failed. So had the efforts of the Suffragettes. Gandhi's various passive resistance campaigns failed save where were led by capable people with limited aims of a type highly beneficial to those involved.
By the time Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, Socrates was established in his mind as the exemplar of a satyagrahi.
Nonsense! Gandhi didn't drink wine with handsome young men.
When the Rowlatt Act of 1919 took aim at the possession of seditious documents, the Satyagraha Sabha, led by Gandhi, decided to disseminate the same four tracts, including the Gujarati translation of Plato’s Apology, that were banned for sedition in 1910.
So, Gandhi broke the law. However, the age of multi-ethnic Empires had ended. The question was whether Gandhi, as the head of the Congress-Khilafat combine could negotiate a speedy transfer of power with the Viceroy.
As one critic notes, ‘the rereading and translation of the Apology becomes one of the first acts of civil disobedience for the 1919 satyagraha’ .
It was certainly the most inconsequential.
The statement by the Sabha noted that the books had been selected since they were ‘not inconsistent with satyagraha, and . . . therefore, of a clean type and . . . [did] not, either directly or indirectly, approve of or encourage violence’ .
Moreover, once the Labour Party put Irish and Indian independence into its manifesto in 1918, saying 'Imperial rule is oppressive' might no longer count as sedition.
In the Congress Report on the subsequent unrest in the Punjab, Gandhi again expounded on the meaning of satyagraha as truth-force and observed that Socrates was a satyagrahi since he insisted on telling the truth to young Athenians and then laid down his life for that principle .
A dangerous argument. It may be true that there is no God and no Prophet and no Mahatmas or 'Khilafat' (Vice-regents under God) but saying this to young people would get you in trouble with your village or caste Panchayat. Don't forget, a lot of Indians at that time thought death was the correct penalty for apostacy. As for the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, they posed a yet greater danger.
Satyagraha was non-violent and involved self-control, he added, and it could not be blamed for the violence and pillaging of the protesters in the Punjab. ‘There was once a wise man, named Socrates, who lived in Athens. His unconventional ideas, which, however, spread love of truth and goodness, displeased the authorities, and he was sentenced to death’ .
It displeased his own people. The 'authority' was the Ecclesia- i.e. the Assembly of all the free male citizens of the City.
As the letter to a relative confirms, Gandhi’s identification with Socrates persisted at least into the 1930s, when he again summarized the Apology, though far more briefly this time.
Perhaps Nehru told him of the homo-erotic undercurrents in various dialogues- e.g. the Lysis. Moreover 'Symposium' means a party where wine is drunk and everybody gets sloshed. Some also start bumming each other.
Yet, it is a mistake to extrapolate from Gandhi’s references to truth and goodness in his writings on Socrates and to think of him as a simple, unsophisticated, or overly literal reader of Greek philosophy.
Because he didn't read Greek philosophy.
Plato and Socrates are not the first names that come to mind in connection with anti-colonialism or civil disobedience or with spiritual renewal, but one of the interesting features of the engagement with Socrates, in South Africa and India, is how Gandhi ‘brings to insurgency’
the Boers were 'insurgents'. Indians were not.
the words of a Platonic text . This reading of Socrates was not entirely new and took its inspiration from, among other things, the writings of John Ruskin and nineteenth-century conceptions of Socrates as a martyr.
Based on Socrates's embracing the role of pharmakos, of scape-goat, in the Phaedo. After Darwin's revolutionary idea had taken hold, the attempt was made to turn Christianity into a sort of ethical religion based on doing stupid shit like getting crucified or drinking hemlock.
Ruskin, in particular, had awoken in Gandhi a powerful understanding of Plato’s text and affirmed for him that the struggle for satyagraha needed to be upheld at all costs, unto the last, even unto death.
'Cobbler, stick to your last' means don't talk about stuff you don't understand. The word 'ultracrepidarian' means the same thing. Also, if you aren't actually risking death stop pretending that you are a fucking martyr.
Many of Gandhi’s interlocutors, opponents, and gaolers would have had a far deeper knowledge than Gandhi of Plato’s Greek and a more wide-ranging familiarity with Plato’s dialogues (and, for that matter, of Ruskin’s work). Gandhi could not read classical Greek.
Whereas the average turnkey in India composed Anacreontics in between hitting delinquent prisoners on the head.
