Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School

by Srivastava,Sanjay

• ISBN13: 9780415178556
• ISBN10: 041517855X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Doon School, a famous boarding school for boys in India, inculcates in its students the notion that to be post-colonial is to be rational, modern, secular and metropolitan. The School numbers many of India's political, social and intellectual elite among its former students; its code of conduct for the modern Indian citizen has been extremely influential. Sanjay Srivastava questions the ways in which post-colonial identity is constructed in India. He focuses on the Doon School as the site of his analysis, but his work ranges far beyond the School itself. Srivastava uses historical sources, ethnographic fieldwork and perspectives from cultural theory to confront the social, cultural and historical location of the often abstract notion of post-coloniality. In so doing, he contests the prevailing theoretical positions of post-colonial studies.

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables	viii
Series editor's foreword	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction: the seductions of capital	1	(19)
Practical minds, solid builders, and sane opinions	20	(24)
The marble mirage: constructing the Orient	44	(13)
The garden of rational delights	57	(33)
Secularism, the citizen, and Hindu contextualism	90	(44)
The management of water: capitalism, class, and science	134	(31)
The order of men: sentiments of the metropolis, settlements of civil society	165	(25)
Conclusion: `post-coloniality', national identity, globalisation, and the simulacra of the real	190	(31)
Appendices	221	(5)
Notes	226	(15)
Bibliography	241	(10)
Index	251