Classics and Empires of Nostalgia
The narrator in Waiting for the Barbarians dreams of the life he could have had as a colonial magistrate: living in a villa on a quiet street, “going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics.”[812] At one point, he is able to return briefly to his “old recreations”: “I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have.”[813] Ideas of the classical, and texts canonized as “classics,” played an influential role in “empires of nostalgia.”[814] The “potent afterlife” of empires took a variety of forms, from emulation and memorializing to rejection (see also Vasunia, chap.
15 in vol. 1).[815] The Roman Empire was used as a model of empire from the Middle Ages into the early modern period in Europe and the Middle East.[816] The emulation of Rome played a role in Spanish imperial traditions in the Americas too.[817] Roman antecedents framed Spanish understanding of Inca administration, urbanization, and religion[818] and both sides in “the Controversy of the Indies” in the 1550s drew on classical philosophy and the Roman Empire as historical precedent when they addressed the rights and treatment of the Amerindians by the colonizers.[819] Spaniards compared the Inca capital to the city of Rome in antiquity, and likened Inca social and religious organization to Roman counterparts. This included comparing Inca deities to the deities of the ancient Mediterranean world and Roman domestic worship.[820]Similarly, in the early part of established British rule in India, the famous linguist and legal scholar Sir William Jones (1746-1794), compared the deities of ancient Rome and Greece to those of contemporary India, and in the context of his proposed digest of Indian laws described himself as the “Justinian of India.”[821] His comparative mythology was underpinned by his emphasis on the relationship between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.[822] Jones also played a key role in the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784; this society was pivotal in establishing empirical historical research into India's past, one strand of which was the mapping of “classics” onto India.
The resulting periodization of Indian culture was analogous to that of Greece and Rome in contemporary Europe, leading to the formulation of “classical” India as a category in its own right, with Sanskrit texts and Brahmanical Hinduism acquiring the prestige of “classics” and the “classical.”[823] Comparisons with the Roman Empire, some of them anxious, were an important part of British imperial self-definitions.[824] European classical learning had a prominent place in the syllabi for the Indian Civil Service examinations, where the scheme of marking and the reading lists reflected the importance given to this learning in shaping the class and gender identities of imperial administrators for India.[825] Virgil tended to be popular with British officials in India, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, as indicated by the many references to him and the Aeneid as an imperial epic in their books, diaries, journal articles, memoirs, and official reports.[826] The idea of the Roman Empire as a providential vehicle for the dissemination of Christianity further enhanced Virgil's appeal to British officials.[827]Both colonizers and the colonized in British India engaged with ideas of Greco- Roman antiquity in order to make cross-cultural connections and to reflect upon the conditions and historical experiences they were grappling with.[828] Indian authors and scholars turned to Homer rather than Virgil because the Homeric poems and Sanskrit epics were part of debates about the early sources of language, religion, and culture.[829] In the wake of the Indo-European hypothesis, Greek history had become the “antique twin” of Indian history. By the 1850s, Indian and other Asian intellectuals' understanding of the ancient history of southern Asia included comparisons of ancient India with Greece and Rome in their writings.[830] Urdu poets such as Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) used ancient Greece and Rome as tropes for a variety of purposes in their poems, calling upon a long history of Islamic Hellenism,[831] while both Gandhi and Nehru represented Plato and Socrates (and ancient Greece as whole) within their differing versions of Indian nationalism.[832] A patriotic and competitive antiquity with Greece and Rome was also evident in Nehru's autobiographies, where it framed his handling of time and the shaping of temporality in his narratives.[833] In the political and historical works of Indian liberal thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparisons between ancient India, Rome, and Greece were a prominent strand in their “classicism of anti-imperial modernity.”[834]
The engagement with and appropriation of Graeco-Roman classical literature was also evident in the Spanish Americas.
With the establishment of two colleges in 1527 and 1536 by Franciscans in colonial Mexico to recruit indigenous intermediaries for the conversion of the native population, Indians began to read and write Latin. The colleges' legacy influenced the evolution of humanism and the classical tradition in New Spain, and Latin as a language adopted fresh meanings and new expressions as a result of its transplantation.[835] Multivalent connections were forged between the Greco-Roman tradition and the ethnically complex Hispanic American heritage.[836] Epic poems in Latin, such as Rafael Landivars (1731-1793) Rusticatio Mexicano (1781), were patriotic assertions of the wonders, beauty, and wealth of the author's American homeland. Its complex formal techniques point to a rich literary cosmopolitanism in the Americas as the poem draws on a wide range of Greek and Roman authors to represent the geography, wildlife, traditions, and forms of production in the American countryside.[837] Other Latin epics from this region were also triumphs in “patriotic syncretism.”[838]