The Construction of Indian identity in Tomas Metcalf's Ideology of the Raj - Book Report/Review Example

The book gives a rich historical recap of the most important stages of British occupation in India, of their ideological base and their most important political manifestations. The theme of the book relates to the contradictory perceptions that the British had about India – as a society scarred by despotism on one hand, and a country with its own unique societal tradition and norms on the other. As this book review will show, the major contribution of Metcalf’s work is his constructivist approach for understanding the historic relations between the British and the Indian.

Metcalf unfolds the duality through which Indian identity was perceived and thus constructed by the British. This complex duality involved notions of similarity on one hand, and difference on the other (28-66). In Ideologies of the Raj Metcalf observes the processes of institution and state-building, introduced by the British rulers in India. He focuses on British imports such as the construction of administrative categories in the census, as well as British Indian residential areas, and institutions of governance (Metcalf 10-20).

The author does not provide a simple chronology of events from Indian history under British rule. His account is contrived outside the narrow confinements of the historic events, because he looks at the collective psychology, rather than the facts which shaped these events. Metcalf’s summary of these complex institution-building processes however reveals them as collaborative rather than entirely British. His observations on the specific aspects of state-building reveal the complexity of the systems of knowledge, which were introduced by the British and accepted by the Indian people in this process of the creation of identities (30-70).

It also reveals the transformations of the Indian perception of the British presence in the region, which “involved simultaneous processes of acceptance, accommodation, adaptation and rejection” (Metcalf xi). These systems of knowledge, as created by the British and perceived by the Indians, were the fundament of the British-Indian Empire, and one of its most outstanding features. One of Metcalf’s most interesting observations in this book is related to “Oriental despotism” (6-20). He suggests that Oriental despotism was used by the British people as a justification for their intervention and conquest of India.

In the case of the British conquest of India, despotism is described as a political order, typical for the Oriental countries (Metcalf 6-20). As understood by Metcalf, the term presents the deep ideological divisions between the West and the East not only as geographical regions, but also as divergent socio-political entities. The British perception and knowledge of the East and India in particular was derived from reading and interpretation of the ancient texts on Hinduism and Islam, and the social expressions of these religions in the orderings of the Indian society (Metcalf 12).

These texts were interpreted by the British as a call for a necessary reform in India, and the imposition of more law-abiding and democratic forms of governance (Metcalf 13). In order to devise their strategy for domination in India, the British had to visualize India’s past, present and future, which in their eyes were marked by excessive despotism and political suppression. Based on this generalization, Metcalf implies, the British devised a very