We are grateful to Richard Strier and Modern Philology’s two anonymous readers
for their thoughtful and stimulating critiques of this essay. We are also grateful to Alan
Bewell, Richard Helgerson, Linda Hutcheon, and Lynne Magnusson for advice and
encouragement.
1. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000),
402, 945.
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton University Press, 1993), 18.
3. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1971), 114.
379
380 MODERN PHILOLOGY
4. For the invention of tradition, see, e.g., Bernard Cohn, “Representing Authority
in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 165–209. See also David Cannadine, Orna-
mentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
41–57. For the Victorian interest in rehabilitating older methods of analogy like biblical
typology in relation to Tennyson, see David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Vic-
torian Age (London: Athlone, 1987), 188–230.
5. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Akbar’s Dream” [1892], lines 182–84, in The Poems of
Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969); references hereafter cited
in the text. See Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 222–23; and Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of
Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994), 8–10.
6. For “transculturation,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–11.
7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000). References hereafter cited in the text.
9. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1989),
esp. 52–54; and Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold,
1969). See also David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985; repr., Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
382 MODERN PHILOLOGY
10. See, for instance, Said, Orientalism, esp. 31–36, and “Orientalism Reconsidered,”
Race and Class 27 (1985): 1–15; Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” chap. 6
in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 102–22; Anthony Pagden,
“Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartholome de Las Casas,” in
New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), esp. 95; Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990;
repr., London: Routledge, 1993); and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
11. For Enlightenment historicism, see Collingwood, Idea of History, 86–133; and
Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, 74–124. See also Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 4th ed.
(1978; repr., Oxford University Press, 1981), 89–116; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1987), 51–74.
12. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 10.
13. James Mill, The History of British India (1817; repr., University of Chicago Press,
1975), quoted in Colin Paul Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire (Karachi:
Area Study Centre for Europe, 2000), 210.
14. Marx on India is the locus classicus for this view of Enlightenment historicism’s
acts of oblivion: “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we
call its history is but the history of successive intruders who founded their empires on
the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society” (“The Future Results of
British Rule in India” [1853], in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The First Indian War of
Independence [Moscow: Progress, 1959], 32). For a telling critique of Said’s use of Marx
on India, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New Delhi: Verso,
1992), 221–42.
15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 124.
16. George W. Bush routinely represents the United States as “the greatest force for
good in history” (see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and
the End of the Republic [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004], 103), and Tony Blair just
as often dismisses Islamic resistance to Western concepts as “reactionary” (see, for
instance, his White House speech, August 2006). Both these politicians subscribe en-
thusiastically to Bernard Lewis’s historicist contention that the “backwardness” of the
Muslim world is rooted in its refusal to learn from “the theory and practice of Western
freedom” (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response [New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002], 159).
384 MODERN PHILOLOGY
distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democ-
racy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality and so on,”
he explains, “all bear the burden of European thought and history” (4).
It seems impossible to think without them. Chakrabarty’s sense of this
impossible burden, so evident in the degree to which he focuses on
the overwhelming assimilative power of these Western concepts, does
much to explain the temptation to textual deconstruction during the
sixties and seventies. The only way to liberate oneself and one’s cul-
ture, many felt, was a root and branch deconstruction of Western
rationalism, what Derrida and Spivak called the “imperialism of the
logos.” 17 For Chakrabarty, however, the Western concepts he lists are
both inadequate and indispensable. They are indispensable partly
because they provide such a strong foundation on which to erect
critiques of socially unjust practices: “modern social critiques of caste,
oppressions of women, the lack of rights for laboring and subaltern
classes in India, and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialism
itself—are unthinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlighten-
ment Europe was appropriated in the subcontinent” (4). They are
inadequate because modernity erases the achievements and continu-
ing potentialities of other cultures—it erases the possibility of valuing
different ways of being in the world. In its power to assimilate and
denigrate other cultures, so Chakrabarty’s argument implies, modernity
effectively erects a prison house of Western instrumentalist thought. 18
However solipsistic it may be, it seems impossible to escape.
