Akbar Dream

Akbar’s Dream:
Moghul Toleration and English/British Orientalism

PAU L S T E V E N S
University of Toronto
RAHUL SAPRA
Ryerson University
Perhaps the most dramatic indictment of the British Empire in India

is that it provided Adolf Hitler with a model for his fantasy of a German
imperium in eastern Europe and Russia: “What India was for England,
the eastern territory will be for us,” he declared in August 1941. “The
Russian territory is our India,” he said a little later, “and just as the
English rule it with a handful of people, so will we govern this, our
colonial territory.” 1 Although it is true that Hitler’s understanding of
the British Raj was limited, probably owing more to Hollywood movies
like The Lives of a Bengal Lancer than to any kind of direct experience
or sustained study, his admiration concentrates the mind. It confirms
the accuracy of Partha Chatterjee’s observation that the Raj was “a
modern regime of power destined never to fulfill its normalizing
mission because the premise of its power was the preservation of the
alienness of the ruling group.” 2 It praises precisely what radical Vic-
torian commentators like John Hobson had condemned: “Upon the
vast majority of the populations throughout our Empire we have
bestowed no real powers of self-government, nor have we any serious
intention of doing so, or any serious belief that it is possible to do
so.” 3 One of the principal means by which the more imaginative
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.
ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2007/10403-0003$10.00
379
380 MODERN PHILOLOGY
proponents of empire were able to protect themselves from these dis-

quieting thoughts was by “Indianizing” the imperial government in the
very specific sense of historicizing it, inventing tradition and repre-
senting the British Raj as the fulfillment of its shadowy Moghul type. 4
For this reason, in 1877 Disraeli made the Queen of England Empress
of India, and, as Balachandra Rajan has pointed out, Tennyson made
his Solomon-like Moghul emperor, Akbar, prophesy the coming of
the Christlike English to rebuild his temple and reestablish religious
toleration: “From out the sunset poured an alien race,” so Akbar
dreams, “Who fitted stone to stone again, and Truth, / Peace, Love
and Justice came and dwelt therein.” 5
This extraordinary act of nineteenth-century historicism, of appro-
priating Indian history and assimilating it into the grand march of
Western progress, is more important than it first seems for a number
of reasons. While Tennyson’s trope seeks to resolve the fundamental
contradiction at the heart of late Victorian imperial policy—that is, the
contradiction between the desire both to preserve indigenous Indian
culture intact and at the same time to recreate it in the image of
progressive Western ideals—it also inadvertently reveals the degree to
which, even at the height of empire, appropriation could mean “trans-
culturation” in its fullest sense. 6 For even as the trope appropriates
Indian history, Indian history is made to appropriate European Chris-
tianity, transforming it into a creed whose primary imperative is not in-
dividual salvation in the next world but multiethnic religious toleration
in this one. The ramifications of these rhetorical moves are complex,
but they immediately call into question the seamlessness of historicism’s
desire to make Western hegemony inevitable—whether in the political
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.
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Paul Stevens and Rahul Sapra „ Akbar’s Dream 381
form of “colonialism” or cultural form of “modernity.” That is, they call

into question the seamlessness of what Edward Said has described
as Orientalism’s power “for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient.” 7
In order to explore this issue more fully we wish to examine the re-
lation between religious toleration and transculturation by comparing
the Victorian literary fantasy of Akbar’s dream with its seventeenth-
century reality—or at least what is represented as its reality in the tes-
timony of those English people who actually experienced religious
toleration in Akbar’s empire. But first we need to define our terms and
explain what is at stake in the relation between historicism and Western
hegemony. The most economical way we can do this is by situating our
argument in relation to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe—
a work we consider one of the most powerful and suggestive recent
contributions to postcolonial studies. 8
HISTORICISM AND HEGEMONY

In its most general, primary sense, historicism simply means the theory
that social and cultural phenomena are historically determined, that
each period in history has its own values that are not directly applic-
able, or sometimes even comprehensible, to other periods or epochs.
More than anything else, it is the emergence of this way of thinking that
distinguishes modernity. Quite literally so, for the very words “modern”
and “medieval” arise out of the self-conscious need to comprehend
the course of history in terms of a radical cultural shift or fissure, and
only with the advent of this way of thinking can we talk of the “his-
toricity” of a phenomenon, or can things properly be called “ana-
chronistic,” or indeed can the past be called a foreign country. 9
Modernity, however, has its discontents, and to the degree that
modernity comes to be seen as the peculiar achievement of the West,
then historicism as one of the defining attributes of modernity turns
into something more problematic. As postcolonial scholars from Said
to Chakrabarty have argued, nothing has been, and still is, more
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).
formidable in justifying the assumption of colonial or imperial power

than the practice of historicizing cultural differences: the practice of
redirecting the focus of historicist analysis and, instead of simply
looking backward and comprehending the past in terms of cultural
change, looking outward and representing contemporary cultural
differences in terms of historical change, development, or progress—
looking out from the presumed center and representing distance in
space in terms of distance in time. 10 In Tennyson’s case, the familiar
dictum “what they are, we were” becomes “what they might have been,
we are.” Extravagant as Tennyson’s trope is, it foregrounds the extent
to which this epistemological habit, in the form of Enlightenment
historicism, became one of the mainsprings of the West’s sense of its
own exceptionalism.
Historicism in this secondary sense, it needs to be emphasized, is not
history, but a way of thinking that produces history. It is not simply a
record, reconstruction, or inquiry into the past, but a philosophy that
comprehends past, present, and future as one, a process that assumes
progress and development, a master narrative that insists on an over-
arching, unified meaning, and in some cases a science that hopes to
discover the laws of history. 11 Secondary or Enlightenment historicism
is not, then, disinterested. As Said pointed out, the one human story
historicism imagined always culminated in Europe or was observed
from the vantage point of Europe. 12 In 1817 when James Mill said,
“progress is the natural law of society,” he meant European progress. 13
What was neither observed nor documented by Europe was either lost
or felt to be of no consequence. Non-European societies were without
history. They were routinely dismissed in Marx’s infamous words as
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.
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“passive,” “unresisting and unchanging,” 14 and, according to Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri, this “negative construction of non-European
others” had, and still has, a certain kind of inevitability, for it “is finally
what founds and sustains European identity.” 15 In its relation to non-
European societies, Enlightenment historicism has revealed itself as a
monumental act of cultural solipsism. Historicism in this sense is at
the heart of what Said meant by the habit of representation he called
“Orientalism.”
Academic awareness of historicism’s Eurocentric biases does not
seem to have lessened its power in many areas of discourse. In con-
temporary politics, for instance, its truths are still taken as self-evident.
Just listen to Bush or Blair. 16 Historicism, often at its most vulgar,
enables Western governments and media outlets to opine endlessly
about the backwardness of the Middle East, about civilizations clashing
and nations failing, wondering why Islam went wrong and how exactly
various discrete cultures may best be led or coerced into “democracy.”
Facile as these arguments often seem, the power of Western historicism
is not to be underestimated. The importance of Chakrabarty’s re-
markable 2000 book lies precisely in its ability to explain this power.
Western historicism, he argues, to the extent that it is the narrative
account of the modern concepts we would not do without—including
historicism itself in its most general or primary sense—is very difficult
to contest. “Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society,
public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual,
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).
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
17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3.
18. See Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991); and Paul
Stevens, “Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the
Work of Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 36 (2005): 425–37. By “instrumen-
talism” we mean “the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most eco-
nomical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost-output
ratio, is its measure of success” (Taylor, Malaise, 5).
become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the

