Surveying a range of individuals, regions, and movements, this book supports reflection on the ways traditional scholars and other colonial agents actively appropriated and re-purposed elements of European knowledge, colonial administration, ruling ideology, and material technologies. The book conjures a trans-colonial and trans-national context in which ideas of history, religion, language, science, and nation are defined across disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Providing new insights into the negotiation and re-interpretation of Western knowledge and modernity, this book is of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, as well as of intellectual and colonial history, comparative literature, and religious studies.
Michael S. Dodson is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is a historian of British imperialism in South Asia, focusing particularly upon the intellectual, cultural, and urban history of the nineteenth century in north India.
Brian A. Hatcher is Professor and Packard Chair of Theology at Tufts University, USA. His research addresses such issues as the transformation of intellectual practice among Sanskrit pandits in colonial Bengal, the interrogation of modernity under the conditions of colonialism, and the expression of religious change in emergent Hindu movements.