How the Oriental was ‘Constructed’

Conference volumes are not easy to review as the essays do not always cohere to form a clear and lucid narrative. The volume under review, however, does partially better on this count as it reflects on a plethora of writings—travel accounts, professional histories, women’s memoirs—to index the shifts in the way India was represented by Europeans from the late 16th to the mid-19th century. Consequently, while the subject of representing India, in itself, is hardly new, given the number of books that have been written to make sense of the way India was constructed and staged by Europeans, the volume manages to bring fresh perspectives. For one, it advocates a comparative approach to look at French and British modes of representation. This is a useful departure even if the contrasts occasionally appear forced and are not sufficiently contextualized. Secondly, the volume moves beyond the frame of Orientalism and tries to introduce new ways of reading the texts that were produced by travellers, missionaries, trade scouts and women to mark the multiple registers of desire, enchantment and disavowal that characterized European writing.  The rationale for the time period chosen, however, is not entirely convincing; even before the great mutiny of 1857 that vitiated race relations between subjects and masters in India, representations of India by Europeans had undergone substantial transformation.