Scholarly Personae in Colonial South Asia: Pandits, Cultural Brokers and their Antagonists. Medieval Worlds|Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages & Cultural Brokers in European and Asian Contexts. Investigating a Concept - Volume 20. 2024 medieval worlds Volume 20. 2024|

Résumé 0

This paper presents an analysis of the pandit as a scholarly persona of the Sanskritic culture in colonial South Asia. It looks at how the interaction between pandits and Orientalists brought about and characterized the new persona of the »orientalist pandit« in late 18thcentury to 19th-century Calcutta. Furthermore, it shows how the idea of cultural broker as described in the field of social anthropology can be usefully applied to the »orientalist pandit «, as it encourages us to investigate social aspects and authority-related issues in processes of mediation of knowledge between pandits and British scholars. The community of specialists of the Sanskritic culture reacted in various ways to the knowledge brokerage of some pandits. The philological and intellectual activity of Gangadhar Ray Kaviraj, a specialist of the Ayurvedic tradition, showcases an antagonistic reaction to such brokers in the first half of the 19th century, when pandits had already been marginalized but contributed in different functions to the production of knowledge about »the Orient« in colonial South Asia.