history of Europe’ ” (27). Consequently, the project of decentering
“Europe,” he feels, “must realize within itself its own impossibility.” He
therefore looks to a history that “embodies this politics of despair” (45).
There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us. 19 Two ob-
jections immediately come to mind. First, as academic discourse has
made clear, modernity is not frozen in time, but its enabling concepts
are dynamic and capable of turning into something rich and strange,
something “postmodern,” something that might enable a multitude of
new ways of being in the world. This is Richard Helgerson’s point
when he suggests, in an important recent article, that the position con-
temporary postcolonial scholars now find themselves in, one domi-
nated by “Europe,” is not unlike the position early modern European
scholars lamented four hundred years ago when they felt themselves
dominated by classical antiquity—the analogy, itself a function of the
historicism it would contest, suggests how modernity might transcend
itself. 20 The second objection is that historicism, as Chakrabarty surely
knows, was never quite as homogeneous or stable as his text recurrently
implies. Its enabling concepts were never simply, purely “European.”
As scholars from Raymond Schwab to Balachandra Rajan have made
clear, Romanticism, for instance, and all it implies for modernity, is
inconceivable without the impact of India. 21 At the same time, Amartya
Sen has drawn attention to India’s rationalist, dialogic traditions—tra-
ditions that bore fruit in the science of the Gupta period and the public
reasoning of Akbar’s court, traditions that do so much to explain the
durability of present-day Indian secularism and democracy. 22
How then are we to explain Chakrabarty’s emphasis on the impasse?
While his perception of the enduring influence of modernity is of
crucial importance, his despair seems excessive, even melodramatic.
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.
And indeed, in a curious postscript, he actually renounces the “politics

of despair” that he has just reannounced (45–46). He first proposed
this politics in the core 1992 Representations article for his book. 23 In
the 2000 book itself he announces it again as quoted above (45) and
then immediately renounces it: “But the ‘politics of despair’ I once
proposed with some passion do not any longer drive the larger argu-
ment presented here” (46). The self-conflict revealed in these pages can
be explained in a number of ways. On the one hand, Chakrabarty’s
reluctance to relinquish his despair suggests a persistent sense of
loss. The substance of that loss is evident, for instance, in his moving
account of Western historicism’s occlusion of peasant darshan—a kind
of imagination that enables one to see the smiling face of the domestic
goddess Lakshmi and that, in refusing the customary Western separa-
tion of instrumental and spiritual categories, played a major role in
twentieth-century Indian nation formation (149–79). On the other
hand, the equally powerful need to cast aside despair indicates the
degree to which the postcolonial project of provincializing Europe
has itself become an orthodoxy. As Helgerson points out, responding
directly to Chakrabarty, the world of former European colonies is no
longer powerless: “as a postcolonial perspective changes the way we
understand Europe,” it is perfectly clear just how effectively “the
empire has been striking back” and has been doing so for some time
now. 24 So powerful is this process that the history of the West is rapidly
being rewritten in the academy if not the White House.
Nor is this process unprecedented. It is a measure of Enlighten-
ment historicism’s own contingency, its weak mightiness, that its
history now seems not only solipsistic but more of an agon than a
triumphal march. The “laws” of history imagined by Hegel or Marx
have turned out to be anything but binding, and when Francis
Fukuyama announced in 1992 “the end of history,” no one outside
the Washington beltway was listening. 25 At the same time, however,
the power of Orientalism as imagined by Said no longer seems so
incontestable. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, “only the most obscurantist in-
digenists and cultural nationalists” would now believe that “Europeans
were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about
23. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” Representations 37 (1992):

1–26.
24. Helgerson, “Before National Literary History,” 179.
25. Not even he now takes it seriously—see Francis Fukuyama, America at the Cross-
roads (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. 53–54, for the somewhat
sheepish qualification of his original argument in The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Avon, 1992).
non-Europe,” that is, of producing anything other than fantasies of their

own negative self-definition. 26 The critical point is that the original
seamlessness of Said’s Orientalism had as its necessary condition the
perceived seamlessness of Western historicism. As confidence in
the latter has faded, so has conviction in the totalizing claims of the
former. 27 As Enlightenment historicism and its privileging of Europe
continues to be historicized, so it becomes increasingly possible to see
many contingencies, many other, earlier attempts to respond to the
knowledge Ahmad recognizes, and so to provincialize Europe. This per-
ception is at the heart of Mary Louise Pratt’s “heretical” conception
of reverse transculturation: “while the imperial metropolis tends to
understand itself as determining the periphery . . . , it habitually blinds
itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis.” 28
Our aim in this essay is to analyze one of these patterns of reverse
transculturation, to produce a work of “new” historicism, and to show
how even as the British Empire moved to westernize India under the
pretense of Indianizing it, there was, as Tennyson’s trope suggests, a
history of confusion and incipient heterogenization, of Europeans
recurrently, often inadvertently, calling into question the primacy
of Europe. The focus of this phenomenon is religious toleration.
Tennyson’s imperial poem and its risks lead us back to England’s ex-
perience of religious toleration in Moghul India; religious toleration
is as important as it is in our story because, while it straddles the line
between the instrumental and spiritual, it also functions as one of
the primary registers of reverse transculturation. Indeed, in the con-
fusion toleration engenders, it records the enduring power of India
to resist a colonialism that, while primarily driven by economic gain,
was routinely legitimized by Western historicism through all the argu-
ments of modernity.
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.
We propose to pursue our argument in two parts: first, by showing

