James Tod (1782-1835) spent twenty-two years in India (1800-22), during the last five of which he was Political Agent of the British Government in India to the Western Rajput States in north-west India. This book studies Tod's relationships with particular Rajput leaders and with the Rajputs as a group in general, in order to better understand his attempts to portray their history, geographical moorings and social customs to British and European readers.

The book highlights Tod's apparently numerous motivations in writing on the Rajputs: to bring knowledge about the them into European...