Jaspreet Singh Boparai on three Bengali bores.

Dr. Jaspreet Singh Boparai may have studied at Oxford, Cambridge, the Courtald Institute, the Warburg Institute, the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris and so forth. Yet, he remains a simple Punjabi bumpkin who doesn't get that peeps with phoren degrees in non-STEM subjects are required to write utterly illiterate or unreadable English. Otherwise, people will think they are stupid or that they are 'coconuts'- brown on the outside, white on the inside- who have become indifferent to the opinion of us desis. 

In an essay for Antigone magazine he claims that

Satyajit Ray and Nirad Chaudhuri both demonstrate, in their own ways, how completely an Indian could master the English language in the 20th century, and make it his own, without ever having to leave home, or submerge, compromise or deny his identity, his ancestral culture, or his heritage.

This is bizarre. The Dutt family was writing better, more natural and idiomatic, English in the mid nineteenth century. Ray didn't write much in English. His detective stories were in Bengali. Chaudhuri started to publish in English after he had given up on his 'ancestral culture' and heritage. Indeed, from 1946 onward, he was engaged in bitterly denigrating both. He didn't have to leave India but he chose to leave India at the age of 73 and, settling in England, was very happy there. Ray, the nephew of Nitin Bose- who introduced play-back singing to Indian cinema- loathed Indian movies and wrote long articles asserting that they were crap. As an auteur, he owed nothing to the Indian cinematic tradition- even in instances where that tradition drew on German or American directors. 

If you compare Niradh's writing with that of his old boss, Ramananda Chatterjee's, you understand why people said the standard of English at Calcutta University began to fall from around 1905. Ramananda got his MA in English seven years before Niradh was born. He had the intellectual self-confidence to devote himself to making himself useful to his country. He did not curse his fate for not having having been born in Paris. He held no grudge against his own people for not being Frenchmen of the Eighteenth Century.  That's why any article he wrote was highly effective in advancing the cause he had adopted. True he relied on statistics, rather than irrelevant quotations from Pascal, but, like Dacca Muslin, his prose was pellucid. The idea he wished to convey was never encumbered by yards of fustian or weighted down by gaudy ornaments. 

There is an obvious reason why standards, at least as regards English prose, fell during the Twentieth Century. The Calcutta graduate would increasingly interact only with other Indian graduates, not with Englishmen. There is nothing to be ashamed of, or to be apologetic about, for this development. True, some fools continued to write in a ludicrous 'Babu' fashion, but those who mattered moved towards a spare, logical, prose style of a wholly utilitarian type. That was a good thing. The Georgian style of a Jerrold or Sir John Squire was anathema to T.S Eliot and George Orwell. Why? Because it was shoddy. It was stupid. It was the reverse of Augustan. Its practitioners, in themselves, constituted a crapulous Dunciad. 

These men were able to accomplish all this, and create works of lasting importance, thanks not only to the self-confident intellectual society within which they arose,

Prior to about 1905, there was intellectual self-confidence in Calcutta. That's why poorer rustic lads like M.N Roy or Dhan Gopal, coming to Calcutta for higher education, could embrace a Revolutionary creed and end up, by the early Twenties, in New York or Berlin or Bolshevik Moscow, playing an equal part in the politics of the future. Sadly, once parents- like Niradh's father- discovered that Education could become the path to political exile, they heartily endorsed a re-infantilisation of the University. What mattered was that their sons get clerkships- unless they were smart enough to do STEM subjects- and that they lack intellectual self-confidence for the excellent reason that the thing was misplaced. India was as poor as shit. The economic substructure was too slender to support much in the way of a parasitic intelligentsia. 

and the first-rate institutions that educated them,

Indians wanted the Universities to become second-rate and then third-rate and finally morph into places where ambitious young people could acquire valuable work-skills- e.g. beating people with hockey sticks or, for those who wished to serve society by becoming legislators, raping and stabbing all and sundry.  

but also to a literary tradition that was already over a century old when The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published.

Being interested in religious matters, Raja Ram Mohan Roy did learn Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Arabic. He already knew Sanskrit and Persian and learnt English quite quickly. His writings were important in that they provided ammunition for the Unitarians. But Roy & Tagore's Brahmo Samaj dedicated itself to being as boring as shit and to scolding anything which moved. Ray and Niradh firmly believed that being boring and scolding their fellow Bengalis was the path of virtue. 

Boparai thinks Chaudhuri had a good knowledge of English literature. This isn't true. To be fair, he hadn't taken the old BA (Arts) degree which did have papers on Eng Lit. Instead he joined the new History department though, sadly, he couldn't get his MA. There was a great vogue for Anatole France in the early Twenties in Calcutta and he did apply himself to learning French- perhaps because his tutor at the Scottish Church College was Dr. Kalidas Nag whose Doctorate was from the Sorbonne. But Niradh, unlike Bibhuti, was not widely read in contemporary English literature. To take one example, Niradh didn't understand that the words Apu utters on first seeing the rustic girl he will marry- 'they breed Goddesses at Slocum Magna!'- was a reference to a recent English novel which highlighted the charms of a, somewhat isolated, rural part of England. In context, the quotation was highly apposite. Niradh thought it must be a reference to some obscure poem. 

Chaudhuri managed to capture and encapsulate an entire culture at the moment of its passing,

Nonsense! He was a good friend of Bibhuti but failed to appreciate his adventure stories or his stories of the occult. He showed no awareness of the accomplishments of his contemporaries- Swamy Prabhupada was a batchmate at Scottish Church, or Hemanta Kumar Sarkar who was his age but who got the gold medal for MA Sanskrit in 1919. Niradh's coterie was initially rather narrow, but he was employed by Ramananda Shastri and all doors were open to him. He just wasn't very interested in what was happening behind them. Thus, he can't answer any question Indians interested in the period might have even about authors like Sarat, whom he met. The man had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. There were some fascinating personalities whom he must have interacted with- e.g. Dr. A.K Mukherjee & his wife, Savitri Devi- but, about them, he is wholly silent. 

unconsciously and almost in spite of himself.

The reverse was the case. He was a thrifty fellow and recycled everything he had written as a jobbing journalist. But he was long on bombast and short on observation.  

He was an honest observer with a shrewd eye, an excellent memory and a scrupulous, fastidious attentiveness to detail, all of which enabled him to chronicle the complexities, paradoxes and contradictions of the society that made this work possible.

He wasn't Proust. Indeed, he doesn't seem to have read Proust. He fancied himself a Sainte- Beuve though, it was obvious that the fellow had praised mediocrities while dismissing Balzac, Hugo & Baudelaire. 

