The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company.

Trautmann, Thomas R.

The Making of Western Indology: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the East India Company. By ROSANE ROCHER and LUDO ROCHER. Royal Asiatic Society Books. London: ROUTLEDGE, 2012. Pp. xv + 238, 5 plates. $145.

Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) has had to wait a couple of centuries to get biographers with the level of Indological knowledge and skills of historical research that are needed to assess his life and works in depth. It has been worth the wait. Rosane Rocher and Ludo Rocher seem to have been preparing themselves to write this book through a lifetime of Indological scholarship in many fields, above all law (Dharmasastra) and the Sanskrit grammarians (Vyakarana), in which Colebrooke made fundamental contributions; and also through the work of Rosane Rocher on two other of the Calcutta Indologists, Nathanial Brassey Halhed and Alexander Hamilton. In many ways this book is the culmination of decades of preparation and accomplished scholarship in Indology and its history. The result is magnificent.

Disciplinary specialization makes it hard for us to fully assess the polymaths of an earlier age, and Colebrooke's interests ran in many directions. A short list of the main fields would be, for Indology proper, law, grammar, religion, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and epigraphy. He wrote a hundred-page article on Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry, but it was really about prosody exclusively; poetry was one of the few lacunae in Colebrooke's wide-ranging reading and writing. He also wrote at length on policy regarding agriculture and commerce; geography and geology (origin of the Ganga; height of the Himalaya; Himayalyan glaciers; variable depth of the ocean; structure of the earth); botany; and meteorology. There are eighty-five items in the list of his publications, and not only have the biographers read them all, they comment on each one.

Colebrooke wrote all these pieces while working full time for the East India Company, mainly as a judge, but in various other capacities as well; at the summit of his career he was made a member of the supreme council in Calcutta. He was also president of the Asiatic Society. His scholarship had to be fitted in after hours of a busy official life, but his offices supported it as well, by a generous salary and access to Indian scholars who were on the Company payroll as court pandits or, between postings, were maintained by Colebrooke himself out of pocket. He also maintained copyists, building up an exceptional collection of manuscripts, which itself became an important contribution to European learning about India. After his retirement from the service he settled in London, taking the lead in the founding of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Astronomical Society, and joining the Geological Society, the Linnean Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Institution of Great Britain (concerned with "useful mechanical inventions and improvements"), the Zoological Society, and the Medico-Botanical Society. He contributed papers to most of them.

The Rochers follow the career of Colebrooke and his work creating and contributing to the life of scholarly institutions in great detail. They also follow Colebrooke's complex family life. His connection with India began with the bankruptcy of his father, who had been a director of the East India Company, which made it necessary for the son to join the Company service. After his return to Britain, with children by an Indian bibi and an English wife, he managed his properties and maintained a home for a number of relatives while keeping a place for himself in London and attending meetings of the learned societies to which he belonged. The Rochers have run down the many sources of the multifaceted life and writings of Colebrooke with a completeness that is admirable. The list of archival sources they have made use of is a model of thoroughness.

The authors clearly admire Colebrooke, but this is not a panegyric, and they forthrightly call out faults as well as accomplishments. For example, they tell us that Colebrooke downplayed the problem of domestic slavery in British India after the banning, in 1807, of British participation in the international slave trade, and in doing so contributed to the perpetuation of slavery in India.

Colebrooke's most influencial work was on Dharmasastra, which had direct application in British India. He took up the translation of the Digest of Hindu Law, the Vivadabhangarnava of Jagannatha Tarkapancanana and others, a project he did not entirely approve of, but which had been left unfinished by the untimely death of Sir William Jones. He wrote the Two Treatises on the Hindu Law of Inheritance, translations and commentary upon the Dayabhaga of Jimutavahana and the Mitaksara of Vijnanesvara. He wrote many other works as well, which were widely cited for cases concerning Hindu law in British Indian courts. The authors' valuable commentary on this work includes a criticism of Colebrooke for creating the false doctrine that Hindu law was divided into regional schools.

The Making of Western Indology, then, has an abundance of information on the life, and informed assessment of the writings, of Colebrooke, of the highest value. It is unlikely ever to be surpassed.

As the title indicates, the book also has an overall interpretation of the significance of Colebrooke's life and work, namely that he was a crucial figure, albeit a transitional one, in the formation of Indology in Europe. Here the Rochers bring to bear a deep knowledge of early continental Indology and the relations with Colebrooke of leading figures such as Bopp, Schiller, and Rosen, not to mention the anti-Orientalist Hegel, who closely studied Colebrooke's work on Indian philosophy. The respect with which Colebrooke was held by such scholars is evident. The complaint from the Continent was that Britain produced few scholars of India, and did not produce as much good Indological work as they could have with all the advantages imperial rule gave them. This is surely true, and was acknowledged by some of them. Colebrooke was a shining exception. But the continental scholars criticized him for relying too much upon the opinions of contemporary pandits and commentaries of Indian scholars. This not very appealing put-down denigrates Indian scholars along with Colebrooke, in favor of European philology, deemed scientific.

Essentially the Rochers endorse the judgment of Max Wuller, that Colebrooke's achievements were much more important than those of Jones, and "drew him into the immediate precursors of German Indology, separating him from the inspiring, yet often unsupported, pronouncements of Jones"(p. 195). They treat the making of Western Indology as a question of professionalization:

 Colebrooke was not a scholar by profession any more than Jones had
 been, but his writings set professional standards of demonstrability,
 thoroughness, precision, critical rigour and sobriety for the
 emerging discipline of Indology. Early German Indologists, who
 approached Sanskrit as another classical language and wished Sanskrit
 documents to be treated according to the demanding rules of classical
 philology, uniformly singled out Colebrooke as the only British
 scholar who lived up to their expectations. (p. 202)

I hesitate to say it of a book I so greatly admire, but I do not feel it should be necessary to diminish the work of Jones in order to show the true worth of Colebrooke. And I wish the authors had carried the analysis further, beyond the scholarly virtues by which Colebrooke fulfilled the expectations of German Indologists. It would be good to hear about how British-India connection and its scholarship was an essential precursor to the Continental formation, and of its transformation, issuing eventually in the Indology of the research universities. I would have liked a bit more.

Wanting more is the sign of an excellent book. We are all beneficiaries of the prolonged labors and deep knowledge of the authors.

THOMAS R. TRAUTMANN

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN