Constructing Regional Identity in Colonial India: A Study of the Imperial Gazetteer of India

Abstract

This paper will discuss how a sense of regional identity was constructed in colonial India using the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1909). It states that Gazetteer was not just a reference work, but an instrument of colonial spatial knowledge production. The paper examines the ways in which the colonialists systematized India into standard administrative units like provinces, divisions, and districts by concentrating on its Index, Glossary, terminology, and the classification structure. Qualitative textual analysis and discourse analysis are the two methods employed in the research to discuss how the classification, naming, and administrative vocabulary contributed to the colonial comprehension of regions. The results indicate that the Gazetteer stressed hierarchy, uniformity, quantifiable information, economic worth, and administrative applicability, and paid a relatively small amount of attention to cultural and local senses of place. In this process, space was the representation of regions as stable, similar, and controllable space instead of flowing social and historical space. The conclusion of the paper is that the Gazetteer was influential in creating a colonial vision of regional identity, which was in line with imperial rule and which would remain influential in subsequent interpretations of geography, territory and identity in India.