'What is intellectually stimulating is the variety that this volume offers - the ways in which individual essays bring into light a new body of archival sources as well as the manner in which eash essay offers a specific geographical-cultural episode of a larger pan-Indian narrative around the colonial "civilizing mission."' —Srirupa Prasad, 'Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History'

'Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress': Britain's Ideology of a 'Moral and Material Progress' in India. An Introductory Essay; PART I: TRIAL AND ERROR: 1. Dealing with Oriental Despotism: British Jurisdiction in Bengal, 1772-93; 2. 'A Race of Monters': South India and the British 'Civilizing Mission' in the Later Eighteenth Century; 3. Between Non-Interference in Matters of Religion and the Civilizing Mission: The Prohibition of Suttee in 1829; PART II: ORDERING AND MODERNIZING: 4. 'The Bridge-Builders': Some Notes on Railways, Pilgrimage and the British 'Civilizing Mission' in Colonial India; 5. Taming the 'Dangerous' Rajput; Family, Marriage and Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Colonial North India; 6. What Is Your 'Caste'? The Classification of Indian Society as Part of the British Civilizing Mission; PART III: BODY AND MIND: 7. Sporting and the 'Civilizing Mission' in India, 8. 'More Important to Civilize Than Subdue'? Lunatic Asylums, Psychiatric Practice and Fantasies of 'the Civilizing Mission' in British India 1858-1900; 9. The Sympathizing Hear and the Healing Hand: Smallpox Prevention and Medical Benevolences in Early Colonial South India; 10. Perceptions of Sanitation and Medicine in Bombay, 1900-1914; PART IV: THE CIVILIZING MISSION INTERNALIZED: 11. National Education, Pulp Fiction and the Contradictions of Colonialism: Perceptions of an Educational Experiment in Early-Twentieth-Century India; 12. In Search of the Indigenous: J C Kumarappa and the Philosophy of 'Gandhian Economics'; 13. The Civilizational Obsessions of Ghulam Jilani Barq; Notes, Index