‘Orientalism’ and After : Impacting Feminist Theory in India

In the late 1980s, when I started a job as a lecturer in English at the University of Hyderabad, in a city well known for its feminist, leftist and eventually also Dalit politics, I found that many people were reading Edward Said's 'Orientalism'. They were mostly from English and comparative literature departments, and from history. Books travelled very slowly in those pre-internet and pre-liberalisation days, with many kinds of import restrictions being in place. My paperback copy of the Said book soon started coming apart because of the number of times students and colleagues photocopied it.