This accessible cultural history explores 400 years of British imperial adventure in India, developing a coherent narrative through a wide range of colonial documents, from exhibition catalogues to memoirs and travelogues. It shows how these texts helped legitimize the moral ambiguities of colonial rule even as they helped the English fashion themselves.
- An engaging examination of European colonizers’ representations of native populations
- Analyzes colonial discourse through an impressive range of primary sources, including memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, administrative reports, and travelogues
- Surveys 400 years of India’s history, from the 16th century to the end of the British Empire
- Demonstrates how colonial discourses naturalized the racial and cultural differences between the English and the Indians, and controlled anxieties over these differences
Table of Content
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introducing Colonial Discourse 1
2 Travel, Exploration, and ‘‘Discovery’’: From Imagination to Inquiry 12
Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of ‘‘Discovery’’ 18
The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29
‘‘Inquiry’’ and the Documentation of the Others 41
Conclusion: ‘‘Discovery’’ and Wonder, ‘‘Contracted and Epitomized’’ 49
3 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial Exotic 55
The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57
The Exotic in English Culture 59
The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference 60
The Sentimental Exotic 62
The Scientific Exotic 79
Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 95
4 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle 104
The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106
Administering Colonial Spaces 121
‘‘Raising the General Credit of the Empire’’: The Spectacle of Empire 140
Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle 145
5 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material Progress 161
England’s Age of Improvement 164
Discipline and Improve 170
Imperial Lessons 174
The Salvific Colonial 178
Rescue, Reform, and Race 183
Conclusion: From Improvement to Self-Legitimization 194
6 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitans 201
The Self-Fashioning of the Scholar-Colonial 204
Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213
‘‘Consumption, Ingestion, and Decoration’’: Colonial Commodities 219
The ‘‘Empire City’’: Pageantry and Empire 226
Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitan 229
References 235
Index 260
About the author
Pramod K. Nayar is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Hyderabad, India. He has been Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Charles Wallace India Trust–British Council Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Fulbright Senior Fellow at Cornell University. His many publications include States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), and Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (2012). Forthcoming is a book on new media.
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