The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.-Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror THE HISTORY WE ARE SKETCHING is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging. From the eighteenth century forward, there was one assumption about India that was shared by Orientalists like Sir William Jones, who revered Indian civilization, and Anglicists like James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay, who notoriously thought one shelf of a good European library to be worth more than the entire native literature of India and Arabia. To both camps, India was an ancient and essentially static civilization whose chief glories, whatever their relative merit, belonged to the eastern equivalent of classical civilization with Sanskrit in the place of Greek and Latin. Although of great moment, the conflict between the Orientalists and Anglicists took place within an evolving imperial ideology with more disagreement about means than ends. The shared assumption was that while the West too had sunk into its middle ages, a renaissance had followed leading to a progressive modernity, whereas India had fragmented politically and stagnated culturally. Civilization was not many, but one. It was a hierarchy with Europe at the top, and by European standards India was in severe need of long-term, moral and material uplift (Cohn; Blaut).India became British while liberalism was on the rise, and as the British expanded the territory under their control they quite naturally looked for equivalents of the liberal social order's ideological building blocks: private property, individual liberty, a legal code that sustained property and liberty, and education in western categories of knowledge, and found them wanting -or, excepting education, forgotten. In the case of the law, for example, were 435