that Tennyson’s emphasis on toleration was rooted in the impact Indian
religion had on the British Orientalists of the late eighteenth century;
second, by showing that the incipient threat to Enlightenment histori-
cism that this constituted reproduced the confusion or unmooring early
modern English travelers felt at the dawn of historicism’s hegemony.
The constant that causes this recurring pattern of transculturation is
precisely the force that Chakrabarty feels the West occludes—the non-
instrumental alterity of Indian culture. In making this argument we
concentrate on two figures usually taken to exemplify European in-
difference to the alterity of India, Sir William Jones and Sir Thomas
Roe. Central to our argument is the conviction that Orientalism in
Said’s sense is primarily a function of historicism, but that neither his-
toricism nor Orientalism were, or indeed are, entirely secure against
the experience of contact—whether through direct converse or the
influence of more etiolated forms of discourse.
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.
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much by a superhuman will to power as by a somewhat bathetic con-

fusion of purpose. As Bernard Cohn has pointed out, Queen Victoria’s
1858 proclamation of direct rule articulated two contradictory aims:
on the one hand, imperial policy sought “to maintain India as a feudal
order,” while, on the other, it looked “towards changes that would in-
evitably lead to the destruction of this feudal order.” 31 On the one
hand, says the proclamation, it sought to maintain “the ancient rights,
usages, and customs of India,” while on the other, it looked toward
“prosperity and . . . social advancement.” 32 British diffidence had pro-
duced a policy that was at once profoundly conservative and optimis-
tically progressive. 33
It is precisely this contradiction that Tennyson’s “Akbar’s Dream”
seeks to address. It sets out to valorize the indigenous culture of India
by suggesting that it has a real history and that its “medieval” past, when
properly understood, points to the possibility of a progressive future.
Progress is not a violation of Indianness but a manifestation of its
occluded past. Inspired by Benjamin Jowett, who, like Tennyson him-
self, had lost a number of beloved family members in the service of
British India, 34 the poem is so carefully researched that its extensive
notes constitute an integral part of its overall design as a political
speech act. Like the great Imperial Assemblage at Delhi in 1877 to
proclaim the Queen Empress and, in the words of the Viceroy, Lord
Lytton, to place her “authority upon the ancient throne of the
Moguls,” the poem invokes the power and glory of the ancient in-
digenous empire—which was an astonishingly complex compromise
between Hindu, Moslem, and other cultures and subcultures. 35 The
31. Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 166.

32. Royal Proclamation, November 1, 1858, in The Evolution of India and Pakistan,
1858 to 1947, ed. C. H. Philips et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 10–11.
33. For a cogent account of how this fundamental contradiction regularly produced
vacillation in imperial policy over the period 1858–1914, see Robin J. Moore, “Imperial
India, 1858–1914,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed.
Andrew Porter (Oxford University Press, 1999), 422–46.
34. Jowett’s brothers, William and Alfred, both officers in the East India Company’s
army, died of disease in 1850 and 1858, respectively. Tennyson’s son, Lionel, a civil
servant in the India Office, died in 1886 on his way home from India. As Jowett
advised another relative, “I hope you know how to live and not die in India, which I
believe greatly to be an art” (The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, ed. Evelyn Abbott,
2 vols. [London, 1897], 1:19).
35. Lytton, quoted in Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 187. See, for instance, Aziz
Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964),
and An Intellectual History of Islam in India (Edinburgh University Press, 1969); and John
F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 34–40.
poem eschews the Enlightenment stereotype of oriental despotism and

insists on the Moghul empire’s achievements: “Akbar’s rapid conquests
and the good government of his fifteen provinces with their complete
military, civil and political systems,” Tennyson’s note assures us, “make
him conspicuous among the great kings of history” (line 25n). But
unlike the Imperial Assemblage, the poem imagines the empire as a
political form that has the potential to transcend itself from within: it
is not timeless, unresisting, or unchanging, but, under the leadership of
a hero like Akbar, capable of development and dramatic improvement.
For Tennyson, what most gives India a history, in the sense that Hegel
or Marx would have understood, is the Moghul empire’s progress
toward religious toleration. Akbar effects real change. He rejects the
insistence of the ulema (line 45) on one faith. He despises these clerical
jurists who “sitting on green sofas contemplate / The torment of the
damned” (lines 46–47) and reveals himself as a visionary capable of
understanding that all religions are one—“There is light in all,” he
muses, “And light, with more or less of shade, in all / Man-modes of
worship” (lines 43–45). The symbol of this new all-embracing “Divine
Faith” is the sun (lines 98–102). At this point, it becomes clear that
Tennyson’s Akbar is, to some extent at least, rehearsing contemporary
British policy, for in identifying the sun in all its religious manifes-
tations with Christ “the Sun of Righteousness” (line 80), Tennyson is
invoking a specific understanding of Christianity as the religion of
toleration. 36 As Akbar stumbles on his conception of a new religion
of toleration by listening to a Portuguese Jesuit quoting Christ (lines
71–82), so Disraeli had come to realize that the best way to represent
the Raj’s religious policy was to declare that “neutrality & toleration in
matters of religious faith are part & parcel of the system of Christianity
which this Country & its Queen professes.” 37 Akbar comes to perceive
Christ’s injunction to bless even our persecutors as “a purer gleam /
Than glances from the sun of our Islam” (lines 75–76). Guided by
this light in a way that suggests why the conventionally progressive
Anglo-Indians in a work like Forster’s Passage to India admire him so
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.
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.
latter weakness is evident not only in the “terror” hybridization may

produce but much more clearly in the doubts new ways of seeing things
may sow. Weakness in this sense is more than evident in Tennyson’s
poem, for while his politics are clear, his religion is not. As Tennyson’s
copious notes suggest, over a century of scholarly inquiry into Indian
religion had had an enormous impact on his understanding of Chris-
tianity. Most important, Christianity is no longer seen as God’s ex-
clusive revelation but as merely one religion among many. Christ’s
assertions that “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” that “no man
cometh to the Father, but by me” ( John 14:6), are quietly dismissed
as solipsistic: “every splintered fraction of a sect / Will clamour ‘I
am on the Perfect Way, / All else is to perdition’ ” (lines 33–35). The
idealization of Akbar’s Divine Faith indicates the degree to which, for
Victorian intellectuals like Jowett and Tennyson, the Deist concept that
“all religions are one” now bears the added burden of Indian thought
and history. If the poem is British as a political speech act, it is Indian
as a religious one. It grants the authority of toleration’s origin to
India not Europe—Akbar’s “tolerance of religions and abhorrence of
religious persecution,” says Tennyson, “put our Tudors to shame” (head-
note). 42 The poem also implicitly questions the totalizing confidence
of so many Christian missionaries actively at work in Victorian India.
In this, it effectively reopens the early nineteenth-century debate
between Orientalists and Occidentalists.
Sir William Jones and Lakshmi’s Smile

