CSCS Courseware

Here is an extract from the first chapter of Bernard Cohn's Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, (which by the way you must look at) in the light of the exercises and also in making connections between the first two modules:

"The British appear in the nineteenth century to have felt most comfortable surveying India from above and from a distance-from a horse, an elephant, a boat, a carriage or a train.They were uncomfortable in the narrow confines of a city street, a bazaar,a mela-anywhere they were surrounded by Indian subjects. In their narratives of their lives and travels in India, few Indians are named other than royalty and personal servants. Indians who came under the imperial gaze were often made to appear in dress and in demeanor players in the British constructed theaters of power, their roles signaled by prescribed dress, their parts authored by various forms of knowledge codified by rulers who sought to determine how loyal Indian subjects were to act in the scenes that their rulers had constructed. Everyone-rulers and ruled-has proper roles to play in the colonial sociological theatre."(Cohn 10, 1996)