JAIPUR: Was she a humanitarian dynamite who was distraught by a dishonest husband and beguiled by a cunning paramour? Or was she a saintly creature,

JAIPUR: Demonising the enemy was an old tactic which was meticulously used in old colonial era to isolate the enemy and create a public opinion in
favour of colonialists and neo-colonialists to justify their act of aggression.
The Britishers did it effectively to demolish the local kings in India, including Tipu Sultan who had challenged the expansion of British empire. Now, it was Americans who did the same thing to Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Maya Jasanoff’s historical book Edge of Empire deals with the expansion of British colony by hook or crook. She was in Jaipur to attend the ongoing DSC Jaipur Literature Festival. Though the book did not get the attention it deserved in India, historian William Dalrymple puts it as ‘one of the best reads of the period’.
He says one of the main features which make the book more readable was her writing. She writes in literary English which makes it more enjoyable even for an ordinary reader.
The half Indian (her father is a Bengali) historian whose work has won non-fiction awards, the Duff Cooper Prize, given annually for a literary work in the field of history, biography, politics or poetry puts her in the league of previous winners like Lawrence Durrell, Seamus Heaney, Richard Ellmann, Richard Holmes and Robert Hughes.
Jasanoff describes life in India and Egypt as seen through the letters and diaries of the European adventurer-collectors who bought or sometimes plundered the artefacts of ancient civilisations and had intimate cross-cultural encounters and even friendships along the way.
Jasanoff stated that her aim in writing the book was to explore ‘imperial history through individual lives’. Dalrymple was full of praise for Jasanoff’s work, which he described as ‘the most interesting reimagination’ of 18th century Indian history. It carefully avoids, he said, the simple dualism of self and other that is typical of postcolonial discourse.
Jasanoff went on to read some interesting passages from the novel. She also spoke about her next work, recently completed, which deals with an as yet unexamined aspect of the American Revolution—the mass exodus of the people who chose to remain faithful to Britain and migrated to different colonies.