The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective
About this ebook
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.Scholarly and accessible,The Ruler's Gaze throws fresh light on Indian colonial history through a Saidian lens.
About the author
Formerly of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Arvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has also taught in universities in Australia (Queensland, Sydney), the United States (Northeastern, Temple, Boston, Harvard) and India (Nalanda). He has also published extensively in the fields of Indology and comparative religion. He was instrumental, through three global conferences (2006, 2011, 2016), in facilitating the adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions. Books authored by him include Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, Hinduism and Its Sense of History, Religious Tolerance: A History and The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective. He is contributing editor of Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition, and series editor of the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions.
