Kobor, Kelli Michele, Orientalism, the construction of race, and the politics of identity in British India, 1800-1930. Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1998. Brief summary.

“The central thesis of this dissertation is that orientalism should be seen as part of the modern global system of knowledge emerging from the colonial encounter of the 18th to 20th centuries. Whereas previous scholars of the orientalist project have tended to argue that it is an essentially Western field of inquiry, this study argues that orientalism is a fundamentally new intellectual construct, produced by British writers in association with Indian scholars. Through this Anglo-Indian orientalism, Western attitudes toward the classification of human “races” were introduced to South Asia.  The “racial science” that dominated so much of European scholarship in the mid to late 19th century—which in India mainly revolved around the identification of “Aryans” and “Dravidians” within the subcontinent—later provided a framework for both anti-colonial and several separatist political movements. The framework for this study is provided by the Asiatic Societies which British orientalists founded in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay at the start of the period.” The abstract.