This is the secret to the author’s grandeur – not his attempts to sound like a Cabinet minister under the Marquess of Salisbury.

Salisbury's ministers were aristocrats who had no interest in sounding like a pederastic Don or a provincial barrister on the make. I suppose, Arthur Balfour is meant. But he had a keen intellect and was something of a philosopher. 

Niradh suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to return to his parent's home, after getting into debt during a period when his father financed his stay in separate lodgings while he prepared to re-take the MA exam. He was rescued from rural idiocy by the publication of an article he had written- based he says on one of Pascal's provincial letters- lambasting some other literary upstart. This was not grandeur, it was a sort of megalomania such as may afflict a tormented mind. Still, if writing rubbish of that sort would get him back to Calcutta, he would gladly do it. No doubt, people were laughing at him. But it is better to be laughed at because you have a mania for Pascal rather than that you are laughed at because you are a drooling maniac. 

At its best, the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian avoids abstractions in favour of vivid anecdotes and reliable experience:

No. It embraces gossip- the man was after all a journalist- but it is wholly unreliable.  

you trust Chaudhuri’s judgment when he generalises, because you

are a Punjabi. You have a low opinion of Bengalis.  

know he is not trying to marshal evidence for some theory or other.

He was Bengali. He didn't need no stinkin' evidence. 

Ray's first film was faithful to Bibhuti's text and was a box office hit in Bengal precisely because audiences had grown up reading Pather Panchali. His second wasn't faithful and did not do well. He tells us that it was then that he started to think of the foreign 'Arthouse' market as a way to break even. With 'Charulata' he was careful to be faithful to the text, or if that was impossible, at least to be careful with the mise en scene. 

What is Ray showing us in Charulata, and what is he trying to tell us?

He is showing us what Tagore wanted Bengalis to see. Don't steal money. It isn't a nice thing to do. Also, instead of just banging on about the greatness of Gladstone, maybe you should bang your wife once in a while. Some women want to have babies of their own, you know.  

Why should Classicists be interested in this, beyond the pleasure, satisfaction, intellectual enrichment and moral insight always to be gained from the work of a great artist?

The theme of the neglected wife isn't Classical. It is Romantic and rather bourgeois. Jaspreet doesn't answer his own question. I will. Tagore is referencing Madhusudhan's reworking of Aeschylus's Agamemnon in which Clytemnestra refuses to cook hilsa curry for her hubby thus causing him to die of a broken heart. 

Jaspreet shows a commendable ignorance of India in this article but, for a man with a very thorough English education, I am puzzled by his ignorance of England.

Throughout the 19th century, it was impossible to enter the Indian Civil Service, or be called to the Bar, without a good command of Latin and Greek; as it happens, the Hindoo College offered instruction in neither language.

The ICS exam, like the current UPSC exams in India, allowed you to choose from a number of subjects- e.g. Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Maths and Science. 

Greek and Latin favoured younger candidates fresh from Public School. The Bar did not require Latin though it would be helpful for the Roman Law paper. But cramming was all that mattered. It must be said that the cramming establishments were a vast improvement over the 'grinders' who had previously got boys through their exams.  At a later point, when the Army introduced similar exams, crammers sprang up all over the place. Since there was a good chance that a disgruntled student might kill you with a single blow, tutors developed novel and innovative methods to educate their students while still keeping up the success rate of the institution. 

In India, nowadays, there are plenty of such crammers all over the place. Some are very good. Others are only marginally better than the average Government College. Nevertheless, this is a 25 billion dollar industry. The Bengali bhadralok, it must be said, owe nothing to such places. Children may receive private tuition at home but, speaking generally, they had no difficulty in passing exams without additional assistance.

Back in the Eighteenth Century, Calcutta had a Bengali Greek community which had its own priests and a school for young people. The great Indologist Demetrios Galanos, was engaged by an agent of that community in Constantinople to come to Calcutta as a teacher of ancient Greek and Latin. He arrived in Calcutta in 1786 and stayed for six years before settling in Benares and devoting himself to the study of ancient Hindu texts. His was the first European translation of Chanakya-niti. He died in 1833. My point is, if your city is wealthy, learned foreigners settle in it and you can learn their ancient languages from them without any great trouble or expense. Indeed, the Renaissance was sparked by the influx of Greeks fleeing Islamic persecution.  It has been suggested that, in England, the visit of the Byzantine Emperor, seeking help against the Turks, in 1400 led to some Greek Orthodox scholars settling in England where they may have been sought out by Lollards. There does not appear to be any evidence for this. Still, the fact is, Greek learning only took off after it became profitable to print books in Greek- more particularly after 1559 when the country officially became Protestant. I suppose Elizabeth I's love of Greek set the fashion of the period. Still, leaving aside the question of religious persecution or royal patronage, the plain fact is England did not possess a broad enough market for Greek learning till the middle of the sixteenth century. The earlier enthusiasm for the language, remarked by Erasmus who, being too poor to journey to Italy, first came to England to study Greek, appears to have been a localised phenomena centred on charismatic teachers who had studied in Italy. It seems this set a trend where new Grammar Schools would have in their Charter the stipulation that Greek must be taught, if suitable instructors could be found. In other words, there was a slow build up of 'effective demand' which finally crossed a financial threshold such that print capitalism could itself remove the bottleneck to expanding the market. I suppose the triumph of the Protestant faith and increasing maritime and then manufacturing opulence did ultimately permit the attainment of 'critical mass' such that the Romantic movement could be nourished by a more purely Greek Paideia. In particular, the practice of learning Greek through Latin could be abandoned such that the passion of the original burnt through its pious or prudish veils and, naked, enter English hearts. 

Thus gaining an Empire greater than that of Rome, English literature could leap its Latin fence only to discover what lay beyond was ha-ha followed by ha-ha. 

One may say something similar happened in India. Those who wanted more English or Urdu or Tamil or whatever campaigned to get the thing made compulsory in schools so that 'effective demand' would rise and thus the market would find it profitable to supply the commodity more and more cheaply as economies of scope and scale kicked in. Once this happened, supply would create its own demand because of the signalling value of costly 'credentials' which henceforth support a 'separating equilibrium'. The problem is that a thing which is used as a signal may have no utility whatsoever. Indeed, the 'handicap principle' may operate. Higher education, of a literary type, may be a type of brain destroying activity which only those of great natural superiority, with plenty of grey matter to spare, can endure without turning into gibbering imbeciles. Of course, the same thing may be said of popular culture. 

