Write a note on the colonial historiography on Indian history.

The 18th and 19th centuries were dominated by the by European scholars who were usually referred to as Orientalists or Indologists but they described themselves as “antiquarians”. Many of them were employees of East India Company and later the British Government and many of them had their reservations about the culture and history of India and tried to present it as inferior to that of Europe. However, some of them had ‘sympathy’ for India and its heritage like Mountstuart Elphinstone and Thomas Munro.

Every school has its own shortcomings and contributions. The contributions of the imperialists lay in their founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 which provided an institutional focus for scholars working in a number of related fields such as textual study, epigraphy, numismatics, and history. A major contribution of these scholars lay in their efforts to collect edit and translate ancient Indian texts. In this, they depended heavily on information provided by ‘native informants’ who were rarely acknowledged.

The decipherment of Ashokan Brahmi Kharosthi scripts were major breakthroughs by the school of the colonial historiography of India. Officers of the Geological Survey discovered prehistoric stone tools and laid the basis of Indian prehistory. The Archaeological Survey of India was established in 1871 and over the succeeding decades made an important contribution towards unearthing and analyzing the material remains of India. Some of the Orientalists like William Jones, H.T. Colebrook presented a glorious image of the ancient Indian civilization and tried to draw parallels between stories from the Bible and from those from the Indian scriptur.

Faults:

However, for all their glorification of ancient India, they viewed contemporary India (18-19th century) as inferior and backward. Most of them saw the British rule in India as necessary as they found the Indians lacking in discipline and modernity which was the result of centuries of stagnation.

A branch within the imperialist school was the Utilitarianist school of James Mill and T.B. Macaulay which ___ ____ ________ ______ _____ _____ ________.
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