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The editor and the contributing authors must be commended for coming up with an anthology that will attract both academic and non-academic readerships
BOOK: Desiring India: Representations through British and French Eyes 1584-1857
EDITOR: Niranjan Goswami
PUBLISHER: Jadavpur University Press
PRICE: Rs 550
The encounters between India and the West between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries have been discussed so extensively that any new contribution to the field rouses either fatigue or an undue expectation. The editor and the contributing authors of Desiring India: Representations through British and French Eyes 1584-1857 must be commended for maintaining a fine balance between the two and for coming up with an anthology that will attract both academic and non-academic readerships. One of the reasons for this is the freshness of the approach, which explores both British and French accounts in the same book and attempts a comparative analysis of the lenses through which each envisioned India. The ‘Introduction’ to the anthology makes it clear that its purpose is not to homogenize the colonial perspectives and present a seamless narrative of wonder and exploits. By bringing together an impressive collection of accounts by merchants, travellers, officials and intellectuals and analysing their distinct voices and representational techniques, it reminds us of the many Wests that congregated in the ‘Orient’ and constructed the ‘Oriental’.
That does not mean that the book lacks a framework. Any anthology, for that matter, needs to invest in an organizing principle that will justify the inclusion of the essays between its two covers. In this case, the ‘Introduction’ asserts that it wishes to replace “the trope of discovery and wonder with that of desire and representation”. Indeed, the marvellous narratives that...