There was a time when parents nodded approvingly if their child was poring over the pages of a vernacular novelist. By the time I was born, Granny would snatch such volumes out of your hand. Read Enid Blyton, you little shit. After that, you can graduate to Agatha Christie or P.G. Woodhouse. If you are super smart, and bound to get into IIT or IIM, we will buy you Archie Comics so you can get a head start in assimilating American culture. 

At one time Educational credentials served a rationing purpose. But, as general purpose productivity began to rise, to use 'handicaps' (e.g. having wasted four years studying obsolete shite at Collidge) for signalling purposes, became counter productive. Maybe the guy who studied Classics was always stupid. He couldn't have hacked any other type of course. Alternatively, he was a pederast and should be employed at the sort of very expensive school to which parents who hate their kids send them. 

In India, fathers obeyed Chanakya's maxim- indulge your son for the first five years, discipline him for ten, and then turn him into a friend. Thus they did not wish for more than ten years instruction in useless shite. Ideally, their lads should get a job at the age of 17 or 18 and get married and become self-supporting soon after that.

I may mention, the Hindoo student was welcome to get coaching in Latin and Greek or anything else from Professors and Padres in the City. If this was directly linked to professional advancement, then money would be found for it.  

If the Hindoo College offered only English-language instruction, and offered its students Classical texts only in English translation, then how could a Bengali of the period develop any skills in Latin and Greek

pay for tuition. Alternatively pretend that you really really want to convert to Catholicism and get free instruction from the Jesuits or Benedictines or whatever. I think the canny Presbyterians and even cannier Anglicans insisted you convert first before you gained any benefit. This is because the Catholics take catechism seriously. Apparently, it has nothing to do with being catty. This is the only reason I am not the new Pope. 

– or pass the exams necessary to qualify for the Bar, or the Indian Civil Service,

those exams were held in England where plenty of crammers existed. You had to eat dinners for three years to become a Barrister. That was the difficult part. The cramming was easy. You could get it done in a month.  It simply isn't true that anybody needed to be good at Latin and Greek in order to succeed in any field save that of the pedant. Mathematics and Statistics on the other hand did become more and more useful and gained in prestige over the course of the Nineteenth Century. The Nedwigate winner was as likely as not to turn out to be a moron. The same was true of the Senior Wrangler but none dared voice that suspicion. 

or other professions where classical knowledge was a non-negotiable requirement?

There were none such. The Brits opened Medical and Engineering schools in India. If you did well there, then you might get a scholarship to study further in England. Dr. Pranjivan Mehta, Gandhi's first sponsor, came to England on a Medical scholarship. He also qualified as a barrister but made his money in the gem trade in Burma. He wrote in Gujarati, not Latin or Greek. 

In Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s case, the process involved being kicked out of the Hindoo College, then spending three years at Bishop’s College, a missionary institution set up by the Anglican Church in 1820 to train preachers, catechists and schoolmasters. Such a path was unavailable to anyone unwilling to convert to Christianity – to which many major figures in the Bengal Renaissance were cool or sceptical, to the point in some instances of open irreverence (if not outright hostility).

Jaspreet does not understand that the teachers at Bishop's College were poor. They would gladly come to your house and teach you anything you liked, two or three times a week. There were some Indians who became what the English, at that time, considered 'Classicists' in that they translated from Greek verse to English verse and vice versa and sought to reproduce classical metres in English. Sadly, if you had nothing interesting to say, nothing you wrote could command much of a market. On the other hand, if you did have something interesting to say, nobody wanted you to adopt an absurd Latinate diction peppered with obscure allusions to Hesiod or Homer. The Classics didn't matter then to Indians nor do they matter now. Madhusudhan is valued by some Bengalis because of his contribution to blank verse. Aurobindo is valued because he was a freedom fighter and then a Guru. However, his interminable verse is little read. His elder brother, a Classicist like himself, did receive some recognition as a poet in England but Indians did not like him. 

A quite separate subject is Indian Christians who contributed to translations of scripture into vernacular languages. They made a significant contribution to comparative philology though, to my best knowledge, no systematic study of the subject has been made. I may mention that there are some Brahmin Mimamsaka families who took to the Law and who, for many generations now, have kept up a scholarly knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Latin and Greek as well as at least two or three modern Indian languages.  As far as I can see, these accomplishments, though admirable, don't translate into having anything interesting to say. Still, I imagine, back in the heyday of the Theosophical Society when folk had faith in a Philosophia Perennis or some Casaubon type key to all mythologies, their collective mental lives, if only to themselves and in such fugitive moments of leisure as the Courts spared them, must have glittered like Indra's net of pearls. 

 

Pheroze Vasunia on the Classics in India

Instruction in Latin and Greek was the foundation of Padiea in all European countries. In some places it was rationed but where scholars were poor but numerous, the rudiments of the thing were available for a very moderate outlay. A more stringent course of study was part and parcel of Theological training and competition between sects or monastic orders meant that, in places, the net was cast quite wide and thus many poorer boys benefitted. Some of the more pious of them became missionaries, and after a more strenuous course of studies- such that they might not fail in controversy or themselves falter in faith- they were sent out to the four corners of the globe and translated the Bible into vernacular language. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, an English Jesuit prepared a Konkani version of the Bible. 

It is certainly true that many School or even College leavers retained few scraps of of such knowledge in later life. However, there was a ready market for new translations from such languages and those of a literary bent retained a great love for the texts, translating which in the school-room, they had first acquired the rudiments of literary style and polish. 

What is false is the notion that classical paideia was causally connected in any way to Western European colonization of the Americas or the Indies.  

In an essay titled 'Classic India' Phiroze Vasunia takes a different view- 

The British colonisers who travelled to India from the 18th century onwards were steeped in the Classics;

those who had attended Public Schools or Dissenting Academies had some such scraps. But Tommy Atkins did not. Neither did Jolly Jack Tar or the chaps who set up indigo factories or breweries or banks. A medical man needed to know some Greek. A lawyer needed to know some Latin. A missionary needed more than a smattering of both. But Latin had ceased to be the language of the learned by the end of the Seventeenth Century. The Roman Church retained it, but Protestants wished to enrich their mother tongues. French, however, was prestigious at a time when France was the most prosperous and populous Kingdom in Europe. 

they knew their Greek and Latin (if not the languages of India) and quoted liberally from Horace and Virgil.

and Shakespeare and Milton. Some also quoted Sa'adi & Kalidasa. So what? Book-keeping mattered because money mattered. Writing or reading books did not though some may have hoped to gain reputationally by such exertions. 

Not all Britons, of course – but it wasn’t just a small contingent who took ancient Greece and Rome with them to the subcontinent.

It was a small contingent. The vast majority of Britishers in India were soldiers, sailors and tradesmen with little education. 

