ABSTRACT
This book is on the aesthetics of colonial discourse, with specific reference to English writings on India. It moves across non-fictional genres as diverse as official reports, travel accounts, memoirs and letters from the early moments of England’s ‘encounter’ with India in the seventeenth century to the 1920s. Aesthetics, this book argues, furnishes a descriptive vocabulary that enables the English traveller to cast India in ways that call for particular kinds of colonial or imperial responses.
