ABSTRACT
Sara Suleri, noting that Edmund Burke’s description of India as remote and obscure made it ‘the age’s moral example of the sublime’, points to the paradox of Burke turning the sublime on its head by cataloguing the uncategorizable, in which Burke creates the rhetorical effect of India embodying ‘colonial terror’. Suleri, challenging Said’s position, notes that ‘if colonial cultural studies is to avoid a binarism that would cause it to atrophy in its own apprehension of difference. Post-colonial theorists have redescribed this period of British Orientalism - namely, that defined by the formation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal - as ideologically and territorially driven both to appropriate and to distort India’s intellectual history. As the first Europeans to translate major Sanskrit texts, the late-eighteenth-century British Orientalists were celebrated by scholars of the 1950s to the 1980s for exploding earlier misrepresentations of the East.
