| As
Kopf put it: "The intellectual elite that clustered about
Hastings after 1770 was classicist rather than progressive
in their historical outlook, cosmopolitan rather than nationalist in
their view of other cultures, and rationalist rather than romantic
in their quest for those constant and universal principles
that express the unity of human nature".8
Much of this was to change for the
worse in the nineteenth century when nationalism and racism came to
dominate the West European mind. The earliest expression of this
change in our case is James Mill's History of India published in
1817. It was, in large part written to refute the views of Sir
William Jones. It marked the beginning of the triumph of the
Anglicists (read detractors of India) over the Orientalists who were
admirers of the Indian civilization. Thomas Macaulay clinched the
issue in favour of the Anglicists with his famous minute in 1832.
English was to become the medium of instruction and not Sanskrit and
Persian which the Orientalists had favoured. In this new Anglicist
discourse, India was misunderstood, misrepresented and run down in
almost every conceivable way. This shameful history of the
imperialist and hegemonic discourse has been discussed
comprehensively for the first time by the American scholar, Ronald
Inden, in Imagining India.9
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