Imagining India.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

By RONALD INDEN. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xlii + 298.

This is a new printing of Ronald Inden's controversial and intentionally provocative book, originally published by Blackwell in 1990 and reviewed in this journal by David Kopf (112 [1992]: 674-77). The only addition is a three-page "Author's Preface to the Second Impression" in which Inden declines to respond to the widely different, and often extreme, reviews and responses the original publication elicited, and chooses "instead to point to some intellectual trends that have appeared since it was written" (p. xi). His critique of new scholarship is confined to a single paragraph, which describes it as mired in past errors:

With the rise of identity politics, 'postcolonial' historians have shifted away from imagining class and national unities in India's past and have started pointing to diversities, but many of these studies have a tendency to recuperate the older colonialist imaginings of India. Representations of the systematic mistreatment of women (patriarchy), the exploitation of the young (child labour), domination by a parasitic Brahman caste of Aryan descent...