This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament
Perspectives on South Asia

Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, Editors

1993 | 372 pages | Cloth $55.00 | Paper $26.50
Anthropology

Table of Contents

Preface
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament

PT. I. THE POSTCOLONIAL PREDICAMENT AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY
1. The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism
2. Orientalism and the Social Sciences
3. Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj
4. The Burden of English
5. Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures

PT. II. THE GENEALOGY OF THE POSTCOLONIAL
6. The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language
7. British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government
8. Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge
9. Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive
10. Number in the Colonial Imagination

List of Contributors
Index