COLONIALISM AND ENGLISH LITERARY STUDIES 25 to include language and literature as subjects in the curriculum. But it was not until 1893 that Oxford University's administration approved a school of English language and literature. Oxford's first "literary" Professor of English, Walter Raleigh, had however already begun his career as an English literature academic several years earlier at the Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh.3 It is only one of the ironies of colonial history that English literary studies should have had their beginnings in India and Africa,4 These aggressive "Anglicist" projects (which were accompanied by the first major interventionist legislations of the Company, such as the abolition of 'sati,' as well as by significant increase in missionary activity) would appear to be very far removed from the well-meaning and scholarly productions of the Orientalists, their dictionaries, translations, and editions of Sanskrit texts. This at least is the argument of contemporary Orientalists, one of whom has attacked Said in a review as an ignorant and aggrieved Orientalist (in contrast to Nehru, Tagore and Nirad Chaudhuri who regarded the Orientalists as friends and benefactors).5 Above all, he points out, the Orientalists were responsible for creating the Bengal "Renaissance" which is characterized by him as a "modernistic movement." "British Orientalism gave birth to the Bengal 'Renaissance9 because it helped Indians to find an indigenous identity in the modern world."7 It did this by making them "conscious of a heritage of their very own", viz. of the Vedas and the Upanishads as "the scriptures of the Aryans"; of a newly created history which authenticated the great period of the Maur-yas and Guptas; and even of that "amorphous heritage" shaped into "a rational faith known now as "Hinduism."8 Such a benign and benevolent view is far removed from Said's "paranoia." One explanation that is advanced for this difference is that Said's "orientalism" is too monolithic, and does not take into account the various "orientalisms" of China, Japan and India, some of which are described as being of an entirely different order from Anglo-French orientalism in West Asia. Said confesses that he is engaged most deeply with the orientalization of this region, and indeed makes considerable investment in his own position as a Western-educated Palestinian in this engagement. But to take the stand that the existence of varieties of orientalism invalidates Said's thesis about Orientalism is to make nonsense of the entire Foucauldian notion of discourse and its implications upon which that thesis is founded. Discourse analysis, such as the one conducted by Said, by "focus [sing] on that which is stable and persistent in the ordering of social reality" in different accounts, "can point to the assumptions shared by those who claim to be opposed to each other or are conceptualized in this manner" ~ such as the Orientalists and Anglicists..9 I am not confident of performing an extensive analysis of the discourse of the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. But two shared assumptions as they relate to the introduction of the systematic study of English in India, may be pointed out ;