Trautmann came across a stone inscription in Sanskrit near the entryway
of the Old Indian Institute Building at Oxford.  From viewing this, 
the special character of British concept of Aryan came to him as an 
epiphany. (page 3)

The overwhelmingly dark face of slavery over last thousand years in Europe
and Middle East led to a belief of that dark-skin means less civilized.  
India presented an enigma, a land populated by civilized people who are
dark skinned.  Andalusi, an Islamic writer from eleventh century says
that the Indians were the first nation to have cultivated the sciences,
and that though they were black, Allah ranked them above many white and
brown people.  At the end of the last century, consensus developed around
what Trautmann calls racial theory of Indian civilization: that the Indian
civilization is a product of clash and mixing of light skinned Aryan
invaders and dark-skinned barbaric Dravidians.  Trautmann calls this
theory the crabgrass of Indian history, which has been so far immune
to new information and he would like to uproot it.

Trautmann says his study lies within the territory first explored by
Bernard Cohn, who called it colonial sociology of India.  He focuses
on British Sanskritists who he believes provided theoretical structures
and directed the construction of ethnologies of India.

Trautmann says that Edward Said's book "Orientalism" (1978), although 
focusses only on French/British and Arabs, has had a dramatic impact on
Indianist scholars.  Said's argument is an extension to Michel Focault's
concept of power/knowledge: that power and knowledge implicate each
other.  The author believes that Said's book has created a sense that
"all academic knowldge about India .. is somehow tinged and impressed 
with, violated by gross political fact."  To Said, Orientalism is not
merely the intellectual product of Orientalists but "a Western style
for dominating, restructuring, and having an authority over it."
Trautmann says that to make Said's book useful for India, a double 
translation is needed: from Middle East to South Asia and from polemic
to analysis.

To help clarify different Orientalists and their positions, Trautmann
defines Orientalism(1) as knowledge produced by Orientalists, scholars
who knew Asian languages, and Orientalism(2) as European representations
of the Orient not necessararily by Orientalists.  James Mill and G.W.F
Hegel, who never set foot in India and knew no Indian languages, are 
leading architects of O(2).  O(2) is a parasitic of and frequently
in opposition to O(1).  Trautmann finds Said's idea of Orientalism as
monument-of-colonialism unsatisfactory and seems to believe that it 
is possible to examine the substance of Orientalism without justifying
colonialism.  Continuous reassessment of this body of work (O(1)) is
unavoidable because any view of India is built on and will continue to
build in part on the work by Orientalists.

In this book, Trautmann focusses on O(1), specifically on British
Sanskritists.  Orientalist study of India is British in origin, it
languished in Britain in later years and was taken up on the Continent,
especially by German scholars.