Representations of India, the English East India Company, and Self by an Eighteenth-Century Indian Emigrant to Britain

Authors

Michael H. Fisher, Oberlin College

Abstract

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

Repository Citation

Fisher, Michael H. 1998. "Representations of India, the English East India Company, and Self by an Eighteenth-Century Indian Emigrant to Britain." Modern Asian Studies 32(4): 891-911.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Publication Date

10-1-1998

Publication Title

Modern Asian Studies

Department

History

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.1017/S0026749X9800314X

Language

English

Format

text