But it was he, and not they, who perceived the transformative potential of the Apology
it had none in Socrates's time. Athenian Democracy disappeared. Aristotle's student declared himself a God. The Greeks replaced the Persians as an Imperial race. Sadly, by 1917, it had became apparent that Imperialism was not viable. The future belonged to Nation States able to feed and defend themselves or else who could secure Super Power protection.
in an English translation of the Victorian period and who thereby came to a better understanding of satyagraha, the truth-force that brought an Empire to its knees.
The British Empire did get on its knees to suck off the Americans. This was because America had lots of money and planes and ships and submarines and, soon enough, the atom bomb. Gandhi may have delayed the transfer of power. But that delay meant much more avoidable death at the time of Partition. Talking bollocks is no substitute for alethic research and dissemination of information. Gandhi failed because he was stupid, ignorant and wholly indifferent to the facts of the case. Still, he did pave the way for a dynasty more imbecilic than the Windsors.
Was this the fault of Socrates? Yes! He should simply have buggered Alcibiades's brains out. Sadly, this is not the view of the scholarly community- at least that of the brown persuasion-
Mathura Umachandran, of Princeton University, has the following review of Vasunia-
Classics and Colonial India: Classical Presences.
‘Classical Presences’, a radical if sometimes uneven series from Oxford University Press, has done much in recent years to open up the horizons of the discipline of Classics.
By ignoring stuff written in difficult languages like Latin or Greek.
The latest in the series by Phiroze Vasunia ought to be considered a valuable contribution.
to Grievance Studies.
In a nutshell, Vasunia explores how the discipline of Classics and the British Empire in India profoundly shaped one another.
Chaps who learnt Latin and Greek found it easy to learn Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic- or even Tamil. Raja Ram Mohan Roy learned Greek and Latin and Hebrew but he lobbied for unrestricted European settlement in Bengal only because Whites were needed to keep the 'rapacious' Muslim in check. Indians saw there was little to be gained from the 'Classics'. Study the Law and you make money. Medicine too can be quite lucrative. Even engineers can do quite well for themselves. But reading Greek or Latin will make you stupid and unfit for lucrative employment. Look at that cretin Aurobindo!
It is noteworthy that Vasunia has little to say about either Roy or Aurobindo- the only two Indians who knew Latin and Greek. As for 'competition-wallahs' like Otto Trevelyan, the soon fucked off back home unless, like PG Woodhouse's elder brother they became the tutor to the new Messiah, Jeddu Krishnamurthy.
This complex and shifting relationship is traced through the study of institutions and individuals. The imagination and breadth of scholarship on display here promises many further lines of enquiry. The qualms expressed in this review are therefore minor and should not detract from the overall recommendation to anyone interested in the history of the British in India or the history of Classics to consider carefully the material and arguments presented here.
This is a worthless book. But you and me might end up having to write shite of this stripe so let's pretend it aint garbage.
Vasunia distinguishes himself by being both conceptually sophisticated and a close reader of evidence. The book lays out the parameters for the inquiry in an Introduction that considers what the index of classicism is (what is meant by ‘Classics’ and ‘Classical’? How can these meanings be historically contingent?)
The thing means Latin and Greek. Either you know that shit or you don't. This is historically contingent on whether you have a brain and can make a living talking about that shite.
as well as what relationships are set up between past and present when the ‘Classical’ is invoked as a rubric. Vasunia identifies the challenge that Sanskrit, as another classical tradition, posed to those who had invested in Graeco-Roman antiquity, when they encountered India in a modern imperial context.
There was no challenge. You paid a Pundit to teach you Sanskrit. Even pre-Paninian Sanskrit was so easy that a German mathematician- Hermann Grassmann- could translate the Rg Veda in the hope that this would get him a Professorship and thus spare him the indignity of being a School Master.
The essential argument of the book is powerful; the classical past is malleable in the service of both the colonizers and the colonized.
No. Studying the past or reading ancient books is only useful because the past isn't malleable. You can't say that Socrates married Queen Victoria and thus became the father of the Duke of Connaught.
That is to say, the past can be both instrumentalized as a tool of hegemony
which is how come AJP Taylor was able to conquer Germany.
and of envisioning a post-colonial India. Vasunia does well to make such a complex argument without denying the oppressive fact of empire and colonization.
Shame. He should have pretended that India occupied and enslaved Britain. How else can you explain Rishi Sunak?
