Beginning Apr. 1895, includes the Proceedings of the East India Association.

Beginning in 1895, includes the Proceedings of the East India Association.

A detailed assessment of how Western thinking about India developed in the nineteenth century, focusing on the exceptionally full lives of the scholar-administrator Muir brothers. Structured around the lives and careers of two Scottish scholar-administrator brothers, Sir William and Dr John Muir, who served in the East India Company and the Raj in North-West India from 1827-1876, this book examines cultural, especially religious and educational attitudes and interactions during the period. The core of the study centres on a detailed examination of the brothers' seminal works on Vedic and Islamic history and society which, researched from Sanskrit and Arabic sources, became standard reference works on India's religions during the Raj. The publication of these works coincided with the outbreak of the Indian Uprising of 1857, on the nature of which William's correspondence with his brother and others allows some reconsideration, especially in respect of Muslim participation. Powell also examines the response of Indian Muslim scholars, particularly of Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan, to William's critiques of Islam and the brothers' patronage of Oriental scholarship, comparative religion and education during their long retirement back in their native Scotland. The study contributes to current debates about the Scottish contribution to Empire with particular reference to India and to cultural issues. AVRIL A. POWELL is Reader Emerita in the History Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Focuses on the period leading up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Groundbreaking analysis of how colonialism created new conceptual categories and spatial forms that reshaped rural societies. This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history. “The Great Agrarian Conquest is a subtle and substantial work of scholarship. If there is one book Indians need to read to understand how colonialism actually worked (or did not work), this is it.” — Ramachandra Guha, in The Wire, in praise of the Indian edition

Beginning in 1895, includes the Proceedings of the East India Association.

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.