Can Imperialists Produce Knowledge?

Abstract

Mountstuart Elphinstone's administration as Governor of Bombay consolidated East India Company rule over large tracts of Central, Western, and Northwestern India. It represented a new and unmistakable projection of both British armed force and knowledge production. In this chapter, the work of a prominent soldier-administrator scholar whose work was strongly encouraged by Elphinstone, the father of Maratha history, James Grant Duff, is taken up. The line of argument is that, despite the imperial and military conditions that made Grant Duff's research possible, it is a mistake to see it simply as a project of colonial hegemony and not a major, even foundational intellectual production and act of public reason submitted to the cosmopolitan world of letters from which Indians were not, in principle, excluded. The chapter thus suggests grounds for breaking with the Saidian paradigm not simply on positivist grounds, but in favor of finer grained historical and more discerning ideological analysis. This means paying close attention to Grant Duff's (and his History's) struggle against the East India Company itself, whose chief interest was not knowledge so much as secrecy.