In Part One, ‘Alexander in India’ (pp. 33-118), Vasunia looks at two imperial contexts of the use of Alexander. Firstly Vasunia argues that Alexander occupies a central place in the imagination of those Europeans who set out to chart the terrain of the East and to establish trade and administrative structures.
No. Alexander came by land. His soldiers hated the place and wanted to go home. The Europeans came by sea. They needed to make a profit which they could return home to spend. The alternative was dying of dysentery.
The fascinating implication of the argument is that Alexander is an anxiety-inducing model for the proponents of liberal empire, since he is a fraught site for negotiating contradictory meanings (Sober or sot? Conqueror or tyrant? Imitable or inimitable? Greek or not Greek?).
He is fucking irrelevant except in so far as Tsar Alexander III might chose to emulate him.
Vasunia works through the European historiographical traditions concerning Alexander stretching from Droysen in the nineteenth century to G. S. Robertson.
So, not very far at all. I suppose Robertson could be said to have supplied material for Kipling's 'the Man who would be King'. But the 'Greeks' of Kafiristan came under the Afghan King and turned Muslim.
In the second half of his argument in Part I, Vasunia dismantles the nationalistic claim that Alexander played a minimal part in Indian history.
The 'Yavanas' played some part. They were thoroughly assimilated because they were few in number. Still, Jain historians still bang on about how Karevail defeated Demetrius in Magadha.
Rather, Vasunia examines the utility of ‘Sikander’ to Indian rulers at the end of the first millennium AD for the delineation of their political power.
This is because of the Persian and Quranic references to him. Also, many royal houses claimed descent from Sikandar and Caesar and the Achaemenids as well as the Sun and the Moon.
In examining the politicized interactions of these historiographical traditions together, Vasunia’s dynamic view of the reception history of Alexander answers the charge of being sterile and over-awed by Alexander.
Nobody gave a fuck. As Ghalib put it 'kyā kiyā ḳhiẓr ne sikandar se / ab kise rah-numā kare koʾī.' Khizr led Alexander to the waters of life but drank it up himself. Who would bother seeking a guide now?
Part Two, ‘Caesar in Peccavistan’ ,
When Napier conquered Sindh he telegraphed 'Peccavi' (I have sinned). Then Outram, who took Oudh, telegraphed 'Vovi' (I have vowed). After that, Queen Victoria told her Generals to stop being so fucking silly.
examines another dense and sometimes contradictory complex of imperial emulation and rivalry, whereby the British Empire in India, as an institution and as represented by individual administrators, conceptualized itself as a latter-day Roman Empire.
Fuck off! The Romans settled soldiers on land taken from the conquered. The Brits did not because India was too fucking hot.
Vasunia is rightly suspicious of the complacent idea that Rome was a ‘natural’ comparandum for the British in India.
Nothing wrong with Roman 'pietas'. At least they weren't constantly bumming each other like the Greeks.
In Chapter 4, ‘Visions of Antiquity’ (pp. 157-92), Vasunia makes a bold move in argumentation to look at the ‘architecture of architecture’
which is just architecture just as the fart of a fart is still just a fart.
or the racialised ideologies of power that underpinned the ‘what, how and where’ of British colonial building in India.
There were no such 'ideologies'. There was merely routine.
In this context, this reviewer feels more emphasis could have been placed on the decision to move the colonial capital from Calcutta and to make a new Delhi in 1911.
Why? Calcutta wasn't just a shit-hole. It was a shit-hole full of seditious Babus. Delhi was a backwater but less humid.
The final chapter in Part II, ‘Competitionwallahs: Greek, Latin and the Indian Civil Service’ , is perhaps the most pertinent to classicists interested in the history of the discipline.
What is pertinent is that Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit etc. gave poorer boys a chance to excel. Take Upendra Goswami whose father had lost all his money. The boy swotted up Greek and Latin from dictionaries at the local library. This enabled him to crack the ICS exam. The fact is, an Old Etonian is likely to speak and write more elegant English than a lad who went to Godhulia Gornmint Collidge. But, when it comes to Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, the playing field becomes more level. Sheer hard work compensates for an inferior socio-economic milieu.
Vasunia demonstrates how the unequal weighting towards Greek and Latin in the curriculum reflected the privileged position of Oxbridge classics with the Indian Civil Service, especially for those under the aegis of powerful figures in both politics and the academy, such as Benjamin Jowett.
Jowett was considered a friend of India. He was Cornelia Sorabjee's guardian.
