The Reading Warehouse

The book highlights Tod's apparently numerous motivations in writing on the Rajputs: to bring knowledge about the them into European circles, to demonstrate that the Rajputs maintained historical records from the early middle ages and were thus not a primitive people without awareness of their own
history, and to establish possible ethnic links between the warrior-like Rajputs and the peoples of Europe, as also between the feudal institutions of Rajputana and Europe. Fierce criticisms in Tod's time of his ethnic and institutional hypotheses about connections between Rajputs and Europeans
illustrate that Tod's texts were highly controversial.

The innovative approach adopted by the author goes beyond a binary opposition between the colonisers and the colonised in India, by focusing on traces of friendly exchanges between Tod and his British colleagues and various members of the kingdoms of western India, with whom they interacted. Under
themes like landscape, anthropology, science, Romantic literature, approaches to government policy, and knowledge exchanges in India and in London, this volume analyses Tod's role as a mediator of knowledge through his travels in the early nineteenth century.