Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is a seminal work in the field of postcolonial culture studies. It critiqued Western scholarship about the Eastern world for its patronizing attitude and tendency to view it as exotic, backward and uncivilized. Arvind Sharma, longstanding professor of comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, now takes up the Palestinian academic's groundbreaking ideas - originally put forth predominantly in a Middle Eastern context - and tests them against Indian material. He explores in an Indian context Said's contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West.

Scholarly and accessible, The Ruler's Gaze throws fresh light on Indian colonial history through a Saidian lens.

Dr Arvind Sharma was appointed Associate Professor in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1987, where he is now the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion. His previous books include Our Religions, Hinduism and Its Sense of History and Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, among others.