Again, looking at the subjects that were offered and the types of questions put to candidates, allows Vasunia to track how ‘colonial anxieties and fantasies were being triangulated through Britain’s complicated relationship with Greek and Roman antiquity’ .
This is nonsense. The ICS papers were similar to the 'matric' exams used by Universities.
For Vasunia, this exposes one of the great contradictions of the empire; though notionally open to Indians, the Indian Civil Service was a game rigged in favour of those who had been trained in Greek and Latin, underpinned by normative ideas of race and class.
Why rig the game when you are the only player? As for 'normative ideas of race and class', India didn't just have both, it went the extra mile with a very complicated caste system. To some extent this infected the English (less so the Scots or Irish) such there was a prejudice against 'country-bottled' Europeans.
Part Three, ‘Co-operation and Liberation’ (pp. 239-350), returns to the literary mode. In Chapter 6, ‘Homer and Virgil’ (pp. 239-278), Vasunia makes explicit that Greece and Rome can offer different political and cultural stimuli to different people.
Why not make explicit that Indians don't give a fuck about either?
If that seems crudely put, then it is a corrective to the often seen, little interrogated idea of ‘Graeco-Roman antiquity’ as an undifferentiated lump serving as a model.
Add in Judaism (second Maccabees is written in Koine) and you have the 'undifferentiated lump' out of which modern Europe emerged.
Vasunia offers this explanation for the popularity of Homer in India as opposed to Virgil;
Homer is exciting. Virgil is boring.
the latter is too tied up in British imperial visions, whereas the former can be read in the context of the Indo-European thesis.
There are common elements to Iron Age epics. But Virgil's work smells of the lamp.
The broad sketches of the reception history of both Virgil and Homer are useful. However, although Vasunia picks his moments judiciously in the nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth century is unfortunately compressed and there is more to be said about Auden’s waspish poem ‘Secondary Epic’.
What could usefully be said is that Gandhi, learning a bit of Latin for the bar exam, embraced a millenarianism which, I suppose, appealed in multi-ethnic slave empires but which had not existed in the Iron Age. In Virgil's 4th Eclogue we read of a new Golden Age to be established by a Universal Emperor where - pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis, quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris oppida. In Timothy Ades translation- Few traces will survive of such old frauds/ As Shipping, Agriculture and Defence.
Even less successful for this reviewer is the analysis offered in the following chapter ‘Aristophanes’ Wealth and Dalpatram’s Lakshmi’ , which examines the Gujarati poet’s project of moral reform via a re-visioning of Aristophanes’ play.
Brahmins scold Banias for caring about wealth. This is a hint that maybe you should give them some cash.
Whilst the material here is interesting enough, Dalpatram’s thinking on history does not appear particularly interesting in and of itself.
He knew that the Brits were keeping India safe. That was good enough.
What is illuminating is the extraordinary friendship between Dalpatram and A.K. Forbes
he taught the latter Sanskrit. Forbes, like other British officials, wanted to encourage the vernacular languages and to get texts published which could be used in schools and colleges. So he got his Munshi to switch from Brajbasha to Gujarati. The same thing was happening up and down the country.
who introduced the Gujarati writer to Greek literature.
No. He takes an old Greek play and presents it in the vernacular- bowdlerising it and making it a bit more boring in the process.
Why, for example, is Aristophanes a good choice as a marker of Greek literature?
Dalpatram wrote some comic plays. Why? Boring the pants of your audience is bad for the box office.
This fertile intercultural exchange between the two men begs for further examination.
Did they bum each other? If not, why not? Was it because of the hegemony of racialized Patriarchy under the reign of Neo-Liberalism?
The final chapter, ‘Athens in Calcutta: Derozio Dutt and the Bengal Renaissance’
Madhusudhan Dutt & Ram Mohan Roy did know Greek. But the 'Bengal Renaissance' had to do with learning English and French. Aurobindo was a Classist. But the was as boring and bombastic as shit. His big worry was that the Brits were the Romans and the Bengalis the servile Greeks. People pointed out to him that the Greeks were as smart as fuck. Bengalis were boring and bombastic and as stupid as shit.
is more effective in terms of what it does for Vasunia’s overall argument. By juxtaposing the two Bengali writers, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
He died young. Apparently his acolytes liked a drink or two. But, Indians had been getting drunk since the time of Dionysius- who peacefully conquered the land with lute, lyre and loose women.
and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Vasunia can gesture towards the range of relationships and attitudes to Hellenism possible for Indians.
