Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire

Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this revealing study includes travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, anthropological tracts, parliamentary debates, and instruction manuals. It shows how subtle changes of emphasis reflect evolving colonial attitudes toward conquered territories, shifting from flights of the imagination to factual inquiry, to a narrative of exoticism and heterogeneity that safely compartmentalized colonial otherness via natural history, ethnography, and cartographies of disease.

The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth–making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape–planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through awe–inspiring spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than expose them as asset–stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co–creating fresh notions of Englishness and English characters.

1 Introducing Colonial Discourse 1

2 Travel, Exploration, and Discovery : From Imagination to Inquiry 12

Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of Discovery 18

The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29

Inquiry and the Documentation of the Others 41

Conclusion: Discovery and Wonder, Contracted and Epitomized 49

3 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial Exotic 55

The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57

The Exotic in English Culture 59

The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference 60

The Sentimental Exotic 62

The Scientific Exotic 79

Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 95

4 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle 104

The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106

Administering Colonial Spaces 121

Raising the General Credit of the Empire : The Spectacle of Empire 140

Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle 145

5 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material Progress 161

England s Age of Improvement 164

Discipline and Improve 170

Imperial Lessons 174

The Salvific Colonial 178

Rescue, Reform, and Race 183

Conclusion: From Improvement to Self–Legitimization 194

6 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitans 201

The Self–Fashioning of the Scholar–Colonial 204

Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213

Consumption, Ingestion, and Decoration : Colonial Commodities 219

The Empire City : Pageantry and Empire 226

Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitan 229

References 235

Index 260

Pramod K. Nayar is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Hyderabad, India. He has been Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Charles Wallace India Trust British Council Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Fulbright Senior Fellow at Cornell University. His many publications include States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), English Writing and India, 1600 1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), and Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (2012). Forthcoming is a book on new media.