Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay.(Review)

Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay. By Balachandra Rajan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. 267 pp.

Under Western Eyes has illustrious forebears that also make for intriguing connections. Conrad's novel of the same title, featuring Razumov's persistent desire "to retire," is never mentioned but is echoed in the acknowledgments, where Rajan poignantly thanks friends for encouraging him to complete this book late in his life. Indeed, the same title is also shared with an influential manifesto of postcolonial feminism by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who argues that the category of the Third World woman is a fictive construct of First World discourses of dominance. [1] It could be said, as a matter of analytic positioning even more than of titular coincidence, that Rajan's book is situated squarely between Conrad's literary aesthetics and Mohanty's political criticism. A veteran critic of his generation, having already shed considerable light on Milton studies and modernist poetry, the author's belated appearance on the shifting sands of postcolonial literary criticism reveals magisterial expertise alongside a hesitant strain.

Leaving aside the psychoanalytic question of unacknowledged allusions and hints of mortality, however, this book is best understood as a powerful reading of the thematic rendition of India in important English literary texts from the Renaissance to second-generation Romanticism. Rajan seeks to expose the workings of imperialist discourse by examining "a series of literary sites that exhibit the collusions of gender, commerce, and empire" (7). His catholic range of reference extends beyond British colonial space to full-fledged readings of Camoes's Lusiads and …