While Chakrabarty’s analysis of modernity’s enabling concepts does
much to explain the enduring confidence of everyday political dis-
course in historicism, he himself, it might be argued, tends to over-
estimate the intractable nature of the impasse he describes. Almost in
spite of himself, there are moments when he sounds like Foucault
at his most pessimistic or Greenblatt at his most Foucauldian. As far
as the academic discourse of history is concerned, he says, “ ‘Europe’
remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories.” The ubiq-
uitous conceptual power of modernity is such that all histories,
whether they be Indian, Chinese, Kenyan, or whatever, “tend to
19. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Sub-
version,” Glyph 8 (1981): 40–61. See also Paul Stevens, “Pretending to Be Real: Stephen
Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism,” New Literary History 33 (2002):
491–519.
20. See Richard Helgerson, “Before National Literary History,” Modern Language
Quarterly 64 (2003): 169–79.
21. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and
the East (1950; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Rajan, Under
Western Eyes.
22. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and
Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), esp. 3–33, 139–60. Both Rajan’s analysis of
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (Under Western Eyes, 157–73) and Sen’s opening account
of the influence of the Bhagavad Gita (3–6) emphasize the degree to which the impact
of India on Romanticism was not simply a matter of exoticism.
386 MODERN PHILOLOGY
26. Ahmad, In Theory, 178. Ahmad’s skepticism is anticipated by Dennis Porter: “Are
we so positioned by a given historical and geopolitical conjuncture that misrepresentation
is a structural necessity or is there a place of truth?” (“Orientalism and Its Problems,” in
The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July
1982, ed. Francis Barker et al. [Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983], 179).
27. Sen is not unusual in wanting to question Said’s emphasis on the Foucauldian
relation between knowledge and power: “the process of learning can accommodate
considerable motivational variations without becoming a functionalist enterprise of some
grosser kind. . . . We are now in some danger of ignoring other motivations altogether
that may not link directly with the seeking of power” (Argumentative Indian, 143). See
also the powerful critiques of C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), esp. 370–72; and Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), esp. 19–27.
28. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.
388 MODERN PHILOLOGY
PART I
Tennyson’s Imperial Poem and Its Risks
Hitler’s thoughts on India are illuminating not only because they insist
upon British self-interest but because, by idealizing it, they draw atten-
tion to the reality of its antithesis, British diffidence. Hitler was an
anglophile, and his admiration for the Raj was long-standing and em-
phatic. As early as Mein Kampf (1924), he credits the British with an
admirable will to purity and power—an “Anglo-Saxon determination”
to eschew all forms of “hybridization” and monopolize political
agency. 29 He cannot imagine that the British will ever let India go
“without risking the last drop of blood” (956). He feels sure that
Indian rebels will never overcome England by the sword—after all, “we
Germans have learned well enough how hard it is to force England”
(956). In the event, of course, as overwhelming support for various
devolutionary concessions and the final collapse of the Raj suggest, it
was not remotely as hard as Hitler imagined to force England. Even
in the period of what Kipling calls the “post-Mutiny reconstruction,” 30
British imperial policy, however self-serving, was distinguished not so
29. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. John Chamberlain et al. (1925; repr., New York:
Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 956, 938. References hereafter cited in the text.
30. Rudyard Kipling, commendatory letter, in Sir William Lawrence, The India We
Served (London: Cassell, 1928), vii.
36. For the similar use of Christian solar imagery—the political use of Sol Iustitiae,
the “Sun of Righteousness” (Mal. 4:2)—to identify Christ the Son of God with the solar
deities of the late Roman Empire, see Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 258–65.
37. Sir Philip Rose to Disraeli, August 12, 1858, in Benjamin Disraeli Letters, ed. J. A. W.
Gunn and M. G. Wiebe, 7 vols. (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 7:231n. We are in-
debted to Mel Wiebe for this reference. Although Disraeli was at this time chancellor
of the exchequer, he played a major role in formulating and passing the 1858 India Act.
See Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York University Press, 1966), 386.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 391
much, 38 Akbar determines “to hunt the tiger of oppression out / From
office; and to spread the Divine Faith / Like calming oil on all their
stormy creeds” (lines 150–52). But, when he discovers in his dream that
he will fail, and that it will be the English, coming from out of the
sun, who will rebuild his temple and complete his reforms, he says:
“All praise to Alla by whatever hands / My mission be accomplished!”
(lines 188–89). Thus, while Tennyson’s story simultaneously pays
deference to Indian culture and reminds the Raj of its progressive
obligations, it remains an act of self-serving appropriation, seeking to
suggest the authenticity of the English as Indians and the legitimacy
of their rule as the means by which India will fulfill the promise of
its past. Though it comes nowhere near meeting the objections of a
determined anti-imperialist like John Hobson on the issue of self-
government (quoted in our opening paragraph), the poem offers its
audience a way of believing in the idealism and coherence of British
imperial policy and so sustaining their identity as essentially truthful
and just. But this is only half the story.
“The appropriation of a past by conquest,” says Ranajit Guha, the
doyen of the subaltern studies group, “carries with it the risk of re-
bounding upon the conquerors.” 39 Appropriation cannot escape risk,
because every act of appropriation is both a taking possession and a
letting go. 40 As boundaries are crossed, appropriation even by the most
powerful conquerors or colonizers risks reverse transculturation. The
“hybridization” transculturation produces in the colonized may, as
Homi Bhabha has argued, actually constitute a form of resistance.
Under a tree outside Delhi in 1817, for instance, Hindu converts to
Christianity refuse to believe that the Bible could have come from
flesh-eating Europeans and, in their insistence that it was a revela-
tion from an angel at Hurdwar Fair, transform their new religion into
what might appear to Western eyes as a form of mimicry that mocks
their own cultural identity. 41 The mighty weakness of the colonized
stands in sharp contrast to the weak mightiness of the colonizer. That
38. Akbar allows Miss Quested to believe in her future as an Anglo-Indian: as she ex-
plains to Aziz, “Some women are so—well, ungenerous and snobby about Indians, and
I should feel too ashamed for words if I turned like them. . . . That’s why I want Akbar’s
‘universal religion’ or the equivalent to keep me decent and sensible. Do you see what
I mean?” (E. M. Forster, A Passage to India [1924; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2000], 157).
39. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.
40. See Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 192. We are grateful to Adam Hammond for this reference.
41. See Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 102–22.
392 MODERN PHILOLOGY
44. The Letters of Sir William Jones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1970), 2:720 (October 24, 1786).
45. Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father
of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 361.
46. Said, Orientalism, 78.
47. See Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 23–24.
48. Jones, Letters, 2:712–13 (October 1, 1786).
394 MODERN PHILOLOGY
53. William Jones, “Hymn to Lacshmi,” in Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael
J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), lines 199–214.
54. M. L. Roy Choudhary, The Din-i-Lahi, or the Religion of Akbar (Calcutta: Das Gupta,
1952), 6.
55. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 154.
