Orientalist research has most often been characterised as an integral element of the European will-to-power over the Asian world. This study seeks to nuance this view, and asserts that British Orientalism in India was also an inherently complex and unstable enterprise, predicated upon the cultural authority of the Sanskrit pandits.

Autorentext
MICHAEL S. DODSON is Assistant Professor of South Asian and British Imperial History at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

Inhalt
Introduction: Histories of Empire, Histories of Knowledge Orientalism and the Writing of World History Sanskrit Erudition and Forms of Legitimacy An Empire of the Understanding Enlisting Sanskrit on the Side of Progress On Language and Translation Pandits , Sanskrit Learning, and Europe's 'New Knowledge' Afterword: Sanskrit, Authority, National Culture