Description
History of British India (New 2017 Version) Lecture 10 of 9 February 2017 (Winter term, UCLA). I begin by suggesting that the debate over Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, or more widely his views, persists in India to the present day. The lecture today is about the British conquest of knowledge in India. What were some of the epistemological imperatives of the colonial state? Why did the British create so many grammars and dictionaries of Indian languages? What was the Statistical Survey? What is the regime of numbers? What are the implications of dividing all Indians into martial and non-martial races? What were the British really 'seeing' when they traveled in India? I discuss the linguistic, survey, travel, observational, museum modalities. What is the idea of the critical edition of a text?
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