by Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa

In 1971, the historian Sylvia Murr (1947–2002) encountered a curious textual problem in the archives of the British Library. Murr was developing a new edition of Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (1817), a survey of Indian society that had circulated in nineteenth-century Europe as Indology par excellence. The British East India Company had purchased this text from French Catholic missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765–1848) in 1806, praising it as a “masterful guide” into the “vie intime” of natives and a “training manual” for colonial administrators. Murr’s search for archival materials on the purchase led her to a manuscript titled Les mœurs et coutumes des Indiens (Mores and customs of the Indians), catalogued as one of Dubois’s early drafts.[1] On closer inspection, Murr uncovered a number of striking inconsistencies—chief among them, the work dated to 1777, decades before Dubois’s arrival in India. Through close textual analysis and archival research, Murr discovered that the text’s true author was Jesuit missionary Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux (1691–1779). Dubois, who belonged to a rival order that took over the Jesuits’ missions after their 1764 expulsion from France and 1773 suppression by the Vatican, encountered Cœurdoux’s work in the former Jesuit library and plagiarized it.

Solving this textual problem about the manuscript’s provenance led Murr to a historical and theoretical one. What did it mean for the most celebrated work of nineteenth-century colonial Indology to be written by an eighteenth-century French Jesuit? Murr launched a broader investigation into the “conditions of emergence” of an “Enlightenment discourse on India.” Her work bridged a number of seemingly disparate archives, recovering the circulation of Jesuit letters to scholars in the French academies and Enlightenment philosophes, and subsequently, the writings of the French physician François Bernier (1620–88) in the Mughal court. Through this research, Murr argued that Indology offered a test case for the shifting relationship between religion and philosophy, Enlightenment and empire, and the occult and science. She died in 2002 before completing this major synthetic work.

Murr’s methodological and theoretical concerns evoke two parallel, ongoing debates in Anglophone scholarship. The first is Edward Said’s critique of European discourse on the so-called Orient; the second is more recent scholarship on circulations of knowledge in global intellectual history and global histories of science. These scholars do not appear in Murr’s footnotes, nor she in theirs, resulting in a dialogue manqué: Murr, not unlike her Jesuit subject, has largely fallen into obscurity. This essay reconstructs Murr’s attempt to historicize Enlightenment discourse on India and places her analysis in dialogue with contemporary Anglophone historiography. Her history of discourse, which links the circulation of texts to epistemological questions, offers valuable resources for our understanding of the eighteenth century and suggests an alternative genealogy of the field of global history itself.

A Mystery in the Archives

Murr’s interest in Indology began to develop in her final year of secondary school during her studies of ancient Greek portrayals of India. In 1969, she passed the philosophy agrégation, a highly-competitive national examination, and began teaching in secondary schools. Illness forced her to transition to a research career, where she returned to her interest in Western discourses on India, shifting her focus from Greek antiquity to the eighteenth century. Murr subsequently affiliated with the South Asia branch of France’s School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the French School of the Far East (EFEO), which housed a vibrant community of Indologists. She remained there until 1987, when her research on Bernier and his teacher, the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), led her to the modern philosophy branch of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

These institutional contexts elucidate both the originality of Murr’s approach and its relative marginality. India occupied the margins of history and the history of philosophy, the fields with which Murr identified; and while the EHESS and EFEO offered the mentorship of Indologists such as Madeleine Biardeau (1922–2010), Murr did not consider herself an Indologist. As she explained to a colleague in 1988, what animated her work was not an interest in Indian antiquity or anthropology itself, but the history of the question, “How can we speak of Indians?”

