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La civilisation la plus antique: Voltaire's Images of India
JYOTI MOHAN
University of Maryland, College Park
| This article examines the role of Enlightenment Orientalism in Voltaire's perspective on India. The Enlightenment represented a search for new or lost knowledge, an understanding of other cultures and peoples, and an attempt to trace a diffusion of knowledge from the ancient world to the modern. In a sense, the Enlightenment actually saw the glimmerings of what can be termed "world history." An example of this was the writings of Voltaire on India. Deriving his information about India entirely from other accounts, Voltaire attempted to contextualize the position of India in the world vis-à-vis its contribution to bodies of knowledge and the lessons that he anticipated India would teach the world in terms of ethics and morality. Voltaire was among the first who saw Europe as merely a small part of a greater global community. Yet his position as foremost among philosophes made his writings about India extremely widely read and influential. As Aronson put it, "We shall not be greatly mistaken if we assume that this intellectual adventure on the shores of the Ganges was to Voltaire more than a purely mental exercise. It was the first feeble attempt of the great European in modern times to escape from the futility of progress and action as ends in themselves, a momentary awareness that Europe, with all her self-confidence and condescension, was only part of a greater continent."1 |
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In this context, there are certain aspects of Voltaire's position on India that were inevitable and colored his views. The first was the intellectual influence of the Enlightenment itself, and, as a subgenre of Enlightenment thinking, the new craze for the East and its many mysteries, the new movement called Orientalism. Orientalism in this context can and must be read in two ways. The first is to situate Orientalism in the period of Voltaire, that is, the eighteenth century. The Oriental discovery of India in this period meant a newfound respect for all things Indian, especially the "lost texts" of India and, subsequently, the view that the ancient civilization of India was a superior culture, worthy of notice by the Western world. Yet, as twenty-first-century readers of Voltaire, we cannot escape the Saidian view that the Orient, as created by the Western world in the modern period and especially under colonialism, was essentially a fictional, "created" entity. Insofar as this meaning of Orientalism applies to Voltaire, it is interesting to see how he skillfully created an image of India based on a selective study of sources and careful focus on particular aspects of Indian civilization. |
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The "rediscovery" of India in the eighteenth century meant that India formed a key part of Enlightenment discourse. Much of India's importance was indirect in terms of constituting a challenge to the originality and greatest antiquity of Europe's Greco-Roman inheritance. The challenge to Greco-Roman antiquity and the superiority of Christianity was particularly embraced by the philosophes of the eighteenth century who believed that the discovery of the ancient civilizations of India and China would help in better understanding non-Western civilizations. The presence of civilizations that predated the Greek and Roman proved that the Western world was not the only developed society, nor the most advanced. The philosophes thought it especially important to explore ancient Indian civilization to discover how it had influenced and taught the Greek and Roman peoples. In this sense, the exploration of Indian civilization was part of a concerted attempt at what can be termed an emerging trend toward a global history of emphasizing the linkages between cultures and civilizations rather than stressing the individual achievements of societies. |
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