Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge

Bernard Cohn's interest in the construction of Empire as an intellectual
and cultural phenomenon has set the agenda for the academic study of
modern Indian culture for over two decades. His earlier publications
have shown how dramatic British innovations in India, including
revenue and legal systems, led to fundamental structural changes in
Indian social relations. This collection of his writings in the last
fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has
generally been overlooked. The essays form a multifaceted exploration
of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and
codification of information about Indian society contributed to
colonial cultural hegemony and political control.

Cohn argues
that the British Orientalists' study of Indian languages was important
to the colonial project of control and command. He also asserts that
an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most
susceptible to indigenous influences--mostly law--in fact became
responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British
notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others."
He shows how the very Orientalist imagination that led to brilliant
antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays
were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better
packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how
clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and
anticolonialism.