Embedding the Colonial

As it turns out, in the course of the narration, any attempt to restore to both the colonial state and the indigenous society their density and specificity must be founded on a refusal of the polarities that have made the ‘indigenous’ the antithesis of the ‘colonial’. In fact, the research on offer can be, in a manner of speaking, described as a return to the interests of the 1960s with the insights of the 1980s. In the 1950s and 1960s, a period when studies of administrative policy and methods were much in vogue, a good deal of scholarly work was undertaken which aimed at probing the assumptions and purposes that the colonial state actually embodied and at revealing how it had worked in practice. Such studies have become rather unfashionable in the past 25 years or so, when the emphasis has shifted from the intentions of the colonial rulers of India to the workings of Indian society. Much has been written about the capacity of Indian society to frustrate colonial initiatives or to produce consequences from them which could be very different from those which the British intended.
-S.Hegde
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