Böcker av Vinay Lal

Insurgency and the Artist explores not merely how Indian printmakers and artists responded to the freedom struggle but also how the art they fashioned their own conception of the nation.

Colonialism is generally understood to encompass political domination, military expansion, and economic exploitation, but the British, in their nearly two centuries of rule over India, also achieved a thoroughgoing conquest of knowledge. In the backdrop of the Enlightenment impulse, which held that everything can be known, mapped, counted, categorized, and bounded, and the knowledge thus acquired reshaped into useable forms, the British in India created an epistemological state. The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge: The British in India examines the fields and bodies of knowledge through which this state was created.

During the media frenzy over the Millennium celebrations, there was hardly any mention of the fact that, for the majority of the world, there was no Millennium at all. This linear understanding of time is a specifically Western - and Christian - concept. *BR**BR*This is just one of many examples that Vinay Lal uses to demonstrate that nearly every idea which we take for granted in the west is part of a politics of ideas. Oppression is usually associated with class struggle and other forms of economic monopoly. Lal looks beyond this, deconstructing the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism to offer a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking.*BR**BR*Other topics examined are the concept of 'development', which has provided a mandate for surreptitious colonisation; and the idea of the 'nation state', something we have lived with for no more than two centuries, yet is accepted without question. Linking this to the emergence of 'international governance' through the United Nations, the US, and imperial economic bodies (such as the IMF and WTO), Lal explains how such universalism came to dominate the trajectory of Western thought.