University of Hyderabad Prof pens book on the ‘Raj’

A book ‘The British Raj: Keywords’ written by Prof. Pramod K Nayar, Head, Department of English, School of Humanities at University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been recently launched by Routledge. For 200 years India was the jewel in the British imperial crown. During the course of governing India the Raj a number of words came to have particular meanings in the imperial lexicon.

This book documents the words and terms that the British used to describe, define, understand and judge the subcontinent. It offers insight into the cultures of the Raj through a sampling of its various terms, concepts and nomenclature, and utilizes critical commentaries on specific domains to illuminate not only the linguistic meaning of a word but its cultural and political nuances.

This book also provides literary and cultural texts from the colonial canon where these Anglo-Indian colloquialisms, terms and official jargon occurred. It enables us to glean a sense of the Empire’s linguistic and cultural tensions, negotiations and adaptations. The work will interest students and researchers of history, language and literature, colonialism, cultural studies, imperialism and the British Raj, and South Asian studies.

Prof. Nayar teaches courses in Literary Theory, the English Romantics, Postcolonial Literature’s and Cultural Studies. His interests lie in English colonial writings on India, Human Rights narratives and Cultural Studies, with a consistent publication record in these areas. Among his book-length publications are Frantz Fanon; Posthumanism; Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire; Digital Cool; Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India; English Writing and India, 1600-1920: Colonizing Aesthetics; Postcolonial Literature, among others.

He is also the editor of the multi-volume Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources, The New Media and Cyber cultures Anthology and The Penguin 1857 Reader. His work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, Jl. of Postcolonial Writing, Jl. of Commonwealth Literature, Ariel, Changing English, Jl. of British Studies, Prose Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Journeys, New Zealand Jl. of English Studies and other international journals.