ABSTRACT
This book brings to bear on the transitional period into British colonialism in India the pressure against western binaries exerted textually by women writers who were deeply engaged with India’s culture and epistemology. That this volatile, 50-year period of Orientalism is actually precolonial demands a reappraisal of the Asiatic Society’s historical context in ways that theories of postcolonialism or even colonialism cannot adequately frame. The intersection of politics and scholarship for the Orientalists is nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the founding of the Asiatic Society by Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal, for whom “the study of the Indian tradition and conceptual world simultaneously aided in steering and controlling the Indians within the framework of their own ways of thought” (Halbfass 62). The fleeting phenomenon of the Asiatic Society’s transmission of Vedic texts was both defined and complicated by the entanglement of its intellectual pursuits and the political conflict between the hegemony of the East India Company and that of the British government.
