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The Career of Colonel Polier and Late Eighteenth-Century Orientalism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2009

Sanjay Subrahmanyam
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Extract

This essay is concerned with the career of a somewhat obscure figure in the early history of Orientalism, Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, who is however known both to aficionados of the early European manuscript collections in the West, as well as to historians of the more obscure aspects of the Enlightenment on the Continent. The occasion for the research on which this essay is based is, in large measure, a project intended to translate the extensive Persian letter-book that Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India; this translation, of a text entitled I jāz-i-Arsalānī (which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), has recently been brought to partial fruition by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, through the auspices of Oxford University Press (Delhi). In this context, it may be useful to reflect somewhat on the rather extraordinary career, and fascinating milieu, of Colonel Polier.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 2000 , pp. 43 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2000

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Footnotes

*

This essay owes much to Muzaffar Alam, who encouraged me to write it, and equally to Kapil Raj, whose work on the late eighteenth-century intellectual encounter between Indians and Europeans is largely drawn upon here.

References

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