Imagining India

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.