Which were like attitudes to Confucianism- i.e. didn't fucking exist.
Interesting in this context but not addressed here is what status Sanskrit held as an alternative classical tradition for those involved in thinking through a regional Bengali renaissance and a national Indian modernity.
The Brits, those bastards, forced Indians to study not just vernacular languages but at least one Indian Classical language. One may say H.H Wilson's students, who helped him with his translations of the Vedas etc., played a big role in Brahmo and other such bombast.
The Epilogue ushers us through to the twentieth century and the last hurrah of Graeco-Roman Classics in India. As is appropriate for a book that argues persuasively for the close relationship between past and present, it ends as it started with Jawaharlal Nehru.
Though it was Aurobindo who was the Classicist. Nehru studied Botany.
Vasunia examines the relationships of Gandhi and Nehru with Classics in their respective projects of nationalism. While Gandhi’s translations of Plato and self-styling as a Socrates figure are tantalizing, Vasunia rightly pays more attention to Nehru’s more vexed and ambivalent constructions of relationships between the classical past in India and Greece, as well as India’s relationship with its own past.
Nehru was convinced that the Greeks invented sodomy before passing on that vile habit to the Arabs and Turks and so on. No Hindu can be a homo. Us dudes like titties and pussies. We are repulsed by dicks.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is perhaps its most significant flaw.
It's attraction is to show you can easily knock off a book about the influence of Confucianism on eighteenth Century Nigeria. But this is also its flaw. There was no such influence.
Did the Roman Law tradition affect Indian lawyers, judges, and legislators? In one sense, yes. Macaulay was considered a sound Latin scholar. His name is associated with Codification and the displacement of the Court Pundit or Maulvi. But codification was inevitable- indeed the Iran of the Ayatollahs has gone in for it. However, the influence of Roman Law on India is indirect. Still, this may be an interesting topic to pursue.
Vasunia for the most part handles a great range of material well.
He is handling the wrong material. Greek was important for theologians and philosophers. Latin was important for lawyers. Comparative philology was a separate field where Indians rather followed in German footsteps than did anything original. However, Indians keen to uphold the notion that law is a 'samskar'- i.e. is defeasible- as well as 'natural deduction systems' (e.g. navya-nyaya)- did occassionaly turn to Latin and Greek. Nothing much came of it because Utilitarianism was a superior path forward. Still, there was a lot of money to be made in the law and, even to this day, we find legal dynasties where, for generations, the male members have kept up a knowledge of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian etc. This can come in useful for winning cases.
His style of analysis is nuanced, progressing by close readings and the gradual accumulation of evidence
which he looks for in the wrong places.
The reader not well equipped with the arsenal of post-colonial criticism would have benefitted from a more explicit orientation of the book in this scholarly field.
Vasunia should have pointed out that White men have White dicks. Dicks cause RAPE!
In the Introduction Vasunia states that he is indebted to the work of Edward Said
in which case, he is in debt to an ignorant nutter.
and indeed his name does crop up here and there. However, a brief but focused discussion of Said might help to explain why Vasunia’s analyses lean towards the literary.
Writing about the impact of Roman Law on Indian lawyers and judges would require genuine scholarship as would understanding what valency Ram Mohan Roy gave Hebrew and Greek words so as to champion Unitarianism. Equally, the Western Classical equivalent of various Indic words- e.g. dharma and karma- were sought for, generally in vain, by various translators and professors.
A second area in which this reviewer would have liked to read more is the role of gender in the various intersectional critiques.
Also trans-gender, not to mention people who identify as pussy-cats.
Vasunia touches on gender as part of the construction of masculinity in the civilized gentlemanly administrator of the empire, as opposed to the effete Oriental.
Nawab of Oudh had a vagina. General Outram had a dick. How is that fair?
Leaning further on gender as a conceptual tool in the construction of empire in the context of the ‘classical’ would have further enriched the analysis.
Homer had a dick. So did the Viceroy. Neither had to sit down to pee. How is that fair? Even when Victoria became Queen Empress, trillions of Indian women had to sit down to pee. This shows Colonialism is totes Patriarchal and Racist and that it slut shames transgender people who fist themselves vigorously so as to show solidarity with starving Palestinian homosexuals who are protesting against Joe Biden's sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
This omission in respect of the conceptual orientation of the book begged the question for this reviewer of who the intended audience is.
People who don't understand that not till heterosexual dicks are banned will the illegal occupation of Turtle Island by white peeps be put to an end.
