ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attempts to show in detail how colonialism was served by, even as it produced the conditions of possibility for, forms of knowledge that, in the wake of extraordinary challenge, can be characterized under the single term of ‘Orientalism.’ In doing so, the author have acknowledged the power of colonial formations, power that was both concealed and displayed through the transformations and effects of colonial rule in India. He also attempts to demonstrate how knowledge and power were entangled in an unsteady and often unstable history of institutions, representations, legislation, policies, and rhetoric, how power was realized through the incitements of colonial modernity as well as the confusions of colonial rule. Embedded in historical process, it has necessarily been changed by different historical forces at different historical moments. But it is a story that insists on, and demonstrates, the overriding significance of colonialism in the making of modern India.
