"the Best of Brahmans": India Reading Emerson Reading India‪.‬

Critics in the past have tended to conceive Emerson's well-known interests in classical Hindu literature, philosophy, and religion as antiquarian and politically neutral. A close examination of his reading of selected Hindu texts, together with selected subsequent readings of Emerson by representative Hindus, suggests that this is not the case: both were deeply conditioned by Anglo-Indian colonial politics and the legacy of British orientalism. Emerson's interest in classical Hindu literature followed a trajectory from the condescending dismissal of his adolescent years to the enthusiastic approbation subsequent to his reading of the Bhagavad Gita and Vishnu Purana in 1845. At all periods, however, his conception of India was shaped by the regnant discourse of European orientalism, as evinced particularly in his penchant for conceiving classical Indian society in perennialist Romantic terms as the cradle of civilization, and his uncritical utilization of the familiar Kiplingesque dichotomy of East versus West. Although such conceptions have sometimes been seen by cultural critics in unilateral terms--"imposed solely by Europeans upon helpless colonial subjects"--ironically they were also employed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hindus as a mode of resistance to English political and cultural domination. In the case of several notable Indian leaders--Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi, Yogananda, and, in particular, P.C. Majumdar--Emerson's perennialist readings of India were effectively appropriated to privilege the Hindu religious heritage and, at the same time, sanction an emergent discourse of anti-colonialist sentiment and Indian independence. At such points, Emerson becomes a site of contestation, a sort of posthumous pawn, in the larger colonial struggle. **********