Race Matters

Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. 1770-1880

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3621673
AutoresShruti Kapila (Tufts University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Volumen41
Número3
Páginas471-513
Fecha de publicación2007-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x06002526
OpenAlexW2099176071
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas26

In tracing the history of the concept of race, this article revises the conventional view that race acquired significance only after the mid-nineteenth century in colonial India. Instead, it situates the history of race in the connected realms of enlightenment science in both the metropolitan and colonial worlds and in the public sphere of Indian print culture. From the 1770s onwards the emerging 'science' of race was intimately related to orientalism and was salient for civilisational concepts, above all, religion. Precisely because it was a capacious concept that encompassed both cultural and biological ideas, race became an inescapable category for world-comparative distinctions between human types and religions, but it also held implications for the role of empire. Phrenology was a popular dimension of this set of ideas and found votaries among both imperial and also Indian literati of radical, conservative and liberal political opinions. The Calcutta Phrenological Society became an active site of debate on these issues. Yet in the popular realm of vernacular print culture analogous notions of physical typology and distinction (particularly samudrikvidya) remained distant from such concerns. As a form of 'insurgent knowledge' samudrikvidya was part of the techniques for the reconstitution of an Indian selfhood. Race then was not only a powerful concept, but also one that was remarkably mutable in its meanings and uses from the eighteenth century onwards

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Aryan race · Colonialism · Empire · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Vernacular · Anthropology · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society