Empire, Orient and Historical Writing: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Scholarship on Indo-Muslim Rule

The intellectual discourse in the past few decades has been powerfully dominated by the ‘Saidean orientalism’ which postulates that during the past two centuries Europe has ideologically ‘constituted’ Asia in relation to itself with the purpose of inferiorising it. This has been done by Europe by projecting itself as rational, changing, progressive and superior in contradistinction to Asia, that is the other, being irrational, unchanging, static, inferior and despotic. ‘Saidean orientalism’ is thus tantamount to a total reduction of European intellectual activity concerning Asian societies stretching over two centuries, to the perceived task of inferiorising those societies. The present work takes up the theme of the ‘Empire, Orient and Historical Writing’ to understand the dynamics of production of knowledge pertaining to India by the British scholars of the nineteenth century. This is being sought to be done through an indepth analysis of the nineteenth century British historical writing on the Indo-Muslim rule. The scholars chosen for this study are William Erskine, Henry Miers Elliot, John Dowson, Edward Thomas, James Talboys Wheeler and Henry George Keene. Their writings have been subjected to a rigorous intellectual analysis so as to understand the dynamics of the formulation of their views on the theme of the book. The empirical work done in this study reveals that the historical writings of these scholars were embedded in the intellectual milieu trends of their times in Britain and Europe and also their views were as varied as the social reality itself both of Britain and of India.