The anthropologist Richard Fox’s work on the Sikhs of the Punjab, takes a historical approach of looking at the Punjab Sikhs in north-western India through the writings, reminiscences and data of the colonial era. By developing upon Edward Said’s work on the Other in his seminal book, "Orientalism," Fox illustrates the importance of reconsidering historical and colonial history through the inverted gaze of the Other. As Fox argues, it is useful to investigate colonial and imperial power if we are to understand the local formations of culture and the transitions of postcolonial culture and society. Thus, through a look at the past and how it informs upon the present, Fox argues that culture is constantly in the making and, indeed, made by its understanding of the past and the present. In this way, culture is itself imagined along with the community through its collective understanding of its relationship to the past. Fox’s book is a detailed study of the Punjab Sikhs of the present day, through their relationship with the colonial and empirical structures of power the still hold sway through the collective sense of the past. Thus the postcolonial world continues to be formed and invented through their relationship to British colonial power and the structures inherited in Modern India and Pakistan from the former British political systems. Fox illustrates how the role of the contemporary social scientist is to address these former hegemonies of the past and look at the relationship to colonial power structures through the view of the Other. Thus, an anthropologist has to see their own position as a form of intellectual colonialism or imperialism, and continue to position themselves, their research, an the past in light of the subaltern culture.