The Occidentalist position, exemplified by Macaulay’s infamous 1835
“Minute on Indian Education,” maintained that England had nothing to
learn from India and that in order to rule India, its principal concern
should be the production of a subaltern class of cultural interpreters,
“Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals
and in intellect.” 43 The older, Orientalist position as exemplified by the
numerous works of Sir William Jones, one of the East India Company’s
Supreme Court Justices in Calcutta, maintained the opposite. Jones
thought that England had everything to learn from India and that if
it was to govern its new dominion effectively, it had to produce the
42. In this Tennyson inadvertently recovers something of the decentering medieval

tradition of travelers’ stories from the East; see, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt’s
chapter on Mandeville in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (University
of Chicago Press, 1991), 26–51.
43. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney
(University of Chicago Press, 1972), 249.
cultural knowledge that would best enable it to give its “Indian

subjects the benefit of their own beloved and revered laws.” 44 From
Jones’s founding of the Asiatic Society in 1784, and despite the
eventual triumph of the Occidentalists, the British pursued a sys-
tematic attempt to recover India’s past. In his debts to the Asiatic
Society, Tennyson was the heir of Jones and the Orientalist tradition.
The books and articles that Jowett fed Tennyson from Balliol College
Library for his work on “Akbar’s Dream” were based on research
inspired by the Asiatic Society. Even such an early oriental poem as
Tennyson’s 1827 “Expedition of Nadir Shah into Hindostan” was
based on Jones’s own history of the shah. For admirers like Garland
Cannon, Jones remains “one of the greatest intellectual explorers
of all time,” 45 the polymath who first conceived the Indian origin of
European languages and first determined the chronology of ancient
Indian history. For postcolonial scholars like Said, however, Jones
exemplifies the hegemonic nature of “Orientalist” scholarship. He
appears as the Baconian conqueror of an empire of knowledge, deter-
mined to “rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident,”
to “gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn
it into a province of European learning.” 46 Said’s representation of
Jones seems now dismissively one-sided, for Jones was even more
intensely conflicted between the instrumental and the spiritual than
Tennyson was. Indeed, it is the Occidentalist not the Orientalist
position that best, though certainly not exclusively, illustrates the sub-
stance of what Said means by “Orientalism.” 47
In terms of instrumental categories like law and governance, there
is clearly much to Said’s view. Jones was a liberal rationalist, an En-
lightenment philosophe. Indians should certainly have their own
laws, he felt, but only after they had been digested—recovered and
reordered—by reason, that is, by Western rationalism. Indians them-
selves were unfit for the task. As Jones explained to an American friend,
they “are incapable of civil liberty; few of them have any idea of it;
and those who have, do not wish it. They must (I deplore the evil, but
know the necessity of it) they must be ruled by an absolute power.” 48
What they are, we were. Most disturbingly, this historicist arrogance
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).
is contaminated by surprisingly virulent moments of racism. In a

letter to another friend, he confides, “I was forced to borrow of a
black man [a local Bengali money lender], and it was like touching
a snake or the South American eel.” 49 In terms of noninstrumental
categories like literature and religion, however, this highly emotional
irrationalism takes an unpredictable turn. The culture of Hinduism—
later so hated by the Occidentalists—Jones loved, and he loved it in such
a way that it responds directly to one of Chakrabarty’s key questions:
“If the nation, the people, or the country were not just to be observed,
described, and critiqued but loved as well, what would guarantee that
they were indeed worth loving unless one saw in them something that
was already lovable?” (149).
Jones is visibly moved by his experience of Bengal—its sights and
sounds provide an extraordinary stimulus to his imagination: “We are
literally lulled to sleep by Persian nightingales,” he writes from the
gardens of Allipore, “and cease to wonder, that the Bulbul, with a
thousand tales, makes such a figure in Oriental poetry.” 50 His response
is profoundly affective. His own culture’s desire for sensibility, for
aestheticized emotion—benevolence, on the one hand, and “novelty
and wildness,” on the other—makes him especially susceptible to Hindu
culture. 51 As he reads the Hindu scriptures in Persian translation—
translations made possible by Akbar’s sixteenth-century policy of re-
ligious toleration—Jones becomes increasingly enthralled: “I am in
love with the Gopia, charmed with Crishen, an enthusiastick admirer
of Ram, and a devout adorer of Brimha-bishen-mehais; not to men-
tion, that Judishteir, Arjen, Corno, and the other warriours of the
M’hab’harat appear greater in my eyes than Agamemnon, Ajax, and
Achilles appeared, when I first read the Iliad.” 52 As he learns the sacred
language of Sanskrit, he comes to know Lakshmi herself, the goddess
of domestic well-being whose loss is lamented by Chakrabarty in Pro-
vincializing Europe—the figure whom the historian feels epitomizes the
West’s inability to comprehend darshan, a vision of things that is not
subject-centered, not contingent on any concept of mind, but com-
munal, sedimented into the language and other cultural structures, and
most evident in the uncanny sensation of language thinking through
us or quotidian practices living through us. Jones certainly feels he
can see the smiling figure of Lakshmi—though we may wonder if what
he sees is exactly the same as the goddess that Chakrabarty imagines.
49. Ibid., 2:694 (February 27, 1786).

