ABSTRACT
In his ‘Introduction’ to The British Discovery of Hinduism, a collection of excerpts from some of the earliest British works dealing with Hinduism, P. J. Marshall points out that, with ‘the possible exception of Jones’ the early ‘Orientalists’ were not trying to understand what Hinduism meant to the people on the ground.1 Their research was academic and textual. In focusing so specifically on written texts, these early scholars were contributing to and reinforcing a division which still remains in place today – between the ‘popular’ and the ‘philosophical’ in Hinduism.2 Marshall goes on to add that these Orientalists ‘created Hinduism in their own image’.3 I would like to modify Marshall’s statement somewhat. While many British Orientalists investigating Hinduism were certainly judging Sanskrit texts from within a Biblical frame of reference, they struggled to reconcile the apparent contradictions within Hinduism, as well as contradictions in relation to Christianity. Perhaps nowhere was this struggle more apparent than in efforts by Orientalists to show a precedent for monotheism in Hindu antiquity.