In part, Classics was affectation; speaking Latin was a sign that you were polished, well-read and sophisticated.

At some time in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, Latin was replaced by English as the language of instruction in Universities. You spoke French or Lingua Franca abroad. Previously, lectures had been given in Latin and it was that tongue which was used when travelling on the Continent. The disadvantage was that women could not speak it whereas boors from remote villages might have learned it from the parish priest. French, on the other hand, was the language of polite society. The Russian and the Rumanian and even the Turk or Egyptian readily took it up. Pedants and parsons might speak Latin. The polished gentleman or lady of fashion aspired to Parisian French. 

Showing off was part of the point, and acting like a gentleman was important to English self-regard in the days of the Raj.

Nonsense! Making money or gaining promotion was important. There was little point showing off your erudition to your syce or khidmatgar  more particularly if the chaps at the Club gave you the cold shoulder if you indulged in such displays. Everyone knows those ancient Romans and Greeks were all raving sodomites. 

But connections with Greece and Rome went deeper: the British saw their actions in India through the lens of their classical educations and understood their decisions in the light of Graeco-Roman antiquity.

No. You may say that of Camoen's Lusiadas. Thankfully, English literature has nothing quite so wearisome. The English understood their decisions with respect to India in the light of what the Portuguese and the Dutch and the French had done or were doing. 

Some imagined themselves as marching in the footsteps of Alexander the Great,

None did so because they arrived by sea. If they travelled into Punjab or Afghanistan, they did so from the direction opposite to the one by which the great Macedonian had arrived. 

while others preferred Julius Caesar or Augustus as their model.

The British Empire was maritime and mercantile. The Tzar or the Kaiser might think of himself as the Caesar of the modern age. Wellesley, a fine classicist who had attended both Eton and Harrow, did not think of himself as a Caesar. His job was to curb the French and their allies even if this meant greatly expanding the territory ruled by John Company.  The question was, how to make the thing pay for itself? 

For some, the epic poems of Homer bore startling similarities with Sanskrit epic

the differences were more important. Sanskrit epics are theistic. Greek epics are thymotic.  

and were a basis for cultural comparison, and for others, Virgil’s Aeneid offered guidance on how to be imperial and civilised at the same time.

Nonsense! The Brits understood that what mattered was paying your soldiers and ensuring that any native General who surrendered his fortress to you without a fight got a good pension paid punctually in saecula saeculorum.  

The fact is, the East India Company was a commercial enterprise. Only money mattered. 

When Indians and Britons encountered each other from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, the ancient Greeks and Romans were also present.

No. Money was present. If it vanished, so would every stripe of foreigner- the Armenian as much as the Englishman.  

For the early administrators of the East India Company, as for other European adventurers and travellers in India, Alexander the Great and his journey through the region was a source of fascination.

His entire career was fascinating. But he didn't do much in India proper though he spent a lot of time killing Greeks who had established cities in Afghanistan under the protection of the Persian Emperor. Then, he himself married into the Persian aristocracy. 

Alexander provided a point of contact between Graeco-Roman antiquity and Indian civilisation.

There already were Greeks in the Indian portions of the Persian Emperor's domains.  

Sir William Jones, the Welsh philologist and orientalist, is famous for having devised the theory of Indo-European languages while he was a judge in Calcutta in the late 18th century. In 1793, he also identified the figure of ‘Sandrocottus’, a ruler mentioned in ancient Greek texts, as Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauyra Empire and a slightly younger contemporary of Alexander.

If he hadn't done so, some French or German savant would.  

This offered historians a means for synchronising ‘European’ and ‘Indian’ chronologies. The synchronisation was an exciting moment in the development of European understandings of Indian history as it enabled European intellectuals to find an acceptable (to them) point of reference in Indian narratives of the past and to give Gregorian dates to events in Indian history.

This did not matter in the slightest.  

Chandragupta, henceforth, could be said by European historians to have begun his reign in 320 BC. But Alexander’s appeal was not only historiographical. He was a world-historical figure, the greatest conqueror of antiquity, and his movements in the Indus Valley were interesting for that reason alone. As Iskandar, he was the subject of Arabic and Persian tales that had made their way to India long before the arrival of Europeans;

Greeks are Europeans. They had arrived in India centuries before Christ. There were Indo-Greek Kingdoms in North India.  

as Sikandar, he was the subject of Indian

Persian and Arabic 

romance and poetic traditions that went back centuries. British operatives embraced these traditions, but also spent a whopping amount of time and energy thinking about his route and trying to make sense of the surviving accounts of his travels.

No. British operatives spent a whopping amount of time sitting on the toilet because they had the trots. They also made money. The fact is, if you get dysentery just when you are trying to get your books to balance, your enthusiasm for Alexander tends to wane.  

These ancient accounts, written by figures such as Arrian and Plutarch, are hard to interpret and sometimes contradict each other – the challenge of deciphering them generated a vast number of responses. Every modern traveller and agent of the East India Company in northwest India seemed to have – or develop – his own theory about Alexander’s route and motives.

Only if they wrote about it. Plenty didn't. Dysentery can do that to a man.  

What was the precise route that he took through the mountains of Afghanistan? Did he come across a cult of Dionysus on his march toward India, and if so, where was that cult? Where was the camp on the Hydaspes (the Jhelum river), and where precisely did he cross the river? The soldier and archaeologist Charles Masson, who in the 1830s collected thousands of IndoGreek coins

Everybody is interested in coins. Also, hidden treasure.  

that he discovered in the North West Frontier. Masson said that Mittun, or 2 Mithankot, was the site of an Alexandria established by the conqueror in antiquity and was therefore a suitable trading post for the Company; he also thought that the ancient site of Harappa was the Sangala mentioned by the ancient historian Arrian. Alexander Burnes, or ‘Bukhara Burnes’ as he was known, wrote Travels into Bokhara, which was prefaced with an epigram from Horace and sold 900 copies on the first day of publication in 1834.

West Europe had prospered greatly from its dominance of trans-oceanic trade. There was a big demand for travel books. No doubt, Vasunia thinks Dr. Livingstone in darkest Africa was looking for Alexander's catamite who had run off in that direction.  

He claimed to be the first modern European to navigate the Indus. In his coin-collecting, Masson was accompanied by Mohan Lal, a Kashmiri Brahmin,

Lal worked for Masson. He had learned English at the newly set up College in Delhi.  

who wrote his own accounts of his travels in the northwest and retained an interest in Alexander and the Greeks.

and anything else which might make him some money.  

Fascination with Alexander also had a strategic and military dimension; the British were concerned that Napoleon or the Russian tsar might be tempted to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and invade India.

