Macaulay’s dismissal of Indian literature misrepresented the Orientalists, who championed those texts.

Evidence

Quite apart from being astonishingly ahistorical, these Orientalist ways of privileging the early tradition so entirely at the expense of later ones are doubtless highly obscurantist and even repressive in their own special ways, as my later comments will indicate. It is worth remarking, though, that these emphases were nevertheless infinitely superior and infinitely more productive than the colonial-modernist positions of Macaulay, who famously declared that he had never found one among them [i.e. the Orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, and then went on to conclude that he ‘would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanskrit books’. The irony of such a statement is not only that it is so outrageously wrong in its devaluation of those traditions and texts, but also that it grossly misrepresents the Orientalist viewpoint, which emphatically insisted on printing, reprinting, translating, studying and putting those very texts on those very shelves of any ‘good European library’. The original Orientalist position, diametrically opposed to Macaulay’s, was stated with no less rhetorical flourish by William Jones in his address to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1776: ‘the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.’ — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Orientalism debate in Edward Said and to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay’s theme of canonized versus dismissed cultural traditions. — connects to: Macaulay misrepresented Orientalist scholarship he claimed to reject. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1136
• SEED: Angle: how foundational ‘canon debates’ — from Macaulay versus Jones to today’s curriculum wars — always involve misrepresenting the opposing camp’s actual position.

Related

• Macaulay misrepresented Orientalist scholarship he claimed to reject. (similarity 0.95)
• Mill and Macaulay dismissed Indian learning without knowing any Indian language (similarity 0.83)
• Dismissing Orientalism as bad faith ignores its material scholarly functions. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist translation freed Sanskrit texts from sectarian control despite its biases. (similarity 0.78)