Orientalism is most often understood as a set of strategies to extend a european will-to-power over the asian world orientalism, empire, and national culture seeks to revise this view, and suggests that it was instead composed of a set of double practices in india , by virtue of the british reliance upon hindu scholarly intermediaries, the sanskrit pandits it is thus argued that orientalism was ultimately a much more ambiguous, and potentially subversive, enterprise, as indian sanskrit scholars also adapted the institutional and social underpinnings of colonial rule to produce newly-inflected, and often overtly anti-colonial, hindu identities