This combination of influences is evident from Murr’s first publication, a thirteen-page article in 1977 published in Puruṣārtha, EHESS’s South Asia journal, that detailed the textual problem of Mœurs et coutumes. Murr described how, in 1971, she opened the preface of Mœurs et coutumes to find a note dated 1777, signed “Desvaulx.” To prove that Hindu Manners had plagiarized this manuscript, she sorted both texts’ chapters into eight categories that formed a scale of originality, ranging from chapters with identical content to chapters with minor additions or modifications to chapters present in one manuscript but absent in the other. She also offered a close analysis of handwriting, matching the “Desvaulx” signature to French East India Company functionary Nicolas-Jacques Desvaulx (1745–1823), whose papers she retrieved from the colonial archives (Murr would later demonstrate that Cœurdoux entrusted the text to Desvaulx for publication). Her approach, which generalized from minute textual detail, synthesized the philological and social-scientific methods that she would have encountered among EHESS’s community of Indologists. In doing so, Murr simultaneously reimagined what it meant to engage with texts as a historian.

Towards a History of Discourse

What remained was a “systematic” analysis of the contents of Mœurs et coutumes that drew the text into Enlightenment intellectual history. This became the subject of Murr’s 1982 doctoral dissertation and a fifty-page article she published in a 1983 Puruṣārtha issue on French literary production on India. The article mapped the emergence of an Enlightenment discourse on India to the circulation of “concepts, theses, and rhetorical devices” across three “poles of interest”: Jesuit missionaries based in India, scholars in French academies, such as the Orientalist Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), and philosophes such as Voltaire and Montesquieu. To illustrate this process, Murr took up the controversy over India’s place in universal history. In his Essay on Universal History (1756), Voltaire cited Jesuit missionary letters to claim Indian antiquity pre-dated the Biblical flood and thus that history could be wrenched from Biblical time. His provocation elicited responses from the second “pole,” scholars in the Académie des inscriptions (France’s learned society for history), who corresponded with Jesuits in India to dispute Voltaire’s conclusions. Indeed, Mœurs et coutumes stood testament to these circulations, incorporating passages from Cœurdoux’s 1760s–70s correspondence with Anquetil-Duperron, which compared Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to restore India to Biblical time.

In her doctoral dissertation, an extended commentary on Mœurs et coutumes, Murr launched an investigation into the text’s “final causes.” She adapted this term from Aristotelian ethics to describe what the text meant to the three individuals involved—Cœurdoux, the author; Desvaulx, the custodian; Dubois, the plagiarist. Ultimately, she described the text as a “machine,” a term she introduced in her 1983 article to describe how Jesuit letters served a “political function” to refute their opponents and vindicate their missionary activities. This theoretical language likely derived from the longer tradition of the French epistemology of the sciences, particularly, as Ines Županov and Marie Fourcade note, the work of Georges Canguilheim (1904–95). Canguilheim analyzed how a “machine” could function as a metaphor for a regulated system with a delimited set of final causes. In her dissertation, Murr extended this metaphor to Mœurs et coutumes: “it is nonetheless possible … to reconstruct the entirety of this machine and then to work back down from the principal of its motor … to its functions.” The “theological axioms” grounded in Cœurdoux’s Catholic universalism were the motor; the functions were to “explain … the Indian fact and deduc[e] evaluations, as much of the Indian fact as of our own mores” (168).

Murr’s history of discourse ran parallel to Said’s but drew from different methodological and philosophical influences. In many ways, the two appear to have just missed one another. Michel Foucault, whose analysis of the relationship between knowledge and power was a key influence for Said, was himself Canguilheim’s former student. Moreover, Murr’s analysis of the “different levels of translation” separating Mœurs et coutumes from the “Indian reality” evokes statements in Said’s Orientalism (1979), where he likewise treats Orientalist texts as representations, not “‘natural’ depictions of the Orient” (188). Yet their analyses of these texts’ discursive functions diverged. Where Said foregrounded the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and colonial power, Murr instead argued that the text’s “historical meaning” was imbricated in its “social, religious, technological, political, economic, and scientific” contexts (135).

