Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India

Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2008 at Leiden University. The dissertation's title, “Xenophobia and Consciousness in Seventeenth-Century India: Six Cases from the Deccan,” represents a much fairer indication of the book's contents than does its published title. Although the representation in precolonial India of a feared “other” (European as well as Indian), and the underlying enmities that derive from the ascription of “otherness,” are prominent themes in this study, looming just as large in the work as a whole is Gijs Kruijtzer's delving into the questions of agency, self-consciousness, and, ultimately, the notion of identity in precolonial India (hence the original title: Xenophobia and Consciousness). Here, Kruijtzer seeks to combat what he describes as a pervasive trend among scholars during the last thirty years to see “early modern identities … as less than modern identities: less intense, less well...