Maps could have been appended to help guide those not familiar with the activity of the British in India over the course of two-hundred and fifty years of empire, and could have been an elegant way to visualize other European interests in India too.
like their interest in vigorously fisting themselves.
The same could be said for the inclusion of chronologies. On the other hand, since the Greek and Latin are seldom translated, the intended reader is clearly the Classicist.
Vasunia knows that lots of Indian peeps can read Inglis. Better not translate Greek or Latin stuff lest those Indians gain by it. After all, it is one thing to gain affirmative action by playing the Brown card. It is another to have to engage with those smelly Brown peeps.
It seems to this reviewer that the overlap in that Venn diagram of skill sets would be narrow, which is a shame because of the value of the arguments variously and skillfully made here. Vasunia does the kind of detailed, high-resolution, critical look at institutions and practice that Reception Studies is often accused of lacking. This book ought to be considered as rigorous a part of the critique of the discipline of Classics as the work of scholars such as Christopher Stray
who was an actual Classics master and gave a very good account of its history in the UK.
and Susanne Marchand.
she does not have a dick. Allowances should be made.
This is patient, broad and deep research that builds up complex arguments and rewards the reader with the volume and density of the analysis presented. It was a pleasure to read this politicized examination of the discipline.
No it isn't. You would need to spend a lot of time looking at who taught Greek and Latin in various colleges and seeing what influence they each had. A separate matter is the teaching of Latin in theological seminaries, more particularly in Kerala. Syrian Christians sometimes turned to Greek so as to counter the arguments of the Latins.
What of Theosophists in India? Some were Classicists and their interaction with Brahmins from Shrauta or Smarta backgrounds is of interest to people like me. I suppose you might say- 'nothing came of it.' Still, what if Pico Iyer had carried on the tradition of his father? After all, having attended Eton and Oxford, he fulfilled Annie Besant's desiderata for a Tambram Universal Messiah. I suppose, the fact that his Mummy was a Gujju saved him from that fate.
I suppose, as machine translation and generative AI improve, kids in Middle School will be able to quickly compile a better book than Vasunia has written. Still, it must be said, the subject is of little intrinsic interest and no political significance whatsoever.
Vasunia's foundational error is to think that 'Classics as a discipline emerged about 200 years ago, and it in some ways accompanied the rise of the modern empires.' The fact is classicus means belonging to the 'best class'. In England the best class of schools were founded many centuries ago and constrained by their charter to teach Latin and Greek. Thus, by metonymy, Latin and Greek scholarship was 'Classical scholarship'. The Romance languages are those which derive from Rome's Latin. Romantic literature is written in vernacular languages and being recent may or may not be 'best in kind'.
West European colonial Empires date back to the early fifteenth century when Greek was little known and such Latin as had currency was that of the Church or the Law Courts. 'Humane letters' and humanistic knights appear at around the time of the Reformation. But, by then, Spain and Portugal had vast overseas possessions and the Dutch and the French and the English sought to emulate them. By contrast, Greek and Latin were firmly established by the second half of the sixteenth century in England, before the country had anything substantial by way of Empire.
Why does Vasunia think something changed around 1800 with respect to the Classics? Nothing did. Elite schools were stuck teaching Latin and Greek while newer schools taught modern languages and other subjects useful to the rising mercantile class. But Classical scholarship turned out to be a good 'screening' and 'signalling' device. Even if Latin and Greek were perfectly useless, those who excelled at them in School, also did very well in the administration or the law courts or even in business enterprises.
Did Classical scholarship play any role whatsoever in Colonial India? No. True, some ICS officers had studied at top public schools. But many officers of the East India Company were of a Mercantile or Medical background. There was little demand for such studies in India and thus there was precious little by way of supply. However, the Brits did promote Indian Classical and Vernacular languages. It was only after Independence that you could have an IFS officer unable to speak any Indian language (though that loophole was shut around 1981 or 1982 with the result that my poor sister had to learn a bit of Hindi).
To some extent, Sanskrit did- at certain times and certain places- become just as much a Classical language as Latin or Greek. TS Eliot is an example of a poet who moved easily between these languages. But Aurobindo- whose Headmaster at St. Paul's had an MA in Sanskrit- also moved between them in a manner clumsy and cacophonous. The safer thing, Ind's British masters must have felt, was to let Indians concentrate on mangling the English language rather than turning their attentions to Horace or Hesiod.
