Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Arvind Sharma, "The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule Over India from a Saidian Perspective" (HarperCollins, 2018)
Description: Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is a seminal work in the field of postcolonial culture studies. It critiqued Western scholarship about the Eastern world for its patronizing attitude and tendency to view it as exotic, backward and uncivilized. Arvind Sharma, longstanding professor of comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, now takes up the Palestinian academic's groundbreaking ideas - originally put forth predominantly in a Middle Eastern context - and tests them against Indian material. He explores in an Indian context Said's contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West.Sc...