Keynotes: Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Emeritus Fellow, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford and Professor Peter van der Veer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen

This was not only a transformational period for British colonial attitudes to India as an imperial subject – from the trauma of ‘the Mutiny’ to the political and emotional severance of Indian independence – but it was also a period in which ideas of India more generally played a defining role in the intellectual and cultural life of Britain. Particular aspects of the theme which we hope participants’ papers will discuss include ideas of India in professional Indology, (for instance, the popularisation of Indological knowledge, and the role of Indology in the justification of imperialism); the idea of India in ‘esoteric’ spiritual movements such as Theosophy, and the struggle between Theosophists and Indologists over the authenticity of knowledge relating to India; India in British missionary thought; Indians in Britain (e.g. Syed Ahmad Khan, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, Mohandas Gandhi); the idea of India in literary, intellectual and popular culture; and comparative studies of conceptions of India on the continent and the USA.