Marriage and rank in Bengali culture: A history of caste and clan in middle period Bengal

Politics & Social Sciences

Inden, Ronald B.

Social Sciences

University of California Press

How does the Western world imagine India? How far are commonly held suppositions about the nature and character of the Indian sub-continent dictated by distortions perpetuated by generations of writers in a wide variety of disciplines? In this book Ronald Inden offers a critique of the presuppositions behind the discourses which have claimed to reveal the truth about India. He shows how a succession of writers - not only Indologists but also scholars in such fields as religion, anthropology, economics and political philosophy - have built upon the misconceptions of their predecessors and have used such misconceptions to bolster Western self-perceptions. European scholars and their doubles, the colonial administrators and traders, assumed for themselves the power to know the hidden essences of the country and to act upon them, thereby sustaining the West's image of itself as the epitome of the modern.

Imagining India

History

Asia

Basil Blackwell

<p>How does the Western world represent India in its scholarship? To what extent is knowledge of the people and institutions of the Indian sub-continent based on the West's own desires for world hegemony, and fantasies about its rationality? In this controversial book, Ronald Inden shows that the West's major depictions of India as the civilization of caste, villages, spiritualism, and divine kings - and as a land dominated by imagination rather than reason - have had the effect of removing from Indians their capacity to rule their world, giving it to those in the West who wish to dominate it.</p>

Blackwell Pub.

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Books by Inden, Ronald B.