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Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.
Illustrating India
This volume presents for the first time Colin Mackenzie's collection-the oldest extant European visual archive on India. It gives a panoramic view of the Indian subcontinent-people, monuments, and social life-between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Mapping an Empire
In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly
Castes of Mind
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above a...
The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia
Presents a new approach to heritage formation in Asia, conveying the power of the material remains of the past.
The Madras School of Orientalism
Exchange of ideas among Indian and European scholars in early nineteenth century Madras led to unprecedented new discoveries about the history, literatures, religion, law and land systems of India. Giving name to this distinctive form of knowledge coming from Madras during the early nineteenth century, this volume presents the Madras School of Orientalism (MSO), an intellectual formation whose impact is only beginning to become apparent in recent studies. A string of fresh ideas emerged from the MSO even though it patterned itself on the Asiatic Society of Calcutta challenging several generalizations about India s history and culture. The vast collection of maps, drawings, and manuscripts of...
Jaina Painting and Manuscript Culture
This collection presents new research and evidence on Jaina paintings and illuminated manuscripts. It introduces the reader to so far unpublished palm leaf and paper manuscripts, miniature paintings, cosmological and large-scale pilgrimage banners on cloth, printed texts and maps. The documents come from private, museum and library collections in Europe, North America and India and are introduced by expert authors who are based at a number of international institutions. - Jaina texts are considered sacred and are therefore kept in religious libraries and temples, play an important role during festivals and are treated with the same reverence as statues. Because of their high value and religious significance, many have been elaborately decorated, leading to the development of a variety of rich Jaina painting styles. In addition to paintings and innovative formats of representation, the contributions analyse the interaction between the spoken and written word, different modes of story-telling in paintings, the transformation of narratives into songs and performances and how manuscript culture merges all of these genres to bring stories to life.
