Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the Goan historian, José Gerson da Cunha's editing of the Sahyādrikhaṇda purãṇa. Appropriating Orientalist tools in the pursuit of a pre-colonial caste agenda he sought to construct a genealogy that proved the disputed ancient, Aryan origins of his caste, the Saraswat Brahmans.

Paper long abstract:

A principal feature in the historiography of Orientalist knowledge is a tendency of binding varied Indian encounters with colonial knowledge as belonging ultimately to the Orientalist project, classifying Indian agents mainly as informants or collaborators. This paper focuses on the Goan historian José Gerson da Cunha (1844-1900), and his text edition of the Sahyādrikhaṇda purãṇa (1877), written to establish the disputed ancient, Aryan origins of Saraswat Brahmans, a sub-caste to which he belonged. Appropriating Orientalist tools in the pursuit of a pre-colonial caste agenda, it reproduced an "old" form of knowledge in a "new" way, adding a very novel layer to the landscape of colonial knowledge during this period. I describe da Cunha as a knowledge intermediary, whose epistemology and intellectual transactions with the Orientalist sphere was vastly different to that the majority of Indian interlocutors of his time.

da Cunha's enterprise shows that the intellectual agendas of Indian intermediaries did not only follow the grain set by the colonial pedagogical project. It proves that embedded within the wider space of colonial knowledge were supra-colonial spaces created by Indian intellectuals to pursue their own political or cultural agendas. These spaces offer us valuable insights into significant social and cultural trends circulating in Indian society, for example the debates surrounding the nature of Brahman identity, and the ways and channels in which these were negotiated and legitimated. In sum, this paper compounds the fact that colonial knowledge was dialogical and that Indians were not just passive actors or conduits of information fitted to the European framework.