Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the extent to which the colonized peoples engaged the Orientalizing discourse, resisting its stereotypes, subverting its epistemology, amending its practices and sometimes even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. It describes instances of colonial travellers who continued to wear Indian dress after their return to Britain and thus blurred the boundaries of their identity. The book shows that as a result of cross-cultural contacts, British aesthetic conventions and practices were either brought into question or modified by the experiences of British artists travelling in various colonized parts of the southern hemisphere in the 1820s. It examines the biographies of Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja of Baroda, an extremely wealthy and Anglicized ruler whose partially autonomous sovereignty of one of the Indian Native States was marked by his reformism.