50. Ibid., 2:648 (April 26, 1784).
51. Ibid., 2:649 ( June 22, 1784).
52. Ibid., 2:652.
In Jones’s 1788 “Hymn to Lacshmi,” she at first seems irredeemably

westernized—she is associated with Ceres and hailed as Milton might
have saluted her had she appeared in L’Allegro. Even so, it soon
becomes apparent that this is not just another act of appropriation.
The association of Lakshmi with Ceres is precisely Jones’s attempt to
articulate something like darshan—in this case, a moment of percep-
tion in which the divinity of a timeless natural world and the culture
Jones associates with it is seen to be living through its creatures:
Such were thy gifts, Pedmala [Lakshmi], such thy pow’r!
For, when thy smile irradiates yon blue fields,
Observant Indra sheds the genial show’r,
And pregnant earth her springing tribute yields
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The rivers broad, like busy should’ring bands,
Clap their applauding hands;
The marish dances and the forest sings
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And shouting hills proclaim th’ abundant year,
That food to herds, to herdsmen plenty brings,
And wealth to guardian kings. 53
Without knowing it, Jones is imitating what generations of Moslems
had done before him. The desire to experience and understand pre-
cipitates acculturation. As M. L. Roy Choudhary pointed out in 1952,
Lakshmi had long since ceased to be a purely Hindu goddess, and her
songs [are to this day] “still sung by Moslem Faqirs in Western Bengal
villages.” 54
The “Hymn to Lacshmi” is one of Jones’s many responses to reading
the Bhagavad-Gita. He read the poem in the company of indigenous
scholars, many of whom he came to revere—the Brahmin, “who read it
with me, was frequently stopped by his tears.” 55 Jones knows that he
is on sacred ground, but he also knows that he is in the presence of the
quotidian. As he sets out to compose the poem, Bengal is overtaken
by famine, and he understands the pain of Lakshmi’s absence. As he
later wrote,“the Goddess of Abundance, indeed, has not been kind this
year; for we are just escaped from a famine; thousands have perished
in the late dearth, and thousands are fed every day in Calcutta, where
rice is distributed by English gentlemen, most of whom have subscribed
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.
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
56. Jones, Letters, 2:813 (September 19, 1788).

57. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
(London: HarperCollins, 2002), 47–48.
58. Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, 154.
59. Jones, Letters, 2:766 (September 4, 1787).
60. Quoted in Dalrymple, White Mughals, 40.
Orientalist soldiers like David Ochterlony, Charles Stuart, or James

Kirkpatrick, were more than willing to compromise on their cultural
difference, on what Chatterjee calls “the alienness of the ruling
class.” 61 Had they been able to do so, the British Raj might have
become indigenized as the Moghuls had become before them. In this,
the example of Jones is crucial. It illuminates the historical substance
of Akbar’s dream—that it was not the gleam of Jesuit revelation that led
the historical emperor to religious toleration but the peculiar nature of
Indian heterogeneity, the impact not only of Hindu manners, “inter-
woven with their religious opinions,” but of the unusually diversified
forms of Indian Islam on India’s central Asian Moghul invaders.
The great Indian historian Romila Thapar describes the impact of
“Hinduism” ’s diversity on the British Orientalists: “In the course of
investigating what came to be called Hinduism, together with various
aspects of its belief, ritual and custom, many were baffled by a religion
that was altogether different from their own. It was not monotheistic,
there was no historical founder, or single sacred text, or dogma or eccle-
siastical organization—and it was closely tied to caste.” 62 The Moghuls
and earlier Islamic invaders were equally confused, and the effect was
that in early modern India, “diverse and multiple religions were prac-
ticed, with royal patronage extending to more than one” (3). The very
heterogeneity of Hindu and Indian Islamic culture encouraged the
diversity and transculturation that is so apparent in Akbar’s empire. 63
It is this historical possibility, then, the Moghul Empire as a pre-
cedent for what might have happened to the British Raj, that makes
the experience of the first English travelers to Moghul India in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries so important. Their
experience in witnessing such a heterogeneous and tolerant polity is
remarkable. It allows us to see nascent Western historicism at both its
most formidable and most fragile. The New World afforded no such
polity as did Moghul India. On the one hand, these travelers’ ex-
perience suggests the degree to which historicism encourages Orien-
talism in Said’s sense regardless of the West’s immediate, actual power;
it suggests that Orientalism is not simply a function of material
power, a view that is implicit in recent works like Richmond Barbour’s
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.
otherwise persuasive book Before Orientalism. 64 On the other hand,

the experience of the early modern travelers suggests how easily that
historicist sense of superiority may be undone. In comparing the ex-
perience of eighteenth-century British Orientalists and that of early
seventeenth-century English travelers, it becomes increasingly evident
that when Indian religion encouraged toleration and transculturation,
it did so by inadvertently appealing to noninstrumental cultural needs
or imperatives that already animated the colonizers and travelers. If
Jones were made open to Hindu religion by his own culture’s pre-
occupation with affect, sensibility, and benevolence, early English
travelers were similarly made open to Moghul toleration by a pre-
occupation with civility—a conception of civility that undermines the
force of their own incipient historicism.
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.
his 1656 Oceana, the beginnings of this process of displacement were

to be located in the time of the Tudors, specifically in the reign of
Elizabeth. The queen, Harrington argues, was too wise not to see
that the Reformation, especially the dissolution of the monasteries, had
precipitated a radical shift in power to the people, and accordingly
she converted her “reign through the perpetuall Love-tricks that passed
between her and her people into a kind of Romanze,” enabling the
House of Commons “to raise that head which since hath been so high
and formidable unto their princes.” 67 For a liberal scholar like Liah
Greenfeld, this displacement of sovereignty is at the heart of the
argument that Protestant England is the prototype of the modern
nation-state, the embryo out of which modern Western democracies,
with their emphatic distinction between religious and secular spheres
of action, developed. 68 However persuasive these master narratives
might be—both of them variations on the great theme of Western his-
toricism—popular sovereignty and religious toleration were not obvious
characteristics of Elizabethan England. The irony we need to return
to is Tennyson’s—that is, at precisely the time when a “new” Western
nation-state reembarked on a policy of rigorous and increasingly brutal
religious uniformity, 69 an “old” patrimonial eastern empire initiated
a policy of toleration. In comparison with “medieval” India, early
modern England seems remarkably provincial.
Unlike Babur, the central Asian monarch who founded the Moghul
empire, Babur’s grandson Akbar was a native of India—Jalal-ud-Din
Muhammad Akbar was born in Amarkot in Sindh on October 15, 1542.
Although Akbar spent much of his childhood in Afghanistan, he felt
at home in India, and in his late teens married into a distinguished
Rajput family without insisting that his bride, Man Moti, convert to
Islam. 70 Man Moti became the mother of Akbar’s son and successor,
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;
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.
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
74. Abdul Qadir Badauni, quoted in Thackston, “Literature,” 104.

