He linked ancient languages and prehistoric migrations to the long history of foreign arrivals into India, a process that would culminate in the advent of the British presence in the subcontinent. Over the next decade, he founded the new science of philology that combined linguistics with human migration patterns and mingling of races across the Indo-European region. In 1783, William Jones arrived as a sessions judge at Fort William in Calcutta. The British formally began their imperial project in India in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey. This relationship was immediately employed in legitimising the British conquest of India. Even more influential, I would argue, is his exploration of the relationship between race and politics within the context of the Roman experience.
He provided the foundational stone for a theory that sought to legitimise British colonial enterprise as a successor to a great empire of the past that brought a long era of peace and prosperity for Europe in its wake. A central theme in Gibbon’s work was his quest for historical linkages between Pax Britannica – the period of British-dominated world order – and Pax Romana. All six volumes of the book came out by 1788 to tremendous acclaim and sales. The other reason is tied to the way in which the British saw themselves as heirs to the Romans.Įdward Gibbon published the first volume of his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the year Great Britain lost 13 of its colonies in America.
Surely, one reason for the excavation was that, as the latest foreigners to arrive in India, the British wanted a justification for their own arrival. After all, the Indian peninsula had been the site of commercial, political and military incursions by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Timurids since 1498. This excavation was aimed at exploring the arrival of various foreign people, cultures, religions and politics into the subcontinent. It is a fact not so easily known, thus rarely acknowledged, that the British colonial project in India at one moment turned into an excavation of India’s pasts. What I learned by rehabilitating the world’s smallest wild cat near Pune.Gautam Patel: ‘History will not judge us by our highways, but how we preserve the idea of India’.How do tourist guides explain (away) the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho to inquisitive visitors?.A Pakistani comedian on Munawar Faruqui: ‘At some point, your art is simply not worth your life’.40 years after AIDS, remembering Dominic D’Souza, the first Indian diagnosed with HIV infection.
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