After 1868, they had a border with Afghanistan. They didn't need to follow Alexander's circuitous route.  

If you were a land-based invader, the reasoning went, would you not be tempted to follow the very route into India that had been taken by the most successful conqueror in the ancient world?

No. You would take the shortest route. The Tzar would follow the footsteps of the Uzbeks.  

The title of David Hopkins’ book, published in 1808, sums up the author’s concerns

which were also the concerns of Whitehall 

at length: The dangers of British India, from French invasion and missionary establishments: to which are added some account of the countries between the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; a narrative of the revolutions which they have experienced, subsequent to the expedition of Alexander the Great; and a few hints respecting the defence of the British frontiers in Hindostan.

The only 'hint' we need is that if the thing is unaffordable, don't do it. Stay the fuck away from Afghanistan.  

General Sir Charles Napier, who captured Sindh with brutal force in 1843, knew Alexander’s history all too well.

No. We know it better than he did. Historical research has greatly advanced. 

His dispatch to Lord Ellenborough makes for a good story, but he probably never sent the message that simply read peccavi (‘I have sinned’, implying ‘I have Sind’, or ‘I have conquered Sind’).

Outram may not have sent the message 'Vovi' (I have Oudh) either.  

If a good story is what you’re after, however, look no further than Kipling’s ‘Man Who Would Be King’(1888), a masterpiece which draws much of its emotional force and colour from Alexander’s regional fame.

Nope. It is about freemasonry. The indigenous people have a religion based on a lower grade of Masonry, while the British soldiers have received instruction in the higher grade. They are taken for Gods. As Masons, they knew it was wrong to create a lodge because they themselves had never held office in one. 

The inhabitants of Kafiristan in that tale believe the rascally Dravot to be a descendant of Alexander and worship him accordingly

He tells them he is the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis and a god to boot. Kipling does not say the local people have heard of Alexander.  

 Interestingly, the Muslims Afghans would conquer Kafiristan and turn it into Nuristan as a bastion of orthodox Islam a few years later. 

—until things go awry, of course.

His mistake is to marry a local woman who reveals he is not divine at all. But, sooner or later the people would have discovered that he farts and shits. Gods do no such things.  

Earlier, in 1808, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) had been sent to Kabul precisely on account of anxieties over Napoleon’s intentions, which seemed real enough. His Account of the kingdom of Caubul, which appeared in 1815, was in turn weighed and analysed by scholars of Alexander and by Company officials and administrators. Elphinstone was a voracious reader, in many literary traditions including Indian and Persian, and was also widely read in the Greek and Roman authors.

He turned down the chance to be Governor General of India to complete his history of that country. Sadly a relative of his , who commanded the British Indian Army, died as a captive in Kabul during the First, utterly disastrous, Afghan War.  

The diaries and journals he composed in India and Afghanistan include references that range from Homer, Sophocles and Euripides to prose authors such as Thucydides and Xenophon and the orator Demosthenes.

He had attended the Royal High School in Edinburgh. It had very high scholastic standards.  

His observations and casual asides show how far things have changed in the last 200 years.

Or not changed at all. Invading Afghanistan is a bad idea. Just say no.  

It is difficult, despite the various wars in the Middle East, to imagine any officer from the past 50 years writing in their diary such a sentence as: ‘I breakfasted with Kennedy, and talked about Hafiz, Saadi, Horace, and Anacreon.

But not Byron of whom he was a fan.  

At nine I left him, and went to the trenches.’

 Elphinstone hadn't been to University. Thus he was capable of both useful work and an intelligent appreciation of literature. 

British officials in India weren’t shy about telling their correspondents how industrious and diligent they were right from the crack of dawn, but the frontrunner in this field was surely Thomas Macaulay, the historian and colonial administrator, who on some mornings in India read Greek and Latin for three or four hours before breakfast.

He composed the 'lays of ancient Rome' while in India. It was a best-seller. People went to India to make money though, sadly, they might die of dysentery first.  

Reading his diaries and letters can be an intimidating experience. The latter, especially, also reveal a pompous person, a man who took himself and his influence very seriously. His influence was immense and long-lasting. The so-called ‘Minute’ of 1835 helped put English at the centre of educational policy in India;

This was the demand of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore. Oddly, it was later taken up by the founder of Aligarh Muslim University. The feeling was that writing in a Persianized or Sanskritized style rotted the brain. The Edwardians began to feel this was also true of the Augustan style. 

it championed the use of English over Indian languages in schools and colleges.

Once English became the language of the law court, there was bound to be an increasing demand for English instruction.  

This document refers to the Greek and Latin classics but does so to underline the importance of teaching of English: ‘What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India.’

Only if that tongue restricted itself to STEM subjects or topics of commercial interest.  

It’s not too farfetched to say that the ‘Minute’ bears some responsibility for the widespread use of English in South Asia today.

It would be foolish. There's a reason the use of English has become widespread all over the world. That reason is the US of A.

Interestingly, Macaulay’s letters indicate that the idea for his most famous literary work, the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) came to him when he was in the Nilgiris, a mountainous region in the south of the subcontinent, and that he composed most of the Lays while in ‘exile’ in India.

He was seeking to reassure his readers that he hadn't been fucking the dhobin while in India.  

Ostensibly about Rome and national character, the poems are really a British man’s reflection on service, valour and devotion to the country; an expression of English identity by a colonial administrator in India.

He had been given a sinecure in India so as to be able to repair his finances and re-enter Parliament. Macaulay takes up the ballad where Sir Walter Scott had left it. Learned philologists may have carped or quibbled. The reading public- especially school boys- ate it up.  

It stands in the Comitium Plain for all folk to see; Horatius in his harness, Halting upon one knee: And underneath is written, In letters all of gold, How valiantly he kept the bridge In the brave days of old. And still his name sounds stirring Unto the men of Rome, As the trumpet-blast that cries to them To charge the Volscian home; And wives still pray to Juno For boys with hearts as bold As his who kept the bridge so well In the brave days of old.

 Horatius was defending his city. He wasn't seeking to conquer the territory of the Volsci. 

The Lays are the creation of a man who is

making money 

marking time while serving in India, dreaming of his native land by writing about ancient Rome.

Is he a good poet? Good enough for school boys who like waving imaginary swords around.  

While Alexander loomed large in British accounts of Indian history,

No. What loomed large was rival European powers as well as the threat posed by Marathas, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pindaris etc. Larger than all was Mammon. Could the Raj be run profitably? If so, how were the spoils to be divided? This political question gained increasing salience over the course of the nineteenth century.  

there was a problem: his empire was short-lived. It splintered into several parts on his early death in 323 BC, and his generals more or less divided up the conquered lands among themselves. He did not provide a model for a long-lasting empire; for that, one needed to turn to Rome.