75. Richards, Mughal Empire, 34. See also Choudhary, Din-i-Lahi; Nizami, Akbar and
Religion, 28–77; and Ahmad, Intellectual History, esp. 29–30.
76. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:316.
77. Ibid., 2:295. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar sounds strikingly like Thomas More’s King Utopus:
as soon as Utopus had conquered the island, “he decreed that every man might culti-
vate the religion of his choice, and proselytize for it too, provided he did so quietly,
modestly, rationally, and without bitterness to others.” Utopus did this “not simply for the
sake of peace, which he saw was being destroyed by constant quarrels and implacable
hatreds, but also for the sake of religion itself ” (Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M.
Logan and Robert M. Adams [Cambridge University Press, 1989], 97).
evident when English travelers began to arrive in Moghul India in the

late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The travelers we would draw attention to are members of the group
now familiar to students of the English in Moghul India, the group that
found itself at the court of Akbar’s son, Jahangir, between 1615–19:
James I’s ambassador and the East India Company’s agent, Sir Thomas
Roe; Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry; and their acquaintance, “the famous
unwearied walker,” Thomas Coryat. 78 It is important to emphasize
that, despite their powerlessness, these travelers first arrived with the
same sense of cultural superiority to Asian Indians that their fellow
Europeans routinely showed to American Indians. The ambassador,
Roe, a friend of the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh, was in fact a New
World explorer, having unsuccessfully attempted in 1610–11 to con-
firm his mentor’s claims about gold in Guiana. In traveling to India,
he and others were convinced that they were traveling back in time—
if not to the “savagery” of America then at least to the “medieval” world
their own historicism had just begun to create and from which their
societies felt themselves to be emerging. 79 The very theatricality of the
Moghul court that preoccupies Barbour in his account of Roe suggests
the inauthenticity, false appearance, and corruption of the “middle” age
that fell between ancient and modern. 80 For Roe, a former member
of James I’s obstinate “addled” Parliament of 1614, the theatricality
of the Moghul court masks a slavery worse than feudal since, so he
believed, Moghul subjects hold nothing in fee—they have no property,
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.
“for as all his Subjects are slaves, so is he [the emperor] in a kind of

reciprocall bondage,” 81 having to obey the endless theatrical customs
of public appearance and deliberation. To claim as Roe does, to a
readership as sensitive to the role of the law in governance as the
English in 1616, that “they have no written Law,” that “the King by
his owne word ruleth,” 82 is to medievalize Moghul India long before
James Mill’s supremely Occidentalist 1817 history. 83 But what makes
Roe and his fellow travelers so interesting is not so much their in-
clination to historicize cultural differences as their confusion when
confronted by the actual experience of Moghul India.
Transculturation and English Confusion

Unlike their reaction to so much they encountered in Moghul India,
the response of these travelers to the experience of religious toleration
was profoundly conflicted. On the one hand, it was quite literally dis-
missed as “Confusion,” 84 while on the other, it was welcomed and
grudgingly admired. After explaining in some detail the “medievalism”
implicit in the religion of both Moslems and Hindus, that they “ground
their opinions on tradition, not reason,” Terry, for instance, concluded
with a sense of security bordering on satisfaction that “all religions
[in Jahangir’s empire] are tolerated, and their priests [held] in good
esteeme. My selfe often received from the Mogol himselfe the appel-
lation of Father, with other many gracious words, [and] with place
amongst his best nobles.” 85 Thirty years before, one of the first English
travelers to India, Ralph Fitch, had expressed the same sense of security.
81. Roe, Embassy, 1:107–8.

82. Ibid., 1:110.
83. Monarchy unrestrained by written law is not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but in
seventeenth-century England, through the influence of theories like the “Norman Yoke,”
it became a defining characteristic. In 1598, for instance, the future James I provided
his future adversaries with ammunition by insisting that England after the Norman
Conquest had been an absolute monarchy and what law there was was largely a matter
of royal condescension (see The True Law of Free Monarchies, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark
Fortier [Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996], 70–72). In
his 1654 Second Defence of the English People, Milton sees the sources of this “medieval”
absolutism as analogous to those of Indian idolatry: while Hindus “worship as gods the
malevolent demons whom they cannot exorcize,” the common people of England had,
in “blind superstition,” accepted the Norman Yoke, established “as gods . . . the most
impotent of mortals,” and made a “sacred institution” of monarchy (Complete Prose Works
of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1953–82], 4:551).
84. Roe, Embassy, 1:312.
85. Terry, quoted in William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1921), 325, 331.
Fitch is every bit as contemptuous as Terry of indigenous religion, but

his escape from the Christian colony of Goa to the many-religioned
realm of Akbar reads like a fable of liberation. In April 1584, fleeing
from arbitrary imprisonment and the threat of the Portuguese strapado,
Fitch eventually found his way into the empire—“It is a marveillous
great and a populous countrey,” he exclaims, and its capital, Agra, is
“greater then London,” “a very great citie and populous, built with
stone, having faire and large streetes, with a faire river running by
it. . . . Here bee many Moores and Gentiles” and “the King is called
Zelabdim Echebar.” 86 Terry is especially interesting because in traveling
to India he travels back to a melange of medieval and biblical times.
Over and again, images of what strike Terry as a medieval culture also
realize Old Testament scenes: for instance, sati or the superstitious prac-
tice of widow burning, he explains, is not unlike “the custome of the
Ammonites, who, when they made their children passe through the
fire to Moloch, caused certain tabret or drums to sound, that their cry
might not be heard.” 87 At the same time, however, despite this in-
tense drive to derogate by historicizing difference, Terry continues to
enjoy and applaud the empire’s religious freedom. After describing a
daring public affront to Islam made by Coryat, an affront that in any
other Moslem country would have cost Coryat his life, Terry confidently
reflects: “But here every man hath libertie to professe his owne religion
freely and, for any restriction I ever observed, to dispute against theirs
with impunitie.” 88 This confidence in toleration is important not simply
because it offers security or opportunities to proselytize but because
it reveals how toleration appeals to these humanist-educated travelers’
sense of civility. Civility, it needs to be emphasized, is a cultural im-
perative every bit as powerful as historicism in early modern Europe,
and the irony here is that the intermittently recognized civility of the
Moghul state’s policy of religious toleration complicates Western his-
toricism’s tendency to represent the East as an image of its own medi-
eval or barbaric past. The civility of the empire of Akbar and Jahangir
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.
functions not as a shadowy type of what the Victorians will provide

