SOURCE: “Tod's Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India,” in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, Part I, February, 1996, pp. 185-220.

In the following essay, Peabody examines James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, focusing on his ideas regarding nationalism and the ways in which nationalism influenced Tod's description of differences between nations.

This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast’han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called ‘feudal system’ of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast’han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a...