UnIndia Today : How Colonial Rule Built the India Today
Preface Before marching ahead, I would like to deal with the title 'UnIndia Today', the name that is this book's central claim. The India we live in today is not simply the unbroken continuation of an ancient civilization, carried forward untouched into the present. It is also, in ways this book tries to document rather than merely assert, the product of a colonial project to construct the Indian nation. A foreign trading company, and later the British Crown, took a plural, regionally varied, and constantly changing society and converted it, piece by piece, into fixed categories a distant administration could count, tax, judge, and govern. Religion became a census box. Caste became a ranked table. Land became a ledger entry. Custom became a printed law. Similar is the case with our beief & faith. The body became a criminal statute. History became a chronology written in someone else's language, on someone else's terms. And the press, which was at the time the be...