Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire

Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this revealing study includes travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, anthropological tracts, parliamentary debates, and instruction manuals. It shows how subtle changes of emphasis reflect evolving colonial attitudes toward conquered territories, shifting from flights of the imagination to factual inquiry, to a narrative of exoticism and heterogeneity that safely compartmentalized colonial “otherness” via natural history, ethnography, and cartographies of disease.

The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth-making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape-planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through awe-inspiring spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than expose them as asset-stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co-creating fresh notions of “Englishness” and English characters.