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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.

  • Javed Majeed (a1)
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1 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (17331734), 1: line 60.

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.

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. 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.Street 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.

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

5 Mill, J. S., A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: Toronto University Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), vols 7–8, 8: 905–6. The first edition of Mill's Logic was published in 1843, and the last in 1872; the text here is based on the latter.

6 Mill, J. S., ‘Auguste Comte and Positivism’ (1863), in The Collected works of John Stuart Mill, 10: 298.

7 Mill, J. S., System of Logic, 8: 916–17.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 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).

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

14 Heesterman, J. C., ‘Was there an Indian reaction? Western Expansion in Indian Perspective’, in Expansion and Reaction. Essays on European Expansion and Reactions in Asia and Africa, ed. Wesseling, H. L. (Leiden University Press, 1978), 4753.

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); 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.

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.

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

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

19 Collingwood, R. G., The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 143, 156.

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

21 New Leviathan, 131, 143.

22 Ibid., 140.

23 Ibid., 183–4.

24 Boucher, , Collingwood, 2837.

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.

28 Ibid., 240.

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

30 Dumont, , Homo Hierarchicus, 54.

31 Ibid., 162.

32 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 228.

33 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 334.

34 Boucher, , Collingwood, 37.

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).

36 Collingwood, , Idea of History, 236, 245

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Modern Asian Studies
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