¹ A recent example is the exchange between Frederic Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad, in which Jameson's well-intentioned but “first-world” gesture drew deserved criticism. See Jameson's, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986),Google Scholar 6588; and Ahmad's “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,’” Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987), 3–25Google Scholar; and Jameson's reply on pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

² Orientalism(New York: Vintage, 1979).Google Scholar

³ On these Orientalist writers, see Cohn, Bernard S., “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” Structure and Change in Indian Society, Singer, Milton and Cohn, Bernard S., eds. (Chicago: Aldine, 1968),Google Scholar 7. On Halhead, see Rocher, Rosane, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millenium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Hahead. (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1983).Google Scholar For a discussion of Persian historiography and for more on the early British treatments of how eighteenth-century British writings dealt with pre-history, see Historians of Medieval India, Hasan, Mohibbul, ed. (Meenakshi: Meerut, 1968).Google Scholar

⁴ Halfbass, Wilhelm, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 69–83.Google Scholar Also, Inden, Ronald, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies, 20:3 (1986), 401–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 227–9, 330–6.Google Scholar

⁶ Mill, James, The History of British India 1817; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1975).Google Scholar On missionaries, see Embree, Ainslee Thomas, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

⁷ On how European ideas were applied to India, see Guha, Ranajit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963)Google Scholar; Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).Google Scholar

⁸ Smith's, Richard Saumarez “Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law,” Contributions to Indian Sociology (new series), 19:1 (1985), 153–76, is an excellent study of this process in Punjab.Google Scholar

⁹ See Inden, Ronald, “Orientalist Constructions” on the use of representation in Orientalism. Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) contains a fascinating interpretation of representation in British and European knowledge about Egypt.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Cited in Smith, “Rule-by-records,” 153.Google Scholar

¹¹ Dirks's, Nicholas B.The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar is a powerful argument against this thesis. See also, Inden, Ronald, “Orientalist Constructions.”Google Scholar

¹² Chatterjee, Compare Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World-A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38.Google Scholar

¹³ Much of this account is based on Romila Thapar's excellent “Interpretations of Ancient Indian History,” History and Theory, 7:3 (1968), 318–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which contains a critical discussion of these nationalist historians. For more on this phase of historiography and on individual historians, see Historians and Historiography in Modern India, Sen, S. P., ed. (Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1973).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Nehru's, JawaharlalThe Discovery of India (New York: John Day Company, 1946), 65.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Interestingly, Marx and Engels' writings in the New York Daily Tribune on the 1857 revolts were put together and published in the Soviet Union as The First Indian War of Independence 1857–1859 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Dutt's, R. C.The Economic History of India, 2 vols. (1901, rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950Google Scholar) is the classic of this genre. For a detailed treatment of this line of nationalist historiography, see Chandra, Bipan, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1966).Google Scholar For a debate on the “deindustrialization” question, see Morris, M. D. et al., Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium (Delhi: Indian Economic and Social History Association, 1969).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Chatterjee, , Nationalist Thought, 30, 168–9.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The list is huge, but for some representative examples, see Bailey, Frederick J., Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957),Google Scholar and Srinivas, M. N., Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).Google ScholarMandelbaum, David G., Society in India, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)Google Scholar summarizes and cites much of the scholarship on caste. Fine historical studies of caste include the following: Inden, Ronald B., Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in the Middle Period Bengal Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975Google Scholar; Conlon, Frank F., A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Delhi: Thomson Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Leonard, Karen I., Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Marriott, McKim, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism,” in Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, Kapferer, Bruce, ed. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976)Google Scholar; and Moffat, Michael, An Untouchable Community in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).Google Scholar Although Dumont's work no longer enjoys the influence that it did in the 1970s, his formulation that ritual hierarchy defines India continues to draw adherents. For example, Brown's, Donald E.Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988) employs the Dumontian essentialization of caste and hierarchy to explain the absence of “real” historiography in India.Google Scholar

²⁰ See, for example, Social Mobility in the Caste System of India, Silverberg, James, ed. (Paris: Mouton, 1968).Google Scholar

²¹ Clifford, James, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117–51.Google Scholar

²² Dirks, Compare Nicholas, The Hollow Crown, 3–5.Google Scholar For other critiques, see Appadurai, Arjun, “Is Homo Hierarchicus?,” American Ethnologist, 13:4 (1986), 745–61;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology, 3:1 (1988), 36–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ Fabian, Johannes, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 47.Google Scholar

²⁴ The notable examples include: Joshi, P. C., ed., 1857 Rebellion (Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1957)Google Scholar, which tried to reclaim the 1857 revolt as a moment in popular revolutionary movement; Desai, A. R., ed., Peasant Struggles in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar interprets revolts and movements spread over two centuries as part of wider struggle of the dominated; and masterly, Irfan Habib'sThe Agrarian System of Mughal India (London: Asia Publishing House, 1963), which argues that the peasant revolts led by the local notables plunged the Mughal empire into a paralyzing crisis in the eighteenth century.Google Scholar