Murr published this research in a two-volume series, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire (Philosophical India between Bossuet and Voltaire, 1987) with EFEO. Volume II presented an extended commentary on Cœurdoux taken directly from her doctoral dissertation, while Volume I offered the first-ever print edition of Mœurs et coutumes. Murr preserved irregularities in spelling and transliteration to minimize the “loss of information” and added contextual footnotes relating the manuscript to contemporary European scholarship, ancient Indian philosophy, and Dubois’s Hindu Manners. This reflected Murr’s long-standing belief in the scholarly value of critical editions. In 1983, she called for editions of Jesuit missionary letters and of Anquetil-Duperron’s writings, and she later collaborated on an edition of Bernier’s work on Gassendi. “I am glad Mœurs et coutumes will finally see its day, and that the name of Father Cœurdoux—and with him, all of Jesuit Indology from the eighteenth century—finally emerges from the shadows,” wrote Murr to the head of the Jesuit libraries in late 1987.[2]

When Was the Global ‘Turn’?

For Murr, critical editions not only recovered marginal voices and fostered scholarly dialogue; they also grounded her history of discourse in the material circulation of texts between India and Europe. Here, Murr’s work carries striking resonances with recent historiographical developments. In his contribution to Global Intellectual History (2013), Frederick Cooper urges historians to attend to “both the limits of an intellectual circuit” and “its extent and the mechanisms by which it was produced” (286). His remarks dovetail with interventions in global histories of science, such as Kapil Raj’s call for historians to analyze “spaces of circulation,” revealing “encounter, negotiation, reconfiguration, and mutation of knowledge.” Debates over the so-called global ‘turn’ extend to Enlightenment historiography, re-opening questions about Enlightenment’s intellectual, geographical, and temporal coordinates. In “Enlightenment in Global History” (2012), Sebastian Conrad calls on historians to displace the “Eurocentric mythology” that traces modernity’s origins to a set of ideals formulated in eighteenth-century Europe and instead investigate the Enlightenment’s “global conditions of possibility” and nineteenth-century afterlife. Others have undertaken case studies ranging from British administrators’ treatises on Hinduism to Jesuit letters on Chinese science. Županov and Fourcade’s edited volume, L’Inde des Lumières (Enlightenment India, 2013), is one of the few works to relate these historiographical strands to Murr’s earlier scholarship, reminding us how marginal her Indian, Jesuit sources were to a historiography of the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized Enlightenment’s secular, European bona fides.

What does it mean for Murr to be mapping Enlightenment discourse to a global circulation of texts decades before the global ‘turn’? Perhaps this reflects not only on Murr, but on the ‘turn’ itself. In “When was the Linguistic Turn?” (2012), Judith Surkis cautions against the “temporalizing language of turn-talk,” through which linguistic, cultural, imperial, or global ‘turns’ appear to eclipse one another in quick succession. In this framework, the linguistic ‘turn’ was little more than a “politically well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided” intervention, whose capacity has been spent—a criticism that has since been leveled at the global ‘turn.’ Surkis argues that this “melancholic narrative” is built into turn-talk, effacing a genealogy of the linguistic turn that runs through fields such as feminist and South Asian history. Marginalized in Anglophone intellectual history, these fields raised similar questions about historians’ engagement with language since the 1960s, opening new historiographical possibilities. From her liminal position between Indology, philosophy, and history, Murr’s scholarship raises the question of whether such alternative genealogies likewise exist for the global ‘turn,’ and what possibilities they might offer for conceptualizing the history of Enlightenment and empire.

[1] While nineteenth-century British renderings of this text were generally entitled “manners and customs,” the term mœurs does not have a single English equivalent: depending on context, it could be taken as morals, mores, manners, or customs. Given the author’s preoccupation with systems of Indian morality, and the differences between eighteenth and nineteenth-century contexts, here “mores” or “morals” offer an English approximation.

[2] Murr to Joseph Dehergne, November 25, 1987, FIn 6/5, Archives Jésuites.

Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa is an MPhil candidate in Intellectual History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she is a Rhodes scholar. Her work centers on the history of ‘mystical India,’ following the construction of India as mystical and spiritual across a series of related contexts: early modern missionary writings, Enlightenment universal history debates, colonial Indology, and the appropriation of this discourse by Indians themselves in movements for independence and social reform. Her article on Indian feminist contributions to family law debates is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Edited by Jonas Knatz.

Featured image: “Pondicherry, Jesuit College. Published 18th Cent.,” engraving, n.d. (c.1700), P281, British Library. Photographed by the author in 2023.