Synopses & Reviews
James Tod (1782-1835) spent twenty-two years in India (1800-1822), during the last five of which he was Political Agent of the British Government in India to the Western Rajput States in north-west India. His book studies Tod's relationships with particular Rajput leaders and with the Rajputs as a group in general, in order to better understand his attempts to portray their history, geographical moorings and social customs to British and European readers. The book highlights Tod's apparently numerous motivations in writing on the Rajputs; to bring knowledge about the Rajputs into European circles, to demonstrate that the Rajputs maintained historical records form the early middle ages and were thus not a primitive people without awareness of their own history, and to establish possible ethnic links between the warrior-like Rajputs and the peoples of Europe, as also between the feudal institutions of Rajputana and Europe. Fierce criticisms in Tod's time of his ethnic and institutional hypotheses about connections between Rajputs and Europeans illustrate that Tod's texts did not leave his readers indifferent.
The approach adopted uses available documents to go beyond a binary opposition between the colonisers and the colonised in India, by focusing on traces of friendly exchanges between Tod and his British colleagues on the one hand, and on the other hand, various members of the kingdoms of western India, with whom they interacted. Under themes like landscape, anthropology, science, Romantic literature, approaches to government policy, and knowledge exchanges in India and in London, this volume analyses Tod's role as a mediator of knowledge through his travels across a little-known part of the British Empire in the early 19th century.
Synopsis
This study of the British colonial administrator James Tod (1782-1835), who spent five years in north-western India (1818-22) collecting every conceivable type of material of historical or cultural interest on the Rajputs and the Gujaratis, gives special attention to his role as a mediator of knowledge about this little-known region of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century to British and European audiences. The book aims to illustrate that British officers did not spend all their time oppressing and inferiorising the indigenous peoples under their colonial authority, but also contributed to propagating cultural and scientific information about them, and that they did not react only negatively to the various types of human difference they encountered in the field.
Synopsis
Studies Tod's relationships with particular Rajput leaders and with the Rajputs as a group in general, in order to better understand his attempts to portray their history, geographical moorings and social customs to British and European readers.
About the Author
Florence D'Souza is Lecturer in Studies of the English-Speaking World at the University of Lille 3, France
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Tod as an observer of landscape in Rajasthan and Gujarat
2. Tod as anthropologist: Trying to Understand
3. Tod's practice of science in India: voyages through empirical common sense
4. Tod's use of romanticism in his textual constructions of Rajasthan and Gujarat
5. Tod's romantic approach as opposed to James Mill's utilitarian approach of British Government in India
6. Tod's knowledge exchanges with his contemporaries.
Conclusion
Index