24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
other studies would go more deeply into the connection between Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German & Swiss Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing, or into the relationship between administrative ideas and intellectual discipline. . . . One would have to rethink the .whole complex problem of knowledge and power, (p. 24)
This is the sanction I invoke for using Orientalism as a starting-point for an analysis of the problem of English studies in India.
Said also briefly identifies the position of the Oriental intellectual as he is constituted by Orientalism : he is designated as the "native informant" (p. 324). The "accommodation between the intellectual class and the rew imperialism" is a "triumph" of the West (p. 324), in a sense made inevitable because of the West's offer of an easily accessible, codified, institutionalized and virtually commodified knowledge of the Orient. It returns to the Oriental a version of the Orient which he accepts and internalizes. Such complicity between the "master discourse" and the "native informant"2 leads not only to a consolidation of the former, but an jempewering of the latter. The colonial intellectual is able to constitute an elite with considerable political power in his own land.
These two aspects of Orientalism—the suggestion that there is a con-.nection between Orientalism and pedagogy, and the genealogy of the Oriental intellectual—inhere at its margins. In what follows, I wish to explore these marginal aspects ; firstly to outline the Orientalist/Anglicist controversy, as it appeared in India in the 1830s (of which Said does not take much cognizance); to offer a genealogy of the discipline of English literature in the Indian educational system (which involves a brief history of English literary criticism itself as an academic subject) ; to explicate Said's position in "the politics of interpretation," the materiality and agressiveness of texts, and the implications of the institutionalization of "fields" of knowledge ; and finally to reflect upon the English literature academic in India as post-colonial intellectual.
The establishment of English as the language of administration and the medium of educational instruction in India in 1835 signalled the triumph of the "Anglicists," chief of whom was Macaulay whose 1835 Minute provided the justification for such an imposition. English literature as a subject was first established as a result of the 1853 India Act (also authorized by Macaulay), and the recommendations of the report of the Civil Service of the East India Company of 1855, both of which outlined an open competitive examination for civil services in India. It was decided that "English language and literature" would make up a 1000-mark paper in these examinations. Naturally pressure was created Hpon English universities (which put up a great de»l pf resistance initially)