Towards the end of 2004, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, organized an exhibition on the economic and aesthetic exchanges between Europe and Asia during 1500-1800. The circulation of goods, ideas and people was celebrated, and the emphasis was on mutual profit. There was very little on the Bengal famine of 1770, the violence of the East India Company's suppression of agrarian dissent, and the destruction of traditional handicrafts and entire communities of weavers. Needless to add, there was no mention either of the lucrative opium trade that the Company carried on with China, offsetting the purchase of tea with the dumping of drugs on the population, or the fact that the East India Company had many dubious firsts to its credit: the first corporate multinational, the first drug cartel and the first mercenary armies.

What explains the purchase of this naïve view of the past on the public imagination? Colonialism has aged well. The violence of the post-colonial present characterized by the rise of religious fundamentalisms, racism, ethnic fratricide and state corruption has prompted many historians to look back to the 18th century with nostalgia. Everything appears more fluid in the past: identities, state formations and relations between people. The exemplar is William Dalrymple's The White Mughals, which viewed 18th century colonial society through the conceit of a romance between an English official and an aristocratic Indian woman. Love, like in the Hindi film, seemingly conquered all differences.

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