The Politics of Sympathy in the Anglo-Indian Romantic Discourse on Religion

The article draws on recent investigations on the legacy of Adam Smith to explore the uses of sympathetic imagination in the Anglo-Indian Romantic discourse on religion. Intersecting Orientalist and missionary writings, the author argues that religious discourse is one of the sites in which the dilemma between conventional and independent morality embedded in the concept of sympathy proves more problematic but also more fecund. In the works of the Orientalists of the Asiatic Society of Bengal sympathetic imagination acts as a practice of colonial interaction as well as a textual strategy of contrastive cultural analysis. In missionary writings sympathy is deployed to bridge the moral divide between the British and the Indians and to pave the way to Christianity. Despite differences, the polymorphous mode whereby sympathy is inscribed in religious texts mobilizes colonial binaries and complicates both the material and the symbolic import-export system of Anglo-Indian Romantic scene.