Pramod K. Nayar 
Colonial Voices 
The Discourses of Empire

This accessible cultural history explores 400 years of British
imperial adventure in India, developing a coherent narrative
through a wide range of colonial documents, from exhibition
catalogues to memoirs and travelogues. It shows how these texts
helped legitimize the moral ambiguities of colonial rule even as
they helped the English fashion themselves.



* An engaging examination of European colonizers’
representations of native populations

* Analyzes colonial discourse through an impressive range of
primary sources, including memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues,
administrative reports, and travelogues

* Surveys 400 years of India’s history, from the 16th
century to the end of the British Empire

* Demonstrates how colonial discourses naturalized the racial and
cultural differences between the English and the Indians, and
controlled anxieties over these differences

Table of Content

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introducing Colonial Discourse 1

2 Travel, Exploration, and
”Discovery”: From Imagination to Inquiry
12

Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of
”Discovery” 18

The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29

”Inquiry” and the Documentation of
the Others 41

Conclusion: ”Discovery” and Wonder,
”Contracted and Epitomized” 49

3 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial
Exotic 55

The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57

The Exotic in English Culture 59

The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference
60

The Sentimental Exotic 62

The Scientific Exotic 79

Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 95

4 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle
104

The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106

Administering Colonial Spaces 121

”Raising the General Credit of the
Empire”: The Spectacle of Empire 140

Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle
145

5 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material
Progress 161

England’s Age of Improvement 164

Discipline and Improve 170

Imperial Lessons 174

The Salvific Colonial 178

Rescue, Reform, and Race 183

Conclusion: From Improvement to Self-Legitimization
194

6 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial
Cosmopolitans 201

The Self-Fashioning of the Scholar-Colonial 204

Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213

”Consumption, Ingestion, and
Decoration”: Colonial Commodities 219

The ”Empire City”: Pageantry and
Empire 226

Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial
Cosmopolitan 229

References 235

Index 260

About the author

Pramod K. Nayar is a member of the English Faculty at the
University of Hyderabad, India. He has been Smuts Visiting Fellow
in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Charles
Wallace India Trust-British Council Fellow at the University
of Kent at Canterbury and Fulbright Senior Fellow at Cornell
University. His many publications include States of Sentiment:
Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (2011), An Introduction to
New Media and Cybercultures (2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide
for the Perplexed (2010), English Writing and India,
1600-1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), and Writing
Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India
(2012). Forthcoming is a book on new media.