but as a real model of what so many early modern Europeans actually
desired, especially those spirits like the Montaigne of the essay on
cannibals or the John Donne of Satyre III who hunger and thirst after
release from wars of religion or Elizabethan persecution. 89
The force of this irony seems unavailable to most scholarship on
England in Moghul India. Even a critic as acute as Kate Teltscher sees
the early modern mode of understanding and representing India as a
closed system. Travel writers, she argues, know their readers, and those
readers “only believe what they want to be told; they want to hear of the
strangeness, difference and barbarity of abroad to flatter their own
sense of civilization at home”—that is, they want cultural difference
to be historicized. 90 A writer like Sir Thomas Roe, she feels, however
potentially open to experiences that might decenter his own culture
and provincialize Europe, is always conscious of just how unreceptive
his public might be and so is careful to censor his own text. But if this
is the case, then it is not clear why Roe and others talk in the way they
do about religious toleration to the closed-minded “public” Teltscher
imagines for them. A more immediate problem with this argument,
however, is that the text of Roe that Teltscher uses is from Purchas His
Pilgrimes. 91 There Roe is certainly censored—but not by himself so much
as by the Reverend Samuel Purchas. What most obviously gets lost in
Purchas’s edition is any clear sense of Roe’s text as a journal—a text in
which entries are written day by day as they occur, not for the pleasure
of the public but primarily for the practical use of the East India Com-
pany. Because of this, events and observations in Sir William Foster’s
scholarly edition of Roe often read quite differently. Most important,
the one example of cultural instability in Roe that Teltscher concedes
turns out in Foster’s edition to be a story as much about civility as
about Christian humility.
The passage Teltscher focuses on is Roe’s moving account of Ja-
hangir’s encounter with a “professed Poore holy” beggar on December
18, 1616. 92 There, she argues, because Jahangir’s act of humility in con-
versing and eating with the beggar and then raising up his filthy body
in his arms realizes the biblical ideal of Yahweh raising up the poor in
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.
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
93. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 27.

94. The phrase “submerged challenge” is Teltscher’s (ibid.); Roe’s denunciation can
be found in Embassy, 1:367.
95. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 4:386.
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.
zealous Coryat, however sincere, is little more than an embarrass-

ment, a “poor wretch” (286). Confrontational as Coryat is, however,
the symmetry of his challenges suggests that he is not quite as closed
as he appears. In the course of one public dispute, recorded in a
letter to his mother, Coryat somewhat startlingly proclaims himself a
Moslem or “Musulman,” arguing that because the appellation means
“true believer,” he as a follower of Christ is more entitled to it than
any follower of Mohammed—his adversary in the dispute is merely a
pseudo-Moslem. In establishing this distinction, however, Coryat simul-
taneously shows how much he and his adversary are not-so-secret
sharers—in their desire to see themselves as true believers in the one
God. This is even more evident in Coryat’s admiration for the deceased
infidel, Akbar, and his son, Jahangir.
When Coryat’s “Observations” are put together with his letters home,
it is difficult not to see the representation of Akbar’s love for his
mother in the “Observations” as a projection of Coryat’s feelings for
his own “deare and wellbeloved Mother” (261) in the letters. 98 Akbar
is admired for both the civility of his filial piety toward his mother, a
civility reminiscent of Aeneas’s piety toward his father, and for his
strength of character in standing up to her. After a report that the
Portuguese in Ormus had tied a copy of the Koran around the neck
of a dog and proceeded to beat the dog about the town, Akbar’s
mother, Miriam-Makani, insists that the emperor do the same to the
Bible: “But hee denyed her request, saying that if it were ill in the
Portugal’s to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King to
requite ill with ill, for that the contempt of any religion was the con-
tempt of God, and he would not be revenged upon an innocent
booke” (278). For Coryat, the moral is “that God would not suffer the
sacred booke of His truth to be contemned amongst the infidels” (278).
This may be the moral that a conventional sensitivity to divine history
or Christian providence demands, but it is not the moral that the rhe-
torical organization of the anecdote suggests. The emotional force
of the story lies in Akbar’s willingness to stand against those he loves
most on a matter of tolerationist principle—just as Coryat himself
is willing to stand against his mother’s desires in order to fulfill his
vocation and complete his travels: “Sweet mother, pray not let this
wound your heart, that I say [my return will be] four yeares hence,
and not before” (260). The effect of this secret sharing is to foreground
the principle on which Akbar stands, that is, that contempt for any re-
98. The letters were first published as pamphlets in 1616/17 and 1618 and the “Ob-
servations” in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.
ligion is contempt for God. Through Coryat’s admiration for Akbar’s

civility, his filial piety, and his strength of character, Coryat effectively
valorizes this principle of tolerance in a way that undermines the ex-
clusivity of his own religious conviction. That exclusivity becomes even
more unsettled in his representation of the Moslem Jahangir as a
Christlike figure. In the penultimate anecdote of the “Observations,”
Jahangir realizes the New Testament scene of the feeding of the five
thousand (Matt. 14:21): “For a close of this discourse,” says Coryat, “I
cannot forget that memorable pietie, when at Asmere hee [ Jahangir]
went afoot to the tombe of the prophet Hod. . . . [There he with his
wife, Normahal, kindled a fire under an immense brass pot] and made
kitcherie for five thousand poore, taking out the first platter with his
owne hands and serving one; Normahal the second; and so his ladies all
the rest. Cracke mee this nut, all [ye] Papall charitie vaunters” (279–80).
When Terry looks back in 1655 over his experience of England in
Moghul India, he travels back in time to the Old Testament experience
of Israel in Egypt. But what comes to mind is not the epic story of
Israel’s exodus from the house of bondage; it is rather the romance
story of Joseph and his clan reunited in an empire of extraordinary
promise. Jahangir may have been difficult to deal with in business
matters, but Terry concedes, “we Englishmen did not at all suffer by
that inconstancy of his, but there found a free trade, a peaceable
residence, and a very good esteem with that King and people; and
much better (as I conceive) by reason of the prudence of my Lord
Ambassador, who was there (in some sense) like Joseph in the Court
of Pharoah [sic], for whose sake all his nation there seemed to fare the
better.” 99 This image epitomizes the unmooring we have been trying
to suggest. Over the course of the Hebrew scriptures, especially as
they are reproduced in the Christian Old Testament, pharaonic Egypt
functions as one of the principal representations of the demonic other
against which Israel defines itself, but in the story of Joseph and his
brothers, the story Terry finds most appropriate to explain his ex-
perience, the teleological momentum of Israel’s divine history is dis-
rupted by the contingency of Egypt’s plenitude and Pharaoh’s civility.
At that moment, the moment when Pharaoh welcomes Joseph’s family
and Jacob blesses Pharaoh (Gen. 47:1–12), Egypt is no longer Israel’s
defining other. Similarly, in the innumerable moments of conflicted-
ness, moments felt in response to the unexpected experience of tol-
eration and civility, the old patrimonial empire of the Moghuls ceases
to function as the new English nation-state’s defining other. Historicism
itself—in the sense of historical analysis—reveals that in the testimony
99. Quoted in Roe, Embassy, xlv.

