ABSTRACT
The analysis of state and society in South Asia is intimately tied to the history of Orientalist discourse. The annexation of India to the British colonial empire, beginning in the second half of the 18th century, produced a particularly marked tendency on the part of European analysts to see in India a deep gulf between society and the state. Most British observers saw Indian history as marked by a very high degree of political fragmentation and instability, punctuated only by the occasional ephemeral establishment of centralizing empires. The establishment of British rule in India, first under the aegis of the East India Company, and later (from 1858) under the British Crown, represented for many Englishmen the gift of political order to India. Beneath this political order, the concept of Indian “society” as a self-regulating construct distinct from the state, with its own bounded internal logic, exercised a profound influence on the British.
