HSS620: Imagining India: An intellectual history of orientalism

        [Cr:4, Lc:3, Tt:0, Lb:0]

Course Outline

• This course will introduce the select writings on India by European scholars during the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the interpretative essays on this intellectual tradition. Conscious of the internal diversity and ideological orientation of European intellectuals and their writings on India, this course focuses on imagining India whose themes range from language and literature, caste, religion, kingship, history, architecture to visual representations like paintings and photography. The framework of the course is not to equate Orientalism with the exercise of power (although this aspect is evident in a few case studies) but to emphasise on the certain enduring intellectual breakthrough that has come to stay on studies related to South Asian history and culture. The course intends to survey the select writings of William Jones, Abbe Dubois, James Mill, Friedrich Max Muller, Robert Caldwell, Francis Whyte Ellis, W W Hunter, H H Risley, Edgar Thurston, William Simpson and James Fergusson.

Recommended Reading

• Archer, Mildred, Early Views of India: The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniel, Thames and Hudson (1980).
• Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Palgrave (2002).
• Cohn, Bernard,Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Oxford University Press (1998).
• Dalmia, Vasudha, Orienting India: European Knowledge Formations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, Three Essays Collective (2003).
• Dodson, Michael, Orientalism, Empire and National Culture, India 1770-1880, Cambridge Press (2010).
• Inden, Ronald, Imagining India, Blackwell (1990).
• Mackenzie, John, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester University Press (1995).
• Mitter, Partha, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to India Art, Oxford University Press (1977)
• Majeed, Javed, Ungoverened Imaginings: James Mills The History of British India and Orientalism, Clarendon Press (1992).
• Talbott, Cynthia, (ed), Knowing India: Colonial and Modern Constructions of the Past, Yoda Press (2011).
• Thakurta, Tapati-Guha, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post- colonial India, Permanent Black (2004). Trautmann, Thomas, Aryans and British India, Yoda Press (2004).
• Schwab, Raymond, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680 to 1880, Cambridge University Press (1984)