| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Michael Katten . Colonial Lists/Indian Power: Identity Formation in Nineteenth-Century Telugu-Speaking India. Electronic book. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. Site access $195.00.

Michael Katten centers his book around two interrelated issues: the change in categories of identity in nineteenth-century Andhra and the power of these formulations of category. The particular changes he traces are the products of "certain technologies of expression" such as the printing press and colonial bureaucracy, and with the proclivity, not as clearly spelled out, to assert solidarities or groupings that use the technologies at hand. While this is interesting (and also somewhat problematical), what is more interesting is Katten's unequivocal insistence throughout his book that the power of these categories lies in the fact that they are produced at the margin and not at the center. In Indian history, the power of category construction lay with ordinary Indians all the time, not unilaterally with the British and not even with them in adjustment with the protests of the periphery. Categories of the self should be seen as going beyond the usual structures of colonialism, class, state, and nationalism to a group's own imagining of its needs and maneuvering of available technology.

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