The Republic fucked up. What one had to turn to was Christianity- more particularly one expressed in the vernacular which would have no truck with Romish intrigue and superstition. Evangelical Christianity walked hand-in-hand with Benthamite Utilitarianism.  

Athens and Sparta were frequently eulogised and studied by the Victorians, but their empires were small.

Philip V of Spain had an Empire over which the Sun never set. But England did not want to become like Spain or Portugal. The profit motive was preferable to Imperial pride because the latter might bankrupt the nation and render its people vulnerable to invasion or bondage to a foreign purse.  

The Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian empires offered a kind of precedent,

No. One may mention the Chinese Empire. Instituting competitive examinations for posts in the Civil Service meant that you had a new class of 'mandarins'.  

but they were not regarded as European or ancestral in the way that the Greeks and Romans were: their legacies to modern Europe were harder to grasp and define than the Greek and Roman.

Vasunia does not understand that the 'Kaiser-e-Hind' ruled in a manner similar to an Indian Badshah or Chakravartin. What was different about British rule was that Princes didn't murder their fathers or brothers. One Governor did not seize territory from another. The British were a nation of shop-keepers whose morals were similar to the better sort of banyan. 

India was composed of Princedoms and large estates of a feudal type. Just as in Mughal times, there were elaborate court protocols and orders of precedence. This had nothing to do with ancient Rome or Greece. By and by, the Brits in India rediscovered its Buddhist heritage and made a paragon out of Emperor Ashoka.  

Julius Caesar thus achieved a kind of heroic status in 19th-century Britain,

no. He achieved that when he conquered Gaul and invaded England.  

and in the eyes of writers such as J.A. Froude

a spoiled Anglo-Catholic. I suppose a growing sense of unease at class conflict in Victorian England- more particularly as the main political parties sought to appeal to the newly enfranchised upper working class- caused some intellectuals to pine for a Caesar like Dictator.  

was comparable to that other JC, Jesus Christ. ‘Strange and startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of the kingdom of this world and of the Founder of the kingdom not of this world, for which the first was a preparation,’ wrote Froude, in his book on Caesar. ‘Each was denounced for making himself a king. Each was maligned as the friend of publicans and sinners; each was betrayed by those whom he had loved and cared for; each was put to death; and Caesar also was believed to have risen again and ascended into heaven and become a divine being.’

Back then, lots of Kings were considered Divine. Alexander decided that his real daddy was an Egyptian god. The point about Christ was that he didn't kill or enslave people. He introduced a higher type of morality- that of 'Mussar' Judaism- but did so in a manner welcoming to the Gentile.  

Even more relevant to the Victorians than Julius Caesar was Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and the founder of an imperial dynasty.

The Victorians were turning against the English of the Augustan age. Romanticism of a licentious type was curbed by a refining Evangelical spirit. But it was Utilitarianism that paid the bills. 

It was he who laid the foundations for a long-lasting, multiethnic, multiracial empire – and he who faced the challenge of maintaining and consolidating the imperial expansion won by armies before him.

He appointed Tiberius his successor for the same reason Tiberius appointed Caligula his successor. Each appeared a model of virtue if only by comparison.  

Perhaps the late Victorians identified with Augustus because they felt that the problems he faced were similar: developing an imperial bureaucracy, maintaining peace on the borders, and keeping colonial subjects happy. 

England, quite suddenly, had a Queen Empress. It was a period of peace and of rising prosperity. Yet, as Gibbon had warned, the force that might upset this applecart were not be located in the sands of Arabia or the jungles of Brazil. It was in the warrens of the East End that a new idea, a new cause, might already have found expression. One might say that Christianity put an end to an aesthetic paganism but, in return, if had offered theological and ethical riches. Whatever force it might be that overturned the Victorian golden age, one thing was certain. It would be mean-spirited and intellectually meretricious. 

In the magisterial 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, H.F. Pelham described Augustus as ‘one of the world’s great men, a statesman who conceived and carried through a scheme of political reconstruction which kept the empire together, and secured peace and tranquillity and preserved civilization for more than two centuries.’

Augustus was portrayed as a disciplined and hard working administrator. It took the Oedipal genius of Robert Graves to turn him into a mere tool of his sociopathic wife. 

Along with Augustus another classical star shines ever brighter in the last decades of the 19th century: Virgil, poet of the Aeneid.

Virgil did influence Mahatma Gandhi who studied a bit of Latin while in London. Essentially, Gandhi believed that a golden age- where there would be no armies or navies or commerce or dirty pictures- was attainable.  

Virgil’s reputation ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but his place as a ‘classic’ was never really in doubt.

Everybody at Public School learnt Latin tolerably well. The smarter kids excelled equally in Greek. 

Readers such as William Gladstone had championed Homer’s epic and dismissed Virgil as a court poet or a minstrel for hire: ‘this crying vice of the Aeneid’, wrote Gladstone, in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age of 1858, ‘the feebleness and untruth of the character of Aeneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus’.

Gladstone was a Protestant. The problem with the Aeneid is that boys might think that it is the Church of Rome which fulfils its pseudo-prophetic portion because of the 'donation of Constantine' or some such shite. 

But Gladstone was unable to drown out admirers of the Latin poet. The cult of Virgil and Rome (Christian and non-Christian Rome alike) reached new heights by the end of the 19th century in Britain.

After the expansion of the franchise in 1867, the cry was taken up 'we must educate our masters!' Maybe teaching them a bit of Virgil will get their minds of their demand for higher wages and better working conditions.  

In an essay that the Encyclopaedia Britannica described as ‘the most famous English essay on Virgil’, Frederic Myers said that Virgil was ‘the earliest and the official exponent of the world-wide Empire of Rome,

It wasn't world-wide at all. The Han Empire was about the same size.  

the last and the closest precursor of the world-wide commonwealth of Christ’. Aeneas was compared by the Victorians to Abraham and Christ, however overblown those comparisons seem now.

Keep in mind, London was supposedly founded by a Trojan named Brutus. There was also the notion that Christ, as a boy, had been brought to England by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea. 

Virgil’s hero made his own painful sacrifices for the gods above: he gave up his love of Dido, the queen of Carthage, in order to press on with his mission and found a settlement in Italy. Nation over self:

He was obeying a deity. His people were but one strand in what would become a nation.  

the British Empire was built on such stories of personal sacrifice

No. It was built on Naval Supremacy which in turn depended on burgeoning trans-oceanic trade. On the other hand, sooner or later, an Iyer Empire will be built on stories of the personal sacrifice I made by giving up a job in Accountancy to concentrate on watching TV, eating Pizza, and farting melodiously. This is because stories are very important. Armies and Treasuries don't matter at all.  