396 MODERN PHILOLOGY
500 rupees to purchase it: I subscribed 1000 & will double my sub-
scription, if the dearth be not removed by the approaching harvest.” 56
At a time when the East India Company still employed a full-time
Brahmin in its salt warehouses “to perform prayers to the goddess
Laxmi ‘to secure the Company’s trade in salt against loss,’ ” 57 Jones
points to the centrality of the goddess in understanding everyday life
in India. He sees that England in India needs to do something more
than follow the dictates of cost-effective instrumentalism. Against the
gathering power of Occidentalist bureaucrats and missionaries, he
urges his readers to consider “that the allegories contained in the
‘Hymn to Lacshmi’ constitute at this moment the prevailing religion
of a most extensive and celebrated Empire, and are devoutly believed
by millions, whose industry adds to the revenue of Britain, and whose
manners, which are interwoven with their religious opinions, nearly
affect all Europeans, who reside among them.” 58
When Jones’s work on Indian religion and literature is placed in
the context of the prevailing Orientalist mood of the 1770s and 1780s,
the mood William Dalrymple has so brilliantly evoked in his book White
Mughals, it can be seen to constitute an argument for limited hetero-
genization—for Hindu manners and the way in which they have been
assimilated into Indian Islam to affect all Europeans. In Jones’s case
his understanding of Christianity itself begins to change: “I am no
Hindu; but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning a future
state to be incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likely
to deter men from vice, than the horrid opinions inculcated by Chris-
tians on punishment without end.” 59 Just as Tennyson’s Akbar comes to
despise Moslem jurists for the pleasure they take in the torture of the
damned, so Jones does his Christian coreligionists. In his high esti-
mation of Hindu religion, he echoes the 1775 response of the Critical
Review to Nathaniel Halhead’s translation of what Halhead took to be
Hindu law: “This is a sublime performance,” writes the anonymous re-
viewer; “the most amiable part of modern philosophy is hardly upon
a level with the extensive charity, the comprehensive benevolence, of a
few rude, untutored Hindoo Bramins.” 60 In comparison, Europe seems
provincial.
As their imaginations became increasingly Indianized, Orientalist
scholars like Jones, Halhead, or Charles Wilkins, and even more so
61. For a rejection of the idea that Jones’s imagination is ever fully engaged with India,
see Jenny Sharpe, “The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; or How Sir William
Jones Discovered India,” boundary 2 20 (1993): 26–45. Needless to say, we disagree with
her conclusions.
62. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 3. References hereafter cited in the text.
63. See Sen, Argumentative Indian, esp. 41–42.
398 MODERN PHILOLOGY
PART II
Religious Toleration in Moghul India
In November 1558, two years after Akbar became Moghul emperor,
Elizabeth Tudor became Queen of England. Five years later, in 1563,
the year in which Akbar revoked the tax on Hindu pilgrims, Elizabeth
completed the first phase of her religious settlement with a new Act of
Uniformity. These two polities, Moghul India and Protestant England,
are classic examples of what Hardt and Negri, deeply engaged with the
arguments of Benedict Anderson, mean by patrimonial and national
empire states. 65 In European history, these neo-Marxist critics argue,
the latter is built on the terrain of the former, and the two kinds of
empire are most easily distinguished from each other by the displace-
ment of sovereignty from the person of the monarch to the concept
of “the people.” They quote Hobbes to establish the point: “The people
rules in all governments. For even in monarchies the people com-
mands; for the people wills by the will of one man . . . (however it
seem a paradox) the king is the people.” 66 For Hardt and Negri, the
“people” is merely a cypher for the state, but for contemporary re-
publican thinkers like James Harrington, the displacement of power
to ordinary citizens seemed substantial. For Harrington writing in
64. Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626
(Cambridge University Press, 2004).
65. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, esp. 93–113; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London:
Verso, 1991).
66. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, quoted in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 103.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 399
67. Quoted in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law (Cambridge
University Press, 1957), 140.
68. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), esp. 14–17, 29–87. Greenfeld’s thesis is now hotly disputed. See,
for instance, Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in
the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Krishan Kumar,
The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Paul
Stevens, “Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100
(2001): 247–68.
69. See, for instance, John Guy, Tudor England (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 290–308; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 565–93.
70. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (1902; repr., New Delhi:
Atlantic, 1989), 2:240–43. For the life and beliefs of Akbar, see Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi;
400 MODERN PHILOLOGY
Jahangir. For the old Timurid emperor, Babur, India was always a
foreign country: “Hindostan is a place of little charm,” he complained.
“There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no
poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. . . .
