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Asia in Western Fiction. Edited byRobin W. Winks And James R. Rush. Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1990. Pp. x, 229. - Imagining India. Essays on Indian History. By Ainslie T. Embree, edited byMark Juergensmeyer. Oxford University Press:Delhi, 1989. Pp. 220. - Imagining India. By Ronald Inden. Basil Blackwell:Oxford, 1990. Pp. vii, 299.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Javed Majeed
Affiliation:
The Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge

Abstract

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Type
Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (17331734), 1: line 60.Google Scholar

2 For an interesting analysis of how this problem is related to the role of fantasy in fiction about India, see Cronin, Richard, Imagining India (London: Macmillan, 1989). However, the author does not seem to make any distinction between imagining and fantasy; it is precisely this distinction which is at issue in the studies which are reviewed here.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For instance, see Asad, Talal and Dixon, John, ‘Translating Europe's Others’, in Francis, Baker (ed.), Europe And Its Others, 2 vols (Colchester; University of Essex, 1985), 1: 173ff.Google Scholar See also Brian Street, ‘Orientalist Discourses in the Anthropology of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan’, in Richard, Fardon (ed.), Localising Strategies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 240–59.Google ScholarStreet considers the problem of ethnographic style raised by Talal Dixon, as exemplified in such debates as that between Professors Akbar Ahmad and Frederik Barth about the nature of Swat Pushtun society.Google Scholar

4 For example, see The British Review (1817), 10: 3054,Google ScholarThe Critical Review (1815), 5: 560–81,Google Scholarand The Edinburgh Review (1817), 18: 135.Google Scholar

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8 See, for example, On Liberty (1859), in Collected Works, 18: 224, ‘Of the Government of Dependencies by a Free State’, in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Collected Works, 19: 562–77, and his defences in Writings on India, Collected Works, 30.Google Scholar

9 For a provocative analysis of the degree of self-reflexivity in stereotypes, see Edwards´, D. B. account of the relation between stereotypes and the way Pukhtuns define themselves, in ‘Frontiers, Boundaries and Frames: The Marginal Identity of Afghan Refugees’, Pakistan: The Social Sciences' Perspective, ed. Akbar, S. Ahmed (Karachi: OUP, 1990), 6199. Although it would not be entirely correct to describe Pukhtun society as colonzed, Edwards’ account is of special interest given the fascination which this frontier region seemed to exert on British sensibilities, a subject which Embree considers in two essays in his volume.Google Scholar

10 For recent philosophical examinations of paternalism, see Paternalism, ed. Rolf, Sartorious (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Archard, David, ‘Paternalism Defined’, Analysis (01 1990), 50: 3642.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 For a classic exposition of this, see Copley, A. R. H., ‘Projection, Displacement and Distortion in 19th century Moral Imperialism. A re-examination of Charles Grant and James Mill’, Calcutta Historical Journal (1953), 7: 126.Google Scholar

12 For a more recent argument which is in a similar style to Mill's regarding the dangers of too much sympathy when interpreting another culture, see Gellner, Ernest, ‘Concepts and Society’, in Rationality, ed. Bryan, R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 1845.Google Scholar Perhaps one of the most incisive explorations of this issue is by Taylor, Charles, ‘Understanding and Ethnocentricity’, in Social Theory as Practice (Delhi: OUP, 1983).Google Scholar

13 See The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: OUP, 1973;Google Scholar also Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).Google Scholar

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15 For a lucid account of the colonial state in these terms, see Singha, Radhika, The Despolism of Law. British Criminal Justice and Public Authority in North India, 1772–1837 (Cambridge PhD, 1990);Google Scholar Dr Singha examines how the formation of criminal justice by the East India Company helps us to understand the processes which shaped the colonial state. Jorg Fisch analyses the British engagement with Muslim criminal law in Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs. The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law 1769–1817 (Wiesbaden: Franz-Steiner Verlag, 1983), but he does not draw any detailed conclusions about the nature of the colonial state as Dr Singha has done.Google Scholar

16 See Bayly, C. A., The Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London: Longmans, 1989) on the revolution in the concepts of property in South Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (p. 6). Embree also considers this in his essay on ‘Landholding and the Concept of Private Property’ (85–100) in which he argues for a fuller examination of Blackstokne's influence on British notions of property.Google Scholar

17 Hardy, P., The Musilms of British India (Cambridge: CUP, 1972), ch. 1,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Robinson, Frasnci, Separative among Indian Muslims. The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: CUP, 1974), ch. 2.Google Scholar

18 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 243–4.Google Scholar

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20 Boucher, David, The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood (Cambridge: CUP, 1900). 50.Google Scholar

21 New Leviathan, 131, 143.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 140.

23 Ibid., 183–4.

24 Boucher, , Collingwood, 2837.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 97.

26 Ibid., 84.

27 Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 239–43.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 240.

29 Bayly, C. A., ‘Elusive Essences’, The Times Literary Supplement, 7–13 12 1990, 1314.Google Scholar

30 Dumont, , Homo Hierarchicus, 54.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 162.

32 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 228.Google Scholar

33 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 334.Google Scholar

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35 Collingwood, , New Leviathan, 182. This is dealt with in the context of ‘eristical’ discussions and ‘dialectical’ the former are disputes in which each party tries to prove that it was right and the other wrong; the aim of the latter is to show that your view is one in which your opponent really agrees even if at one time he denied it (181).Google Scholar

36 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 236, 245Google Scholar