1. The main way in which British rule in India was a conquest of knowledge was the fact that the British appropriated and dominated the writing of the history of India during the British Indian colonial period. Indeed, from Pandey's description of the colonial administrators' and other British accounts of behavior and customs of the indigenous peoples of India, it can be concluded that the historical subtext is one that shows the history of the British in India rather than of Indian history per se. This is in the background of Pandey's discussion (132) of the "emptying out of all history . . . from the political experience of the [indigenous] people."
The ability to control the language and distribution of discourse in which reports of fact and the official record cannot be overestimated in this regard. In fact, language can be seen as a locus of control all its own. In one important respect, the control that language represented for the British raj survives to this day. The British sought to infuse India with European (and especially) notions of governance and administration, fostering greater bureaucratic continuity with Britain after the departure of the British than might have been anticipated. The survival of English as the only official language of the courts and civil administration of India is the most obvious example of this. If the hegemony of English in official Indian discourse can be interpreted as a mechanism of nation-state efficiency or even unity (perhaps a good thing), that interpretation has to be set beside the fact that the position of English in India is also testament to a colonialist legacy that absorbed and disempowered indigenous-culture specifics. The process of absorption and disempowerment is also at work in the business of creating English dictionaries and grammars of Indian languages, of classifying Indian peoples according to religion and of creating English maps of the region.
It could be argued t...