Inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism, he began a critical investigation of how social scientific knowledge was shaped by the colonial conditions of its production.
Imagining India was a critical survey of the field of Indology and argued that most scholarship consistently failed to treat Indians as rational subjects and knowing actors who were intelligently involved in the creation of their social worlds.
"The immense learning and analytical sharpness of the book is evident from the very first chapter"[2] Post-Orientalist Strategies explored ways of knowing India that are not so limited by colonialism and its legacies.
R. G. Collingwood's works, including An Essay on Philosophical Method and The Idea of History, were especially influential in Inden's thought during this period.
In general, in Inden's work the past two decades, the focus has been on the limitations of what he calls essentializing or substantializing discourses which understand agents as more or less reflections of a single, internally consistent idea.