– think, for example, of General Gordon’s ‘last stand’ –

He disobeyed orders and Gladstone let him perish.  

and the story of Aeneas’ valour was an exemplary demonstration of duty, piety, and heroism.

Stories of valour tend not to focus on negligence, impiety and cowardice. This is because British Empire was based on the Aeneid. Greenland will easily annex US if its people read Virgil incessantly.  

The appreciation of Virgil’s sweeping tale was accompanied by a renewed appreciation of his language and versatility as an epic poet. His genius for the right turn of phrase meant that he was a reliable source of quotations, not least on matters of state. (Horace was the other Latin poet who was regularly ransacked by the mid-Victorians for memorable phrases. Verses from a single poem of Horace—poem 12 from Book 1 of his Odes—were recited by Burke in 1775, then by Fox some 23 years later, then by Marryatt in 1822, Grey in 1829, and by Gladstone, Lyndhurst, Huskisson, and so on.)

That fashion died out during the Great War. I suppose F.E Smith was the last legislator to receive plaudits for his reference to Ucalegon in his maiden speech. In after years, Churchill would be heard to growl 'English!' if any member started quoting Latin or Greek.  

Jupiter’s words to Venus, recounted in Book 1 of the Aeneid, were a staple in Victorian classrooms: ‘For them I set no limits in space and time: I give them empire without end.’

That is what the Pope claimed. Spain may have lost Mexico and Portugal may have lost Brazil, but the Church abides all things- save Pentecostals. Fuck you Pentecostals! Fuck you very much! 

No less resonant for the English reader were Anchises’ revelations to Aeneas in Book 6, here in Dryden’s magnificent translation: Rome, ’tis thine alone, with awful sway, To rule Mankind, and make the World obey; Disposing Peace, and War, thy own Majestick Way. To tame the Proud, the fetter’d Slave to free; These are Imperial Arts, and worthy thee. 

This isn't magnificent. It is doggerel. Still, shite like that sold back then.  

These prophetic words reverberated throughout the British Empire.

No. Settler Colonies were encouraged to become self-garrisoning and self-administering. Sadly, this experiment was given up in the West Indies but in India it had increasing purchase from the 1880's onward.  

Robert N. Cust, who was a member of the Indian Civil Service, tells us in his Memoirs of past years of a septuagenarian that he recalled those very lines when he found himself ruling over millions in India before he had turned 30.

The good thing about doggerel is that it is easy to remember.  What permitted Cust to rule Punjabis was that he delivered 'justice on horse-back' in a manner the Punjabis liked and respected. Also, he didn't try to fuck their daughters or sons. 

Cust was far from alone in his recall of the poet, and numerous memoirs and journals of imperial service quote from Virgil or allude to his poetry. Field-Marshal Earl Wavell

like Allenby in Egypt, Wavell favoured handing over power to the natives. 

followed his tenure as Viceroy of India by becoming president of the recently-founded Virgil Society upon his retirement in 1947 (the society’s first president was T.S. Eliot).

A popular choice. He knew a lot about 'Arms and the Man'.  

The passages in Virgil that prophesied Rome’s greatness acted as a balm to British readers and assuaged their fears of decline and fall.

Macaulay had suggested that the English language would survive in India when the Raj was a distant memory. Sadly, this balm turned to bile when darkies like me started turning up in green and pleasant England. Boris Johnson wasn't exactly pleased when Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister. Previously only one Wykehamist had been Prime Minister. That was 220 years ago. Eton has produced 20 out of the last 55 Prime Ministers. 

In describing the long decline of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon had evoked the prospect of imperial decline for modern readers in a style that was riveting, exquisite and grandiose, all at once. His grasp of detail was breathtaking, as was the lesson that he delivered to his many attentive readers. If even the Roman Empire came to an end, how could the British Empire hope to escape the same gloomy fate?

England lost an Empire in America which was destined to rise and rise during Gibbon's life time.  

Macaulay turned the problem on its head and said in Parliament, in July 1833, that the day when the British handed back sovereignty to Indians would be Britain’s finest time.

Warren Hastings had said something similar before his death in 1818.  

The task of imperial rule would be over, and Britons would return their nation to a grateful people whom they had themselves trained in the arts of government.

Fuck that. What the Brits hoped was that Indians would adopt Christianity. They genuinely believed that heathens burn in Hell fire.  

‘It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions.

The Bengali Hindu wouldn't till, in a moment of madness, he forgot the Muslim threat.  

Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.’ It wasn’t only Indians who found that sentiment disingenuous and condescending; and at any rate, the fear of decline haunted British writers throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Observers of the American Civil War realized that that nation would soon have no peer both in mercantile and military matters.  

By the 20th century, commentators in Britain and India came to see the fall of the Empire as inevitable. Macaulay was implicated in another imperial innovation, the Indian Civil Service,

it existed by nomination previously. What changed was the system of open competitive exams of a Chinese type.  

the ‘steel frame’ which was effectively responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Raj. Entrance to the ICS, which was founded in 1858, was based on competitive examinations, and the examinations were designed from the outset to appeal to – or favour – Oxford and Cambridge graduates.

No. The minimum age was 18. The hope was, this would keep out darkies and country-bottled Englishmen.  

Greek and Roman subjects were given a significant weighting in the mark scheme. Benjamin Jowett, the scholar of Greek and Oxford luminary, joined Macaulay in 1854 on the committee that advocated reform of the previous style of examinations—they called for a wholesale revision of the old system of choosing civil servants. They were evidently successful in achieving their goals, as in the first year of the exam, 70 per cent of the successful candidates were from Oxbridge.

It must be said, recruiting 'College men' enhanced the reputation of a cadre. The Indian Education Service would do the same thing.  

Jowett was in thrall to the idea that his students would run the empire in the mould of Plato’s guardians, and he encouraged his students to join the ICS. Between 1888 and 1905, three successive viceroys of India (Lansdowne, Elgin, Curzon) came from Balliol College alone and all were students of Jowett.

Balliol was fashionable and had long been closely associated with Eton.  

Classics was for generations the subject of choice for the British élite,

but it was kids who were sent off to the Navy at the age of 10 who ensured Britain had an indigenous elite. 

and to an extent the story of Classics and British India is also the story of how the British upper classes raised their young.

In which European country was the upper class not instructed in Latin and Greek and French? German too was added to the list by the 1880s. 

