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"In the middle of the eighteenth century finding themselves with privileged access to Indian languages and advisors, British East India Company servants became instrumental in delivering ideas about Indian religion to European audiences. This book is about the religion they decided to present, the intellectual frameworks that shaped their presentation of it, and some of the ramifications it had for enlightenment thought, Company policy and contemporary ideas of empire. This book charts the history of European interpretations of Hinduism from early modern travel accounts to the emergence of comparative approaches to the study of world religions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Following this it offers an overview of the long history of the Company's policies on religion, as well as some of the significant turning points in the Company's political status and in its institutional approach to research on Indian languages, history and religion"--
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Religion, Enlightenment and Empire: 1. European Letters, the Company and Hinduism; 2. John Zephaniah Holwell and the Religion of the Gentoos; 3. Alexander Dow and the Hindoo Shasters; 4. Enlightenment and Empire; Part II. From Scepticism to Orientalism: 5. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and Gentoo Antiquity; 6. Charles Wilkins and the G¿¿t¿; 7. William Jones, Ved¿nta and the 'Permanent Settlement'; Conclusion.
About the author
Jessica Patterson is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of enlightenment and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published work in History of European Ideas and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
Summary
In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Jessica Patterson's original study situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the contexts of enlightenment and empire.
