Afterword

Abstract

The boundary between lived experience and discursive representation, inherent in the formal division of this book, is in practice neither clear-cut nor sustainable, though it serves its purpose as an organising principle. Looking at individual writers’ representations of India, what comes over time and again is the complexity of what they perceive: that is, their sensory engagement with the materiality of India is both shaped by their previously formed expectations, and overlaid with their knowledge of the responses of others. Their expression of these perceptions is equally complex, formulated as it is in negotiation with existing metropolitan, colonial and indigenous