Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India

Abstract

This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form an exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences - mostly law - in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others". he shows how the very orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.