of these English travelers the drive to derogate by historicizing cul-

tural difference is anything but inevitable and indeed is left in some
disarray among the fragmentary glimpses of a peaceable kingdom.
To an extent that has received surprisingly little attention, there is
evidence to suggest that those glimpses did affect England’s future.
Coryat’s letters circulated among the group of intellectuals that had
begun meeting at Sir Robert Cotton’s library from 1612 onward—a
group that included members of his Mermaid Tavern fraternity like
Ben Jonson and the most eloquent spokesman for religious toleration
in the early seventeenth century, John Selden. At the same time, Roe
became increasingly interested in toleration, expressing outrage at the
Laudian persecution of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton in 1637 and
committing himself wholeheartedly in the early 1630s to John Dury’s
plans to develop a tolerant reunion of Protestant factions across
Europe. 100 For Akbar and Jahangir, toleration was an intensely re-
ligious response to the experience of diversity. For Akbar’s minister,
Abu’l Fazl, it was also pragmatic. He explains how economically un-
necessary the poll tax on non-Moslems was: “the prime cause of levying
the tax in old times was the neediness of the rulers and their assistants.
At this day when there are thousands of treasures in the store-chambers
of the world-wide administration . . . why should a just and discrimi-
nating mind apply itself to collecting this tax?” 101 In 1641, echoing the
pragmatism of Abu’l Fazl, Roe made a speech to Parliament arguing
the economic cost of intolerance: he held that “the decline of the
clothing trade in England could not be halted until ‘the pressure on
tender consciences’ . . . had been relaxed.” 102
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
100. See W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols.

(1932–40; repr., Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1965), 2:364–65.
101. Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, 2:317.
102. Jordan, Development of Religious Toleration, 4:344.
same time, by an affective commitment to the diverse, spiritual possi-

bilities implicit in the practices of their own habitus, by a sense of
what might be. This sense of a future that is not singular or unitary,
Chakrabarty feels, is crucially important. It arises not out of a history
of abstract reason but out of something much more vital—out of pasts
that continue to exist “in taste, in practices of embodiment, in the
cultural training of the senses over generations . . . in practices I some-
times do not even know I engage in” (251). Chakrabarty’s scientists,
in their ability to hold these two modes of being in dialogue, provide
an image of how his countrymen and countrywomen are to preserve
their cultural identities and escape the prison house of Western in-
strumentalism—how they are to get “beyond historicism” (249).
Our argument is meant to suggest that in his preoccupation with the
influence of the West on India, Chakrabarty tends to underestimate the
power of reverse transculturation and to overestimate the seamlessness
of historicism. We suggest that Jones and his fellow Orientalists, Roe
and his fellow travelers, and many other Europeans in India learned to
live in worlds every bit as divided and distinguished as those of Chakra-
barty’s exemplary scientists. In their experience of religious diversity
and toleration in India, many of these colonizers and travelers, though
certainly not all, became increasingly conflicted. Although sensibility
and civility are not the same as astrology, India animated and re-
animated powerfully imaginative, noninstrumental ways of being in
the world—ways of being often only dormant in the cultures of these
European outsiders. To the extent that Jones’s affective response to
Indian diversity and Roe’s civil response to Moghul toleration are
rooted both directly and indirectly in the experience of Akbar’s
peaceable kingdom, they outline a shadowy genealogy of reverse trans-
culturation. This genealogy can re-orient (literally) our understand-
ing of Tennyson’s act of Enlightenment historicism, in such a way that
the poem no longer seems the simple act of appropriation it first
appeared to be but a register of new ways of understanding or letting
go. A crucial part of that letting go is the realization that religious tol-
eration, one of Western modernity’s essential, self-defining concepts,
is neither peculiarly Western nor modern. If this is true, then it is evi-
dence of the way historical analysis (or historicism in its primary sense)
may undo the master narrative of Western progress (or historicism in
its secondary sense) and so help provincialize Europe. In this it points
to the crucial role research and analysis in the humanities have to play
in reshaping our world, in contesting the present hegemony of instru-
mentalist thought in the West that really lies at the heart of so much
discontent.

Akbar Dream

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Akbar Dream

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Akbar’s Dream:

Moghul Toleration and English/British Orientalism

Perhaps the most dramatic indictment of the British Empire in India

ç 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2007/10403-0003$10.00

proponents of empire were able to protect themselves from these dis-

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form of “colonialism” or cultural form of “modernity.” That is, they call

HISTORICISM AND HEGEMONY

formidable in justifying the assumption of colonial or imperial power

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“passive,” “unresisting and unchanging,” 14 and, according to Michael

17. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:

become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the

And indeed, in a curious postscript, he actually renounces the “politics

23. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artiﬁce of History,” Representations 37 (1992):

non-Europe,” that is, of producing anything other than fantasies of their

We propose to pursue our argument in two parts: ﬁrst, by showing

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much by a superhuman will to power as by a somewhat bathetic con-

31. Cohn, “Representing Authority,” 166.

poem eschews the Enlightenment stereotype of oriental despotism and

latter weakness is evident not only in the “terror” hybridization may

Sir William Jones and Lakshmi’s Smile

42. In this Tennyson inadvertently recovers something of the decentering medieval

cultural knowledge that would best enable it to give its “Indian

is contaminated by surprisingly virulent moments of racism. In a

49. Ibid., 2:694 (February 27, 1786).

In Jones’s 1788 “Hymn to Lacshmi,” she at ﬁrst seems irredeemably

56. Jones, Letters, 2:813 (September 19, 1788).

Orientalist soldiers like David Ochterlony, Charles Stuart, or James

otherwise persuasive book Before Orientalism. 64 On the other hand,

his 1656 Oceana, the beginnings of this process of displacement were

74. Abdul Qadir Badauni, quoted in Thackston, “Literature,” 104.

evident when English travelers began to arrive in Moghul India in the

“for as all his Subjects are slaves, so is he [the emperor] in a kind of

Transculturation and English Confusion

81. Roe, Embassy, 1:107–8.

Fitch is every bit as contemptuous as Terry of indigenous religion, but

functions not as a shadowy type of what the Victorians will provide

93. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 27.

zealous Coryat, however sincere, is little more than an embarrass-

ligion is contempt for God. Through Coryat’s admiration for Akbar’s

99. Quoted in Roe, Embassy, xlv.

of these English travelers the drive to derogate by historicizing cul-

100. See W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols.

same time, by an affective commitment to the diverse, spiritual possi-

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