A Wrinkle in Empire

Book excerpt: The manner in which social science studies relating to Indo-European colonial encounters emerged in Indian academics post-1947 evidently shows a tendency whereby such studies are essentially made to fit into the widely recognized and much studied colonizer-colonized dynamic proposed by the celebrated works of Edward Said and Albert Memmi. And there is an almost instinctual implication of Indo-British encounters into this dynamic. How does one, then, situate the presence of the marginalized French colonial exercise in India – in some sorts – that of a colonized colonizer – into this model? How does one explain such presences in the larger, more inclusive framework of a co-constituted history of colonial empires in India? How does the evolution of alternative territorial sovereignties impact the imaginative faculty of Indians in the colonial landscape? What are the ways in which the evolution of such imagined alternative territories shape inter-empire relations? Could such ‘voids’ in the dominant discourses of empire have led to the re-imagination of the territoriality of national anti-colonial resistance and created new strategic regimes of networked circulations? Or, could such potholes in the landscape of the dominant empire have led to the evolution of such spaces as territories of inter-empire resistance?