Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane
• Position: Book Review

Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. By PETER VAN DER VEER. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. x + 205.

"[I]nspired by Edward Said's claim, in Culture and Imperialism, that the historical experience is a common one among both the colonizers and the colonized" (p. 3). Peter van der Veer seeks to write from a new perspective which he calls "interactional history" (p. 8). Written "in an essayistic fashion" (p. 3), his latest book, which focuses on nineteenth-century India and Britain, "is not an exercise in archival research or literary criticism in which the close reading of a primary text against a historical context provides new insights, but an exercise in historical sociology in which larger historical developments are sociologically interpreted and illustrated with examples of major issues" (p. ix). "Its goal is to challenge social scientists--anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and students of comparative religion--to explore beyond the received narratives of colonialism, nationalism, and secularism" (p. 13). Humanists may be most interested in chapter 5, "Monumental Texts: Orientalism and the Critical Edition of India's National Heritage," which...