Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study in British Rule in India

First, I need to say something about how much more difficult this was for me to read--and I am used to reading pretty difficult stuff. I had not read this before and adopted it for our course on the recommendation of a colleague who teaches postcolonial literature and theory (and whose work I respect and admire).

When I began reading yesterday, I was tired. I had been excited about getting started but found myself having a difficult time following the argument; I guess I had expected something simpler, more straight-forward, not as historically specific, perhaps not as carefully argued?  Who knows?  When I nodded off at least twice, I put it aside.  Today, in the morning, my mind was considerably more alert and, this time around, I was prepared for the reading.  I went over some of the passages I had marked, reacquainted myself with the argument, the terms, and some of the names, and finished the introduction.

Most of the times, when I read scholarly prose--e.g. an essay or chapter pursuing a specific argument--I try to put the main points into my own words.  They may not be the central argument so much as the points I find of particular interest to my thinking, and, in this case, for the class--anything to do with reading in a colonial context.  This was not so easy with regard to this piece.  I learned a lot while reading, but most of what I learned (much of it new to me) I would have to reread, at least twice, before I can absorb it.  What I instantly made sense of, by contrast, were the broader arguments that I had previously encountered:
1. That the teaching of English Literature played an important role in enforcing and maintaining colonial rule in India
2.  More stunningly (but I had heard this before as well) it was in India that English literature was first taught in a systematic manner.

While reading, I was surprised by the wealth of information about the complexities and contradictions that marked British colonial attitude toward India, its literature, customs, beliefs, etc.
For instance, I was stunned by British (and I guess European) belief that "Oriental" tales were proper reading for British subjects but not for Indian natives who, it was argued, "lacked the prior mental and moral cultivation required for literature--especially their own--to have any instructive value for them." (5)

What, I wondered, does that say about ideas of reading, especially about reading "tales" meant to entertain? (Actually, now that I am writing about this, my own reading of the chapter is becoming much more interesting.)  Is the assumption that Western readers (enlightened readers) learn to read the tales as nothing more than entertaining tales--about exotic lands and people.  And perhaps the British were right to intuit that Indian readers would not have the same attitude toward these tales as British readers?  But what would their attitude have been?
(I should probably reread the introduction)

Finally, I am intrigued by how Viswanathan's history of English Studies in India speaks to Robert Scholes's thoughts on the function of the humanities in a posthumanist world: 
What would it mean to "teach" students to become fearless, critical reader of "foundational" texts, of the sort that British schools taught, in both Britain and India?  And what sorts of readers did these schools, according to Viswanathan, seek to produce?  And what sorts of readers do "we," in the USA, produce or hope to?