The peasantry and common people parade around stark naked.” 71 “It
is a strange country,” he felt. “Compared to ours, it is another world.” 72
Akbar felt differently. He was fascinated by India and extended his
patronage to all religious groups that were prepared to live peaceably
within his empire. To Sikhs, whose religion most dramatically exem-
plified the synthesis of Hindu and Moslem traditions, he gave the city
of Amritsar; to Christians, he allowed the freedom to build churches
and proselytize; to Jains, he gave his protection; but most important,
to Hindus, he gave enormous material relief and also devoted time
and energy to understanding and recovering their traditions. Persian
translations of Hindu classics like the Mahabharata, the very transla-
tions through which, as we have seen, Sir William Jones first became
familiar with Hindu literature, were the work of Akbar’s scholars. As
Tennyson was the cultural heir of Jones’s Indian scholarship, so Jones
himself in an immediate and tangible way was the legatee of Akbar’s
openness to transculturation. Scholars like Akbar’s servant Abdul Qadir
Badauni worked on Sanskrit texts in exactly the same way that Jones
did—eking out his growing knowledge of Sanskrit with the aid of a
Hindu pundit. Badauni is especially interesting because he is more than
willing to explain what he perceives as the dangers of transculturation.
He describes Akbar’s interest in other religions as a process of con-
fusion, unmooring, and loss: “Doubt accumulated on doubt and the
object of his search was lost. The ramparts of the law and the true
faith were broken down, and in the course of five or six years not a
single trace of Islam was left in him.” 73 Akbar’s minister and biog-
rapher, Abu’l Fazl, sees this process somewhat differently. Through the
discussions that Akbar initiated at the House of Worship at Fatehpur-
Sikri, “the degrees of reason and the stages of vision were tested, and
A. L. Srivastava, Akbar the Great: Political History, 1542–1605, 2 vols. (Agra: Shiva Lal
Agarwala, 1962), 1:61–63; Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Akbar and Religion (Delhi: Idarah-i-
Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1989); Shirin Moosvi, ed., Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary
Records and Reminiscences (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994); and Irfan Habib, ed.,
Akbar and His India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
71. Zahir al-Din Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans.
and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 350.
72. Ibid., 332.
73. Quoted in Wheeler M. Thackston, “Literature,” in The Magnificent Mughals, ed.
Zeenut Ziad (Oxford University Press, 2002), 105.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 401
all the heights and depths of intelligence were traversed, and the lamp
of perception was brightened.” 74
Extraordinary as Akbar clearly was, his sympathy for his Hindu
subjects was not simply a matter of his individual genius—it grew out
of a sensitivity to a long-standing process of cultural integration and
assimilation. As John Richards has pointed out, in sixteenth-century
India, after generations of contact, in both Hinduism and Islam “many
mystics, scholars, intellectuals, and more ordinary folk were actively
seeking some form of synthesis.” Especially “in folk culture,” Richards
continues, “there was substantial sharing of customs, ceremonies, and
beliefs between ordinary Muslims and Hindus. Such practices as the
worship of the smallpox goddess Sitla were often practiced as ardently
by Muslims as Hindus in the countryside.” 75 For many members of the
imperial elite, though certainly not all, Hindus as Hindus had become
members of the “imagined community”—a community not defined in
national but in increasingly universalist terms. Akbar’s friend, Abu’l
Fazl, explains the universalism that drove the emperor’s reforms. The
poll tax or jizya on non-Moslems was abolished in 1564 “as the foun-
dation of the arrangement of mankind” in “the administration of the
world.” 76 The tax on Hindu pilgrims was revoked the year before
because “although the folly of a sect might be clear, yet as they had
no conviction they were on the wrong path, to demand money from
them, and to put a stumbling block in the way of what they had made
a means of approach to the sublime threshold of Unity and considered
as the worship of the Creator” was contrary to both “the discriminating
intellect” and “the will of God.” 77 These reforms were only the begin-
ning, and what they suggest is a polity confident enough in its wealth
and efficiency not to be dominated by narrowly conceived instrumen-
talist concerns but to tolerate and respond imaginatively to the cultural
diversity it had inherited. This toleration—rooted in the experience of
diversity, precipitated by a genuinely religious desire for synthesis,
and idealized in various forms of political universalism—was more than
78. Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul,
1615–1619, ed. Sir William Foster, 2 vols. (1899; repr., Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint,
1967), 1:103. For various Orientalist accounts of these travelers, see Kate Teltscher,
India Inscribed: English and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: Discoveries
of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996); John Michael Archer,
Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing
(Stanford University Press, 2001); Richmond Barbour, “Power and Distant Display:
Early English Ambassadors in Moghul India,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1999):
343–68, and Before Orientalism. For a different perspective, see Rahul Sapra, “A Peace-
able Kingdom in the East: Favourable Early Seventeenth-Century Representations of
the Moghul Empire,” Renaissance and Reformation 27 (2003 [pub. 2006]): 5–36.
