Bharat Ki Kahani

  The nineteenth Century West was a civilization deeply interested in history. Having conquered the rest of the world, now the white man wished to understand what explained his successes. What accounted for the fact that within a span of two centuries the West had left the rest of the world behind in almost all areas of human endeavor and progress? The answer was sought in history, sociology, economics, anthropology and even biology - every stream of social sciences and humanities came to be imbued with this looming question. Simultaneously, the rest of the world was assigned to a proverbial waiting room of history. The West’s present became the future that the East ought to aspire to; and this aspiration was imbibed by literate natives, educated in Western universities. The East was now recast ideologically as what the West was not. ‘They’ came to be described as those other people who are not like ‘Us’ Europeans. Within this intellectual milieu, ‘race’ emerged as an object of study