Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.8, no.1, Carfax Publishing (Bradford, U.K.), 1999

Peter Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia (SOAS Studies on South Asia, Understanding & Perspectives Series), Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1997.

Sponsored by the School of Oriental & African Studies in London, this anthology is part of an series seeking to intervene in present debates on the problem of Eurocentric representations-constructions. The fourth volume of the series edited by Peter Robb of SOAS’s History Department, this volume collects eleven essays which interrogate the concept of race, defined by Robb (in his useful and comprehensive Introduction) as “any essentialising of groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis”. Continue reading The Concept of Race in South Asia →