Macaulay misrepresented Orientalist scholarship he claimed to reject.

Evidence

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, 1136

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended counter-history motif and Said’s Orientalism debate the reader is tracing. — connects to: Macaulay’s dismissal of Indian literature misrepresented the Orientalists, who championed those texts. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 506

Broader Connections

• Macaulay’s dismissal of Indian literature misrepresented the Orientalists, who championed those texts. #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 506