²⁵ Kosambi's, D. D. works on ancient India mark the beginning—and remain stellar examples—of a professional Marxist historiography of this genre. See his Culture and Civilization of Ancient India In Historical Outline (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).Google Scholar

²⁶ See Sarkar, Sumit, “Rammohum Roy and the Break with the Past,” in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, Joshi, V. C., ed. (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), 46–68Google Scholar; De, Barun, “The Colonial Context of the Bengal Renaissance,” in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization c. 1830–1850, Philips, C. H. and Wainwright, Mary Doreen, eds. (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1976), 119–25Google Scholar; and Sen, Asok, lswar Chandra Vidyasagar and his Elusive Milestones (Calcutta: Rddhi-India, 1977).Google Scholar

²⁷ See Gallagher, John, Johnson, Gordon and Seal, Anil, eds., Locality, Province and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Washbrook, David, The Emergence of Provincial Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ Rulers, , Townsmen, , and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the British Expansion, 17701870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

²⁹ For example, Ludden, David, Peasant History in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Alam, Muzaffar, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707–1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. For a Marxist version of this narrative, see Washbrook, David, “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 57–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ Anderson's, Compare BenedictImagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The brilliance of its insights is somewhat marred by a lapse into sociological determinism and by its overemphasis on “print capitalism.”Google Scholar

³¹ Clifford, Compare James, “On Orientalism” in The Predicament of Culture, 255–76.Google Scholar

³² My forthcoming Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) shows how the free-unfree opposition appropriated and reorganized different forms of labor.Google Scholar

³³ Subaltern Studies, vols. I-V, Guha, Ranajit, ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982–1985). The reference to national origins and to the “first world” site of academic training and experience is not meant to be invidious; rather, my intention is to show that national origin is not a necessary requirement for the formulation of a post-Orientalist position.Google Scholar

³⁴ O'Hanlon's, Rosalind “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22:1 (1988), 189–224Google Scholar, argues persuasively that an essentialist and teleological thinking also exists in their work. For an “against the grain” reading that attempts to capture what is novel and contestatory in the Subaltern Studies, see Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies, vol. IV, 330–64.Google Scholar

³⁵ See, in particular, his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

³⁶ Selected Subaltern Studies, Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, eds., with the Foreword by W, Edward. Said (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). The last section in this volume, for instance, is called “Developing Foucault.”Google Scholar

³⁷ See Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial WorldGoogle Scholar; Das, Veena, “Gender Studies, Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Colonial Organization of Knowledge,” Berkshire Review, no. 21 (1986), 58–76Google Scholar; Mani, Lata, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 119–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nigam, Sanjay, “The Social History of a Colonial Stereotype: The Criminal Tribes and Castes of Uttar Pradesh, 1871–1930” (Ph.D. disser., Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1987).Google Scholar

³⁸ See Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist Among Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Thapar, Romila, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978).Google Scholar

³⁹ Dirks, Nicholas, The Hollow Crown.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ The South Asia Regional Studies Department, University of Pennsylvania, held a year-long seminar in 1988–1989 entitled “Orientalism and Beyond: Perspectives from South Asia.”

⁴¹ Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 206–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² Ross, Andrew, “Introduction,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, Ross, Andrew, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), x.Google Scholar

⁴³ The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), ix.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children (New York: Avon Books, 1980).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ For a recent statement of this position from a feminist perspective, see Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).Google Scholar This politics of difference is called “minority discourse” by JanMohamed, Abdul and Lloyd, David in their “Introduction: Minority Discourse-What is to Be Done?,” Cultural Critique, 7 (Fall 1987), 5–17.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ These concerns are stated, for example, in LaCapra's, DominickRethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983),Google Scholar and History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Spivak, Compare Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Larry, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313, in which she argues that even politically oriented Western poststructuralists, like Foucault, are marked by a certain blindness to the reality of imperialist domination.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁸ See Smith's, Paul “Visiting the Banana Republic,” in Universal Abandon?, 128–48.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Tyler's, Stephen A. “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Clifford, James and Marcus, George, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 122–40, exemplifies this tendency. Note, for instance, that he conceives postmodern ethnography's task as invoking “the fantasy reality of a reality fantasy” and “the occult in the language of naive realism and of the everyday in occult language.” This invocation, according to him, “provokes a rupture with the commonsense world and evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effect is worked out in the restoration of the commonsense world” (p. 134). In this view, the offcentering of the ethnographer, as in the cover photograph of Writing Culture, becomes the purpose of postmodern ethnography.Google Scholar