ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Hamilton's Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah has been characterized as a novelistic reprise of her brother Charles's defense of the British imperial project in India. Felicity Nussbaum has written that "Both books surreptitiously defend British Colonial interests in India", and Isobel Grundy has found that "Hamilton shares in the official colonialist agenda". Hamilton chooses Hindu spokesmen to articulate her critique of the metropole, in a kind of inversion of what Homi Bhabha defines as the aim of colonial discourse. Hamilton saves her most bitter denunciation of native rule for the Mughal conquerors; her "Preliminary Dissertation" spells out, with Burkean intensity, the horrors visited on Hindus by their Muslim masters. Indeed, Hindoo Rajah's complex imperial politics are evident in the multiplicity of social issues it addresses; ultimately, the novel enacts as well as represents an unstable and perplexed attitude toward the British Empire in India.
