Ideas of India's 'difference' also made their way to Britain.

Indeed,
by
i960
the British
found
that they had
abandoned
t
heir empire
overseas only to find it on their doorstep. Immigration from India and
Pakistan during the early postwar years created a sizable South Asian
community within Great Britain. Towns such as Southall and Bradford had such large populations, with mosques, halal meat shops, and
turbaned
men and sari-clad women
on the streets, that
they could
almost be conceived of as extensions of Pakistan or India. In accommodating this immigrant
community
the British brought
into play
racial sentiments, and ideas of Indian inferiority, shaped during
the
long years of the Raj. From the late 1950s, despite Indian membership
in a now multi-racial Commonwealth, the British government tightly
restricted immigration
from
South Asia, while the country's
South
Asian
residents
met
with
often
virulent
harassment
and
hostility.
Britain's
South
Asians,
above
all its Muslims
at the
time of the
controversy over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, were at once stigmatized for
refusing
to submerge their
identity
within
the secular
liberalism of British society, and denied the opportunity to do so. The
enduring contradictions between the ideologies of liberalism, and of
'difference', have come back home as Britain copes with the multiculturalism of the 1990s.18
17 Gyanendra Pandey,
North India (Delhi,

The

Construction of

Communalism in

1990), especially chapters i and 7.

18 Talal Asad, 'Multiculturalism and British
of the Rushdie Affair',
Politics and

Society,

Colonial

Identity in

the

Wake

vol. 18 (1990), pp. 45 j-80 .

234

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GENERAL

STUDIES

A variety of works assess British attitudes toward India, and the ways Indi
a
was fitted into the larger set of ideas that sustained the Raj.
Some of these
works are idiosyncratic, even contentious in their approach, but all are lively
and
suggestive. Francis
Hutchins,
The Illusion
of Permanence:
British
Imperialism in India (Princeton, 1967), though now somewhat dated, remains
a stimulating account of how the British sought to assure their

superiority
over their Indian subjects. More philosophical, with a discussion of German
as well as British scholarship, though tendentious in its argument, is Ronald
Inden, Imagining
India (Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
1990). Two
stimulating
works from a psychological perspective, the latter of which includes Indian as
well as British responses to the colonial encounter, are Lewis Wurgaft,
The
Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling's India (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1983), and Ashis Nandy, The Intimate
Enemy:
Loss and Recovery
of Self Under
Colonialism
(Oxford
Univer
sity
Press,
Delhi,
1983). Kipling's
own
writings of course, especially
the
enduringly
powerful Kim (1901), are central to any understanding of the Raj.
Among
a number
of works based
largely on the critical
ev
aluation of
literary texts the most informative are Sara Suleri, The Rhetori
c of English
India (Chicago, 1992) and Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on
India
in the British Imagination
1880-19J0 (California,
1972). Th
ough less
accessible to the general reader, the writings of the literary cri
tics Gayatri
Spivak and Homi Bhabha contain much that is important for understanding
the Raj. Specially useful are the essays in Francis Barker et al., eds., Eu
rope
and its Others, vol. 1 (University of Essex, Colchester, 1985). Of more general
interest are the special number on race of Critical Inquiry,
vol.
12 (autumn
1985), and Patrick
Brantlinger,
Rule of Darkness:
British Lite
rature
and
Imperialism, 18JO-1914 (Ithaca NY, 1988). Though it does not include Indi
a
in its account, Edward
Said's Orientalism
(London,
1978) has
shaped all
subsequent
discussion
of the ideas that informed
European
v
iews of the
'Orient'. For assessments of Said's argument as applied to India see Ronal
d
Inden, 'Orientalist
Constructions
of India', Modern Asian Studie
s, vol. 20
(1986), pp. 401-46; and Carol A. Breckinridge and Peter van der Veer, eds
.,
Orientalism and
the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South
Asia
(Pennsylvania, 1993). The latter brings together a wide-ranging and stimulating set of case studies of law, language, mensuration, and other subjects.
Several works examine the shaping assumptions of the Raj through study of
visual materials. Pathbreaking in its scholarship, though
best
on the early
2 35
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ESSAY

centuries
before
the British conquest,
is Partha Mitter,
Mu
ch
Maligned
Monsters: History
of European Reactions to Indian
Art (Clar
endon
Press,
Oxford, 1977). The richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, The Raj: India and
the British 1600-194/,
C.A. Bayly, ed. (National Portrait Gallery,
London,
1990) is exceptional
for its interweaving
of political narrati
ve and visual
representation. For a view of the Raj from the perspective of architecture se
e
Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj
(California,
1989); for a stimulating discussion
from the poi
nt of view of
urban
planning
see Anthony
D.
King,
Colonial
Urban
Development
(London,
1976). An account which
minimizes the political s
ignificance of
colonial architecture in favour
of the aesthetic is G.H. R.
Tillotson, The
Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity,
Controversy and Cha
nge Since
1850 (New Haven CT, 1989).