ABSTRACT
Imperial and South Asian historiography is bedeviled by questions of not only how the British seized control over such a vast and variegated territory as India, but how such a conquest was rendered legible to a wider domestic audience. Over the years, a number of explanations have been advanced to address the former, with most of them singling out various combinations and permutations of the political, economic and military advantages purportedly enjoyed by Western powers in their campaigns to dominate the extra-European landscape. With respect to the latter, it is clear that the epic drama of these encounters, the capacity for such battles to throw up heroes and villains and the timeless and exotic locations in which they were fought, together account for the ease with which the military history of India came to be subsumed within the terms and tropes of Romanticism and Orientalism. This is not to deny that ultimately the British in India, and Europeans elsewhere in the colonial world, proved victorious on the battlefield. In the end, they were superior and it is not my intention here to rehearse all the arguments that have been advanced to account for that superiority. What interests me here is more the manner in which certain claims about that superiority, which explicitly or implicitly rest upon the assumption that it was innate, drew upon orientalized and romanticized readings of European encounters, and how those claims, rooted in these earlier encounters, helped to frame later analyses and in so doing perpetuated a discourse of difference when in fact closer scrutiny reveals that, at least in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British and Indian armies that were vying for supremacy in India had much in common.2
