| The East India Company subsidized the British study of Indian culture and languages from the 1770s until the 1850s, helping to create the academic subject known as orientalism. The Company created training colleges in which Company-sponsored scholars transmitted information about Indian languages and cultures to civil servants, on the assumption that such information would assist them in their administrative duties in India. It also founded schools in which Indians received the same information.;This policy was never widely popular within the East India Company. Most of the Company's servants and executives were skeptical about the benefits of orientalism. Between 1800 and 1833, they tolerated orientalism as long as it was inexpensive and did not interfere with the Company's internal structure. After 1833, they concluded that orientalism would never yield benefits to the Company and that it was a hindrance to the Westernization and Christianization of India--social policies that Company civil servants were then supporting in increasing numbers. As a result, the Company suspended its subsidies for orientalist research, and orientalism ceased to influence Company training or policies.;The Company's subsidies had created an orientalist community. This community was originally composed of Company servants and committed to making orientalism useful to the Company. It was ineffectual, however, in convincing an increasingly hostile civil service that orientalism was useful. It directed its research into abstruse academic subjects. The Company's abandonment of orientalism did not destroy the orientalist community, but finalized its transformation into an academic specialization divorced from the practical politics of British India.;The history of orientalism and the East India Company is a case study of the relationship between imperial institutions and scholars. Imperial institutions were not generally enthusiastic about using scholarship as an adjunct to policy. They were deeply, persistently skeptical of the practical value of scholarly work. With rare exceptions having more to do with internal institutional politics than with rational decision-making, imperial institutions were unwilling to subsidize scholarship about subject peoples, perceiving it to be valueless. |
