By 1815 the European intellectual conquest of India was well advanced. The landmass had been mapped; attempts had been made to classify its peoples and to analyse their religious, political and social institutions. Hindu history, frequently viewed during this period as synonymous with ‘Indian’ history, had been integrated into histories of humankind, and ancient Indian civilization compared with those of Rome and Greece. An essential element of this intellectual process was the exploration of Hindu mythology – that is, the traditional narratives with which the culture perpetuated its social customs and accounted for the origins of society. J. Z. Holwell's Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Province of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan (1766), published in French translation in 1768, considered ‘mythology’ alongside ‘cosmology’ and, despite its inaccuracies, was widely influential in France, not least among Voltaire and his acolytes; Dow's The History of Hindustan translated from the Persian to which are prefixed two dissertations concerning the Hindoos (1768–72)4 and the scholarly research carried out by the Asiatic Society of Bengal into Indian culture similarly reached a significant readership. Sir William Jones's Hymns to Hindu deities, six of which first appeared in the Asiatick Miscellany of 1785, was the first European text to make explicit use of Hindu mythology as a literary source but it was his translation of the play Sacontala (first published in 1789) which was a success in Britain, France and the German states.

Like their British counterparts, French writers made use of Hindu mythology in order to fashion images of India, both exploiting Hindu mythology as a literary source which could be assimilated into the European canon of fables, and schematizing Hindu civilization to serve specific ideological ends. In some respects, such textual appropriations appear to support Said's theory that Europeans believed India incapable of representing, or speaking for, itself. The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to argue, after Said, that the intellectual and military conquests of India necessarily went hand in hand; nor is it to argue that Indians had no involvement or influence in the image generated of Hindu mythology.