http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/795556519

Orientalism, empire, and national culture : India, 1770-1880

This book is about orientalism in the Indian empire, and examines the varied literary, historical, and linguistic scholarly practices which were used to construct understandings of Indian civilisation. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British orientalist research was a key strategy for gaining information with which to rule the subcontinent, but also, somewhat paradoxically, to naturalise the Company's state into the South Asian political context. By the middle of the nineteenth century, even while British imperial culture became more confident and intolerant, an in-depth knowledge of India's history and cultures continued to play largely unrecognised roles in furthering the 'civilising mission' of colonial education. Yet rather than understanding orientalism as exclusively linked to British imperial expansion and consolidation, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture also suggests that it was actually composed of a set of 'double practices', by virtue of the British reliance upon Indian scholarly intermediaries, the Sanskrit pandits. Thus, this study revises many commonly held understandings of orientalism by arguing that it was a much more ambiguous, and potentially subversive, enterprise, as Indian Sanskrit scholars also adapted the institutional and social underpinnings of colonial rule to produce newly-inflected, and often overtly anti-colonial, Hindu identities.

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