INTRODUCTION
It is a well know fact that the colonizing of India by the British was not just done with “the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, or economic wealth – as important as these things were”, but it was “sustained and strengthened by cultural technologies of rule” (Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, ix). The British “had to devise novel, and exceptional, theories of governance,” (Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj Vol. 3, ix) as they started making space for themselves as the rulers of India. Further, they started to make their power visible through ‘officialising’ the process of administration. The reconstruction and transformation of cultural forms was performed through the mechanisms of knowledge during the colonial period, which distinguished and created “categories and oppositions between the colonizers and the colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East” (Cohn, ix).
The imperial object of knowledge always wanted the Indian to appear in a prescribed manner. …show more content…
This process of fabrication involved the codification of religious laws and the disposal of the Indian people into ‘Hindus’, ‘Buddhists’, ‘Jains’, ‘Muslims’ and so on. This seems to have taken place due to the needs of the governing system of the British colonial rule. But, it cannot be claimed as a function that was one-sided. The imperialists and the ‘native’ English educated elites, in particular, the Brahmins, collaborated in concocting a uniform religion. However, the indispensability of considering thoroughly about the depictions lies in the certainty that they have expressed a mismatch between the descriptions of ‘Hinduism’ on the one hand, and the realities of the Indian culture on the
It is a well know fact that the colonizing of India by the British was not just done with “the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, or economic wealth – as important as these things were”, but it was “sustained and strengthened by cultural technologies of rule” (Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, ix). The British “had to devise novel, and exceptional, theories of governance,” (Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj Vol. 3, ix) as they started making space for themselves as the rulers of India. Further, they started to make their power visible through ‘officialising’ the process of administration. The reconstruction and transformation of cultural forms was performed through the mechanisms of knowledge during the colonial period, which distinguished and created “categories and oppositions between the colonizers and the colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East” (Cohn, ix).
The imperial object of knowledge always wanted the Indian to appear in a prescribed manner. …show more content…
This process of fabrication involved the codification of religious laws and the disposal of the Indian people into ‘Hindus’, ‘Buddhists’, ‘Jains’, ‘Muslims’ and so on. This seems to have taken place due to the needs of the governing system of the British colonial rule. But, it cannot be claimed as a function that was one-sided. The imperialists and the ‘native’ English educated elites, in particular, the Brahmins, collaborated in concocting a uniform religion. However, the indispensability of considering thoroughly about the depictions lies in the certainty that they have expressed a mismatch between the descriptions of ‘Hinduism’ on the one hand, and the realities of the Indian culture on the