ABSTRACT
Under the administration of Warren Hastings, scholars such as Charles Wilkins and Nathaniel Halhed initiated studies into the Indian past. Having established the first printing press in India, Halhed published his Grammar of the Bengali Language, and Wilkins published the first translation of the Bagavad Gita. Ostensibly, such works were issued both to inform Englishmen interested in India and to ‘conciliate the affection of the natives’ (Halhed, 1776: xii). But there was more to these works, and the desire for exotic knowledge betrayed a deeper obsession with India that centred around the remoteness of its antiquity and the origins of its culture, religion and laws. Orientalist scholars, spurred on by such discoveries as the ancient cave temples of Elephanta, turned to the East in an attempt to calculate the origins of all culture. The caves of Elephanta, for example, were not simply dark, mysterious and terrifyingly colossal. Their sublimity also resided in the suspicion that their antiquity was thought to predate any known culture. The implication was that somewhere in the East existed the cradle of civilisation and that the clues as to its precise location was to be found in ancient Sanskrit texts (Drew, 1998: 199). Contained in this literature was a history that went further back in time than Christianity or even English time immemorial:
I, who cannot help believing the Divinity of the Messiah, from the undisputed antiquity and manifest completion of many prophesies, especially those of Isiah, am obliged of course to believe the sanctity of the venerable books to which that sacred person refers as genuine (the books of Moses); but it is not the truth of our national religion, as such, that I have at heart – it is truth itself; and if any cool unbiased reasoner will clearly convince me that Moses drew his narrative, through Egyptian conduits, from primeval fountains of Indian literature, I shall esteem him as a friend for having weeded my mind from a capital error, and promise to stand among the foremost in assisting to circulate the truth which he has ascertained . . . I am persuaded that a connexion subsisted between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece and Italy.1
