Idolatry and the colonial idea of India: visions of horror, allegories of enlightenment

Explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry.

It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which inform even contemporary descriptions of the subcontinent.

Using idolatry as a concept-metaphor, the book traverses an ambitious path through the works of William Jones, James Mill, Friedrich Max Mueller, John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, E.M.

Forster, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee.