Orientalism Empire & National Culture

Orientalist research has most often been characterised as an integral element of the European will-to-power over the Asian world. This study seeks to nuance this view, and asserts that British Orientalism in India was also an inherently complex and unstable enterprise, predicated upon the cultural authority of the Sanskrit pandits, its principal Indian intermediaries. By revealing the unacknowledged roles which this 'traditional' intelligentsia played within elements of the colonial state apparatus, this book traces the conflicts and ambiguities within Orientalism, from the consolidation of Britain's fledgling Indian empire to its links with the emergence of early forms of Indian national identity and inherently anti-colonial cultural movements.