This volume explores the interconnections between culture, ideology and hegemony in an effort to understand and explain how Indians came to terms with colonial subjection and envisioned a future for the society in which they lived. The process of exploring the indigenous epistemological tradition and assessing it in the context of advances made by the west was not unilinear and undifferentiated; it was driven with contradictions, contentions and ruptures. Locating intellectual history at the intersection of social and cultural history, the eight essays in this book cover a wide range of issues, moving from an overview of religious and social ideas in colonial India to empirical studies of themes such as indigenous medicine, the family and literary fiction.

Professor Panikkar contests both the imperialist and nationalist paradigms of intellectual history. Meticulously researched and lucidly argued, his analysis is illuminated by a rare sensitivity to the nature of class formation and class values, as well as to the material conditions of human existence.

K. N. Panikkar is Vice-Chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kerala. He was until recently Professor of History at Jawarharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has written extensively on the cultural and intellectual history of colonial India.

Anthem South Asian Studies

Preface; Acknowledgements; An Overview; Cultural Trends in Pre-Colonial India; Historiographical and Conceptual Questions; Culture and Ideology; Search for Alternatives: Meaning of the Past in Colonial India; Creating a New Cultural Taste: Reading a Nineteenth-Century Malayalam Novel; Indigenous Medicine and Cultural Hegemony; Marriage Reform: Ideology and Social Base