Wild Races: Scripturalizing Empire in British India

This book analyzes the narrative dynamics of social formations in British India, using statistical and ethnographic records, visual cultures, and linguistic exercises to describe the British Empire’s production of knowledge about so-called “strange new worlds.” Lalruatkima then labels these narrative dynamics as “scripturalizing” to account for the creation, or writing, of these worlds into existence. This focus underscores empire as one of many such formations imagined against the backdrop of contested conversations about what it is and what it could be. When reverse engineered, empire throws into sharp relief its constituent narrative placeholders, and the sequences of meaning-making that connect them. Power differentials between the imperial center and frontier determine the placeholders and how they fit into the larger narrative. These discursive components in turn engender the politically charged attitudes and relations within the imperial domain. Lalruatkima excavates the imperial archive for material that accounts for these narrative dynamics.