79. Roe’s deep-rooted sense of cultural superiority is evident throughout his letters,
but this passage imagining a new history of India is especially striking. The new history
would culminate, he says to his friend, George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
in “the arrival of our Nation on this coast, [with] their fortunate or blessed victoryes
ouer their enemyes [the Portuguese] that not only sought to possesse these quarters by
themselves, and to forbid all others that Nature had left free . . . but alsoe to abuse this
people” (Roe, Embassy, 1:309).
80. Barbour, Before Orientalism, 167–85.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 403
86. Fitch, quoted in ibid., 16–18. There may be a memory here of Marco Polo’s
response to the capital of the Great Khan. From Marco Polo through the seventeenth
and into the eighteenth century, there is a recurrent tendency to idealize China. Milton’s
elderly adversary, Joseph Hall, for instance, puts it this way in his youth: “who ever ex-
pected such wit, such government in China? Such arts, such practice of all cunning?
We thought learning had dwelt in our part of the world; they laugh at us for it, and well
may” (The Discovery of a New World [London, 1608], 13). Roe himself expresses dis-
appointment that India, certainly in terms of commodities or “rarietyes,” turns out to
be something less than China (see Roe, Embassy, 1:134).
87. Terry, quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 323.
88. Ibid., 315.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 405
89. For a fine analysis of Donne’s Satyre III and its relation to the powerful humanist
tradition of religious toleration, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radi-
calism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118–64.
90. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 28.
91. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625;
repr., Glasgow: MacLehose and Sons, 1905–7).
92. See ibid., 4:386–87; and Roe, Embassy, 1:364–67.
406 MODERN PHILOLOGY
Hannah’s song against the arrogance of the mighty (1 Sam. 2:8), the
heathen prince’s extraordinary virtue seems to unsettle Roe’s con-
fidence in “Christian certainties.” 93 In Foster’s more faithful edition,
however, this incident appears not so much as a “submerged challenge”
but as the occasion of an explicit and angry denunciation of Christian
failure: “I mention [this incident],” Roe says, “with envye and sorrow,
that wee having the true vyne should bring forth Crabbes, and a bastard
stock of grapes: that either our Christian Princes had this devotion or
that this Zeale were guided by the true light of the Gospell.” 94 The de-
nunciation opens a disturbing fissure that Purchas moves to contain.
He deletes Roe’s angry sentence and adds a marginal gloss: “Humilitie
and Charity superstitious, and therefore blind.” 95 He may not be able
to close the fissure entirely, but he does mask Roe’s anger. That anger
is important, because in the context of the sequence of daily events
edited out by Purchas it indicates why the company’s business is fail-
ing. Roe comes across Jahangir and the beggar because he is on his way
to see the emperor about a breakdown in relations between Moghul
officials and the East India Company, factors at Surat reported to him
on December ninth—a breakdown occasioned by the incivility of the
English. Roe lays it down as a rule that “wee can never live without
quarrell . . . untill our Commanders take order that noe man come to
Suratt but on Just occasion and of Civil Carriage. . . . For what Civil
Town will endure a stranger to force open in the streetes the close
Chayres wherin their weomen are Carried (which they take for a dis-
honor equall to a ravishment)?” (365). No matter how strange their
customs are, Roe insists, civility demands they be respected. In this
context, the civility of Jahangir, the respect and “kindnes” he shows
the beggar (366) together with the many “just and gratious” words he
offers Roe himself and others (416), stands as a model to be emulated
by the English.
