‘The Best of Brahmins’: India Reading Emerson Reading India

Abstract

Argues that, while critics have tended to categorize Emerson’s interests in classical Hindu literature, philosophy, and religion as antiquarian and politically neutral, a close examination of his reading of selected Hindu texts, together with selected subsequent readings of Emerson by representative Hindus, suggests that this is not the case. Both were deeply conditioned by Anglo-Indian colonial politics and the legacy of British orientalism. Sees Emerson’s interest in classical Hindu literature following a trajectory from condescending dismissal to enthusiastic approbation subsequent to his reading of the Bhagavad Gita and Vishnu Purana in 1845. Believes his conception of India was shaped by the regnant discourse of European orientalism; but while such conceptions have sometimes been seen by cultural critics in unilateral terms, they were also employed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hindus as a mode of resistance to English political and cultural domination. Concludes Emerson’s readings of India privilege the Hindu religious heritage and at the same time sanction an emergent discourse of anti-colonialist sentiment and Indian independence, making Emerson a sort of posthumous pawn in the larger colonial struggle.