Eton and Oxford play important roles in this account, as we would expect.

As did Edinburgh and Dublin. 

Eton can count 20 odd Prime Ministers among its old boys, while Oxford can claim to have educated about 30 holders of the high office (some of whom went to Eton) and Classics occupied a dominant place in these institutions from the 19th century into the 1960s.

You could do well without knowing any Latin or Greek though, no doubt, you might have to 'cram' it for a couple of years. But STEM subjects became more and more important from the 1860's onward.  

This conjunction of prestigious schools and Oxford Classics was responsible for shaping the British Empire, and especially the empire in India, in profound ways.

It had no effect whatsoever. What mattered was naval supremacy and whether the Raj could pay its way.

On the other hand, the fact that India's administrators had dicks is highly significant.  

The historian Richard Symonds pointed out in his Oxford And Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (1986) that in 1938, six of the eight provincial Governors in India had read Greats in Oxford and the other two had also been students at Oxford.

They were generally ICS men. They read 'Greats' because they were too stupid to do Math. Still, no doubt, they were good enough as bureaucratic drudges in the most boring of countries.  

And this was just before the Second World War, by which time British political elites were turning away from Classics to other subjects.

If you were smart you could do Math and Physics and so forth. If you weren't, you did 'Greats' which, admittedly, was slightly less shite than P.P.E.  

Of the men and women who have been prime minister since the Second World War, only two read Classics at university, Harold Macmillan and Boris Johnson, both of whom went to Eton and Balliol.

Macmillan did not complete his degree. He volunteered soon after War was declared.  

Perhaps that explains the traces of imperial fantasy and nostalgia one discerns in the words and actions of those two politicians.

Nonsense! Macmillan wanted shot of the Empire. His 'winds of change' speech deeply disappointed those racists who wanted to hang on to African colonies.  

Macmillan, it should be said, volunteered for the war effort in 1914 and did not graduate. An anecdote involving Macmillan shows how classical antiquity continued to cast a shadow over the Raj well after Indian independence. In 1958, prime minister Macmillan attended a banquet in his honour in New Delhi. He and his wife, Lady Macmillan, were being entertained at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the official residence of the President of India and formerly the Viceroy’s palace. Dorothy Macmillan found herself sitting opposite a portrait of her grandfather, Lord Lansdowne, who was a student of Jowett and himself the Viceroy of India for almost six years in the 19th century. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, turned to Macmillan and says: ‘I wonder if the Romans ever went back to visit Britain?’

Nehru studied Botany. He had no great taste for Latin and Greek. Also, being a politician, he was as thick as shit. India was still part of the Commonwealth. Indeed, the Admiral of its Navy was a Britisher. Moreover, his pal Mountbatten visited him virtually every year to get him to do what Whitehall wanted.  

And the shadow extended further than that. In 1908, Mahatma Gandhi was in a prison cell in South Africa, translating Plato’s Apology into Gujarati, probably from an English translation rather than the original Greek.

He didn't know Greek.  

Gandhi’s version appeared in Indian Opinion, the newspaper that he edited for the Indian diaspora community in South Africa. His translation was then circulated in India and, in 1910, banned for sedition by the British authorities along with Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Home Rule’), which resembled a Platonic dialogue, and some of his other writings. By 1915, Gandhi was back in India and,

tried to recruit soldiers for the Brits. The awarded him the Kaiser-e-Hind medal. This shows that Caesar was influencing Gandhi just as much as Plato and Aristophanes.  

by 1919, the Indian National Congress was encouraging its members to read and circulate the outlawed material, with the effect that these texts, so obviously inspired by Plato, became part of the anti-colonial movement.

Which Gandhi had only belatedly joined. Previously he was a loyalist.  

It wasn’t Plato whom the colonial administrators feared:

it was the Revolutionaries who might chuck a bomb at them.  

many of them had read the Apology and the Republic in their student days and would have known the Greek.

Few knew Greek well enough to read the Republic in the original.  

What troubled the regime was that these texts were written and presented by an Indian and that he was writing in opposition to colonial laws and attitudes.

No. What troubled the regime was the Non-Cooperation Program. If Indians had quit the military and the judiciary and the civil service, the administration would have been paralysed. As the Chief of the Imperial General staff was to say in a speech titled 'End of Empire', Britain didn't have the troops to hold India. It didn't have the Indian troops necessary to hold Egypt. It didn't have the troops to hold Ireland. Most fatally, it didn't have the troops to put down a Bolshevik revolution in England itself. 

Thankfully, Gandhi surrendered unilaterally and went off meekly to jail and thus India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in 1922.  

Gandhi saw the revolutionary power in Plato’s texts

No he didn't. Also, there was no such 'revolutionary power'. The man did know his Mazzini from his Garibaldi. He knew about Lenin and Ataturk. More importantly he knew, and loathed, the Indian Revolutionaries. He had some vague notion that Socrates was similar to Jesus Christ and that he himself, being a bania, resembled that cunning Jew.  

– and turned them against the British Empire.

No. What happened was that the Loyalists dropped their loyalty to the British because after 1917 it was obvious that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. The only question that remained was whether there could be a secular, federal, India or whether the Muslims would go their own way. Incidentally, Muslims know Plato as 'Aflatoon'. In Urdu the term means a very pompous and crazy person.  'Falsafiya'- philosophy- is anathema to the Sufi. But so is erudition in dead languages. The story is told of the poet Bedil that when two rival Arabic tutors showed up to teach the young prodigy, they derided each other's scholarship in such intemperate terms that Bedil's Uncle dismissed both of them.  Arabic is a sacred language. It is the language of Holy Scripture. But if learning it turns you into curmudgeonly pedant rather than a spiritually enlightened person, then it is better to avoid it. 

I suppose, we may say the same thing about English of any refined type. Utilitarian 'Globish' better serves the purpose of Humanity. 

Phiroze Vasunia-- Classics in Colonial India

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- more particularly Islamic 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 a Biology unmoored from Teleology.

Before 'Darwin's revolutionary idea' and newer 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.

should 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 they 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 very kindly just top himself already 

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. Moderate 'naram dal' 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 since before Gandhi was born.

In Gandhi’s lifetime, the British administrator Frank Lugard Brayne

considered a nutter by his colleagues 

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- apart from Jugantar, Ghaddarites, etc- 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, who had earlier learned Sanskrit and Arabic, quickly 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 continue to 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 during the Depression. 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 occasionally 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 were 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. Haileybury certainly taught Greek and Latin. But many officers of the East India Company were of a Mercantile or Medical background. There was little demand for Classical 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.