It is true that Roe’s confidence in Jahangir will wane as the possibility
of securing a comprehensive trade treaty fades, but at this point, he
feels sure that both his hope and security rest in the civility of the em-
peror—“I stand on very fickle termes [here],” he writes to his friend
George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on October 30, 1616,
“though in extraordinarie Grace with the King, who is gentle, soft, and
good of disposition” (310). Roe despises the emperor’s weakness for
drink, but at this point even in drink Jahangir’s idealism is remembered
warmly as Roe makes it clear that one of the chief marks of Moghul
imperial sovereignty is the civility of religious toleration: “The good
king fell to dispute of the lawes of Moses, Jesus and Mahomet,” Roe
says, “and in drinck was so kinde that he turned to mee, and said:
Am I a king? You shall be wellcome: Christians, Moores, Jewes, hee
meddled not with their faith: they Came all in love and hee would
protect them from wrong: they lived under his safety and none should
oppresse them” (382). Our point is that civility, and the security it
affords, is the cultural imperative that enables Terry and Roe to value
the Moghul policy of toleration even while they despise most of the
actual religions it tolerates and are unaware of the degree to which it
was driven by the Islamic ruling elite’s heterogeneous Indian context.
Civility is the countervailing tendency that disrupts, if it does not com-
pletely prevent, their inclination to derogate by historicizing cultural
differences. Most important, while for Roe civility certainly has an in-
strumental dimension, it also points to something noninstrumental,
something deeply sedimented in his own culture, as his reference to the
“Gospel” indicates, and in his personal sense of being. The experience
of reading these travelers is not one of encountering a closed system
but one of listening to people who seem unmoored, unable to make up
their minds, caught between instrumental and imaginative impera-
tives. 96 This is evident even in a protestant Christian as vehement and
demonstrative as Thomas Coryat.
Coryat is best remembered for the audacious public challenges he
made to Islam. While he considered Hinduism a self-evident abomina-
tion, a matter of superstition and impiety among the “brutish ethnicks,”
he thought Islam to be more dangerous because it appeared so much
like a parody of Christianity. 97 In the particular story Terry tells, Coryat
challenges local Moslems in Agra by imitating the mullah’s call to
prayer. He responds to the mullah’s call, “No God but one God, and
Mahomet the ambassadour of God,” with his own cry from an adjacent
minaret in Arabic, “No God but one God, and Christ the Sonne of
God.” He “further added that Mahomet was an imposter” (315). Coryat
is saved, as Terry points out, by the Moghul policy of toleration, but it is
clear that this and other acts of confrontation by Coryat outrage the
sense of civility of Terry’s master, Roe. Coryat’s letters home are full
of irritation at Roe’s disapproval, and for the ambassador’s part, the
96. On early modern “unmooring,” see Benedict Anderson, “Exodus,” Critical In-
quiry 20 (1994): 314–27.
97. Coryat is quoted in Foster, Early Travels in India, 269. References hereafter cited
in the text.
408 MODERN PHILOLOGY
98. The letters were first published as pamphlets in 1616/17 and 1618 and the “Ob-
servations” in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.
Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 409
CONCLUSION
Dipesh Chakrabarty closes Provincializing Europe with the story of two
renowned Indian scientists, both of whom were entirely rational in
their science and deeply spiritual in their immersion in the habitus of
their culture. The one was both an accomplished astronomer and a
learned astrologer; the other a Nobel prize winner who would take a
ritual bath before observing a solar eclipse. For Chakrabarty, these men
exemplify the ability to live in radically divided and distinguished
worlds. Both are equally moved by an instrumentalist commitment to
Western historicism or progress, by a sense of what will be, and at the