Children of Allegory: Interpretation and Colonial Rule in Early British India

This essay is about a forgotten episode in the history of allegorical interpretation: the translation and reception of Sanskrit literature by British Orientalists at the turn of the nineteenth century as a “dark and intricate labyrinth.” It is also, more broadly, about the production of historical knowledge through textual criticism as it bears upon that cultural process in the Middle Ages known as translatio imperii et studii—the transfer of power and knowledge. Its central premise is that we can observe during the British East India Company’s conquest of Bengal a transformation in the political and anthropological functions of allegoresis—an interpretive method, from its first recorded uses in debates on Greek poetry, for asserting the emergence or relevance of what might be called most simply worldviews: cosmological, theological, metaphysical, and otherwise.