What were the important studies carried out during the colonial period on Indian culture?

The colonial period produced important studies of Indian culture, beginning with the Orient lists. Sir William Jones discovered the Indo-European language group and thus transformed notions of Indian culture. There was a keen Orientals interest in Indian art, evident in such works as James Ferguson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876).

The Orient lists were sometimes unjustly critical of early Indian historiographical efforts in this direction, as is evident in Ferguson’s criticisms of Rajendralal Mitra’s highly original study of the temples of Orissa in The Antiquities of Orissa (1868-69). This did not stop Indian intellectuals and in due course Ghulam Yazdani wrote a wonderful account of Ajanta paintings entitled Ajanta (1930).

Around this time Indian historians exhibited an interest in the culture of people as distinct from the chronicles of the Kings. Muhammad Habib wrote Hazrat Amir Khusrau of Delhi in 1927, and K.M. Ashraf wrote an account of popular culture during the Delhi Sultanate in Life and Condition of the People of Hindustan (1935).

By this time English education had brought about an important change in the mentality of the middle class, a theme explored by the American intellectual B.T. McCully in English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (1940). Indian intellectuals themselves studied the impact of the West on the new vernacular literatures, for instance, Sushil Kumar De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1919), and Sayyid Abdul Latif, The Influence of English Literature on Urdu Literature (1924). One of the intellectual achievements of this time was Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols. (1922).

Independence and Partition brought a renewed interest in the subcontinent. The synthetic surveys of the time deserve mention: A.L. Basham, The Wonder that Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Subcontinent before the Coming of the Muslims (1954), and S.M. Ikram, History of Muslim Civilization in India and Pakistan (Lahore, 1961).

In recent years, the Western cultural impact has been studied in new and sophisticated ways, for instance, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (New Delhi, 1985), and Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1994). Such works explore the emergence of modern Indian culture from fresh perspectives and have broadened our understanding of the process dubbed the Indian Awakening. The phenomenon is now studied from a more critical angle of vision and culture is now more closely related to the emerging forms of consciousness and society.