hat this was a British exercise in attempting to understand and engage the indigenous peoples. But when English dictionaries and maps are considered in the context of colonial military and police power, there is also an assumption that the British were somehow not an invading power, but were somehow entitled to control India in the first place. This assumption is exactly what Pandey is analyzing when saying that the colonialist "communal riot narrative," which is reflected in various official, newspaper, and other accounts of Hindu-Muslim rivalry and violence in the raj period, "is simultaneously and necessarily a statement on the Indian past" (140). That is, the sense of colonialist entitlement came from the fact that the British raj was positioning itself to correct and reform the Indian history and culture of religious warfare.
This kind of mission did not prevent the colonialists from getting Indian religious or civil history wrong. In citing the concern of officials to identify origins of riots in Banaras, Pandey notes references to Muslim ritual observance of Muharram emphasizing "public exhibition of grief," a proxy for "behaviour that stands for the primitive--once found in the West, still widespread in the Orient" (142). The West is advanced in matters of civil society, the Orient primitive and exotic--exactly the attitude of so-called Orientalism, which filters its view of the East through the whole civil, literary, philosophical, and moral apparatus of the West. The origins of the riots from the Indian point of view do not come into the discussion. Indeed,
Said (150ff et passim) cites fiction and nonfiction accounts of the Orient, particularly in the nineteenth century, written by European travelers and other observers with varying degrees of scientific, academic, and poetic accuracy and quality. This is confirmed by Pandey's description of various colonialist accounts of what were perceived as sectarian riots in Banar...