ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the influential work of William Jones and James Mill, important spokesmen respectively for the Orientalist and Anglicist schools among colonial officials, in terms of these themes and related issues such as the epistemic and political status of mythology and fable. Both Jones and Mill theorise concrete physical/sensory experience of India as a problem for representational regimes of framing India, so that a disturbing indeterminacy and undecidability of knowledge ? induced by physical proximity to India in the case of Jones and fellow Orientalists ? triggered in Mill a shift to a model of ‘rational’ governance that sought to entirely eliminate physical contact with India.
