Maskiell owns a couple dozen shawls and a comparable number of books about them. She spends much of her research time looking through the colonial records in London. She also studies documents in Philadelphia and New York City. Advertisers, for example, continue to portray the East and the nature of its work as unchanging. They say the West is always developing and progressing, but the East uses the same methods it's used for thousands of years.
Advertisers continue to emphasize the exoticism of the East, too.
They represent India as totally different from the West by focusing on its princes and royal houses, Maskiell said. They publicize its poverty and dust storms, but never the fact that India is one of the Silicon Valley's biggest supplier of computer experts. Maskiell first became interested in India as a teenaged babysitter. When she was an undergraduate student, she majored in Indian history. As a graduate student, she concentrated on women's history.