Colonial Knowledge Formation under British Rule and Modern Sri Lankan Historiography

The National Trust – Sri Lanka Monthly Lecture Series No- 129 October 29, 2020

Continued from yesterday

In the 19th century, the epicenter of Oriental Studies moved from colonial India to Europe. In this process, characteristics of early orientalism were also changed. Trautmann summarizes this change as a shift from indomania to indoforbia. The earlier admiration of oriental culture was gradually replaced with colonial contempt towards ‘native’ things in the frame of Civilizational Mission and ‘White Man’s Burden’. After the mid-18th century, the ideological agency of Western colonialism masqueraded as ‘enlightenment’ ‘Civilization Mission’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’.

The identification of Dravidian language family parallel to the Indo-European language family and subsequent linking language with races was to have a profound impact on colonial historical thinking. The classification of languages into language families had deeper political implications. The languages was linked with the race and nation. In this process history of language was deeply implicated in history of national and cultural identity. The notion that languages and nations are tightly connected to each other gave birth to the tendency of studying nations through the genealogy of languages. It paved the way for the development of comparative philology and ethnology as academic disciplines in the 19th century. Franz Bopp set the tone of new discipline of Comparative Philology in his pioneering work, On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic, in 1816. He identified the common origins of grammatical forms and reflections of composition of a family of languages identified as Indo-European group of languages.

Max Müller borrowd the term Arya from Sanskrit and applied it to the family of languages and also to the people who speak this language group. Max Müller who studied Sanskrit first under Franz Bopp came to Paris to continue his Sanskrit studies under Eugene Burnouf. Later, he came to London to study Sanskrit text in the collection of East India Company. In 1851, he became a member of Christ Church, Oxford and, in 1854, became the Professor of Modern European Languages and Professor of Comparative Philology. Max Müller not only linked Aryan language family to the Aryan race but also advocated the brotherhood of the Aryan people. In Max Müller’s words, “Ram Mohun Roy was an arya belonging to the south-eastern branch of the Aryan race and he spoke an aryan language, the Bengali”.

In order to understand the full implications of the construction of the phenomenon of Aryan race on the basis of Aryan languages, we should pay attention to the development of race sciences in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. The publication of ‘The natural history of man; comprising inquiries into the modifying influence of physical and moral agencies on the different tribes of the human family’ by James Cowles Prichard’s in 1843 manefested this development. Prichard argued that race is a sign of civilization and the cause of racial differences is not any environmental factors but civilization itself. In the hay day of British colonialism. it conceptualized the European superiority.

In his paper, On the relations of the Bengal to the Arian and aboriginal languages of India, presented in 1847, Max Müller identified two races in India- lighter civilized race and darker savages. Max Müller presented a racist frame to the Indian History and a justification to the British colonial rule in India: “it is curious to see how the descendents of the same race, to which the first conquers and maters of India belong, return, after having followed the northern development of the Japhetic race to their primordial soil, to accomplish the glorious work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their Arian brethren”.

When the concept of the Aryan was passed from the Sanskritists to the anthropologists after 1850, in the context of prevailing racist prejudices, the concept got further racist in terms of ‘pure Aryan race’ giving ideological rational for the fascism in Europe. Later stage of his life Max Müller came forward to accept that language and race were not necessarily connected but by that time the Aryan concept got entangled with ‘crazy doctrines of racial anthropology’.

The impact of the Aryan Concept and identification of ethnic groups in line with language groups on the historical thinking of Sri Lanka under British colonial rule in the 19th century must be analyzed in line with the building of a colonial state in Sri Lanka under the British colonial rule. Conceptual and institutional developments linked with the imposition of the colonial state in Sri Lanka under the British rule offered a new form to re-read the history of Sri Lanka. The Aryan concept and other social constructions in redefining collective self in terms national identities provided the text for the reading of the past. In the European context, the formation of ‘modern state’ converge two distinct historical processes, namely and the building of ‘modern nation,’ in the formation of nation state. In the colonial context, the colonial state absorbed these two historical processes and superimposed a political form (colonial state) and national content. In this process, the material of the pre-colonial historical tradition were contextualized and reread in terms of the ‘nation state’ political framework to offer ideological rational for the new political space.

Identification of the Sinhala language with the newly invented Indo-European Family of languages and the people who speak Sinhala with the Aryan race and parallel identification of the Tamil Language with the Dravidian family of languages and the Tamil speaking people with the Dravidian race had a far reaching impact on the reading of the past of Sri Lanka. The phenomenon of Aryan settlements in Sri Lanka can be cited as an example. As Pal Ahluwalia remarked in relation Orientalism, “such was the vigour of the discourse that myth, opinion, hearsay and prejudice generated by influential scholars quickly assumed the status of received truth”.

(To be continued)