This essay examines the contested grounds of authorization for one important orientalist project in India during the nineteenth century – the translation of the ancient Sanskrit Ṛg Veda, with a view to highlighting the ultimately ambiguous nature of the orientalist enterprise. It is argued that Europeans initially sought to validate their translations by adhering to Indian scholarly practices and, in later decades, to a more “scientific” orientalist–philological practice. Indian Sanskrit scholars, however, rather than accepting such translations of the Veda, and the cultural characterizations they contained, instead engaged critically with them, reproducing a distinctive vision of Indian civilization through their own translations into English. Moreover, by examining the diverse ways in which key concepts, such as the “fidelity” of a translation, were negotiated by Europeans and Indians, this essay also suggests that intellectual histories of the colonial encounter in South Asia should move beyond debates about colonial knowledge to more explicitly examine the contexts of knowledgeable practices.