ABSTRACT
On Discovery India has a penchant for being discovered. I learned as a schoolboy in the 1950s that India was “discovered” in 1498 by Vasco da Gama. What the “discoverers” discovered was, of course, varied cultures, civilizations, and peoples who had hitherto, clearly, been undiscovered. It was only years later that the oddity of the claim dawned on me. After all, did we not also learn in the same school that, for several millennia before that fateful moment when a Portuguese pirate showed up on the Malabar Coast with his guns, this same landmass-India, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and by three seas in the south, as the Vishnupurana has it-had supported many dynasties large and small, evolved complex societies and systems of thought that were quite as complex, and developed arts and crafts that were the envy of the ancient world?That moment gave me insight into the meaning of such “discovery”: the process of claiming “discovery” says much about the nature of power exercised by the “discoverers” and serves to camouflage a process of transformation affecting both the “discovered” and the “discoverers.”
