Oxford University Press in New Delhi in recent years has produced several collections of articles, for the most part previously published, written by senior scholars who work on India. These volumes—full disclosure: mine among them—serve to make such articles more readily accessible, even while they are less exciting than wholly new works of scholarship. Peter Robb has, in fact, divided his articles into two volumes, and he has provided an unusually substantial introduction as part 1 of this first volume. The introduction sets out a framework both for part 2 of the present volume, comprising four previously published studies, and for the articles of the second volume, Peasants, Political Economy, and Law: Empire, Identity, and India (New Delhi, 2007). As the shared subtitle of the volumes signals, a central theme in both is the role of the imperial state—its ideologies, laws, and policies—in shaping Indian modernity and, particularly, its role as a centrally important element in the constitution of modern political identities.

Robb's introduction, organized as three chapters, insists that dismissal of the importance of the state (e.g., as reflecting a Eurocentric bias) is misplaced, and that fundamental transformations at the heart of the modern history of India simply cannot be understood without attending to the rhetoric, technology, and patterns of governance that flow from colonial institutions, above all, the state. He points out, for example, that while it may be perfectly true that liberal rhetoric far outpaced actual policy, nonetheless the very social categories articulated in a debate or a law, even an ineffective law, “leaked into people's ideas” and helped shape seemingly natural categories like “men,” “women,” “workers,” or “landlords” (6). Similarly, a discourse of rights became a language for arguing and claiming the entitlements that formed the give-and-take of public life. Robb's argument about the importance of “categorization” as a centrally important activity of an imperial regime is one deserving serious attention.

Robb is particularly interested in liberalism, and specifically the liberalism of Lord Ripon, viceroy from 1880 to 1884. The most original parts of the volume, I believe, are those sections in the introductory chapters and in chapter 5 devoted to his viceroyalty. The two most controversial acts, for which Ripon's regime is best known, were a tenancy act and an act to extend the jurisdiction of certain Indian magistrate to Europeans; the former, as enacted, was highly limited, and the latter, after a great European outcry, was simply scuttled. Ripon also introduced municipal councils, on the liberal principle that Indians had to be represented in some aspects of a government that needed both information and taxes. However limited the outcome, Robb argues, Ripon's viceroyalty contributed to an expanding sense of what was expected of government. Robb makes the important point that the liberal claims to universality for its principles were always compromised in India by the simultaneous imperialist need to assert difference between rulers and ruled, a difference that unfailingly constrained liberal policies and is vividly illustrated by the correspondence of Henry Cotton, a senior civil servant, with Ripon (45–46).

Chapter 5 takes the specific issue of borders and boundaries, developed in the third chapter of the introduction, and applies its analysis to the extension of British control in the little-studied northeastern areas of Assam and, especially, Nagaland in the 1880s. There, the three administrative practices of establishing fixed borders, asserting a unification of sovereignty, and extending state responsibility for its subjects’ progress, together, Robb argues, were key to creating not only structures but also a language and a consciousness that shaped public life. Ripon's papers yield an evocative example of the concrete actions involved in disarming a population, sedentarizing it, creating new elites, and articulating a rule of law in place of the village burnings, collective punishments, and expeditions that colonial authorities had hitherto used for asserting control. It is impossible in a short review to note scholarship published after the writing of these articles, but Manu Goswami's brilliant Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004) is especially relevant here.

Robb's approach in the articles on Nagaland and on the (much-studied) Colin Mackenzie survey (chap. 4) do not tell us much about the preexisting culture that he rightly insists must be taken into account in understanding the solidarities that took shape in the colonial era. Nor do we learn anything nuanced about the reformulations that do in fact take place. Thus, in relation to the category of “Indian Muslim,” the subject of chapters 6 and 7, we do not learn why, if true, Muslims were “predisposed to choose religion as a basis for identity” (65). One problem is the limitation of working only in English-language materials on a subject like this. Chapter 6, on the trial of Maulvi Ahmadullah as a “Wahhabi” in 1865, in fact tells us very little about him and takes colonial sources far too uncritically. Chapter 7, on the Congress Muslim, Dr. M. A. Ansari (1912–35), suffers from dichotomies, above all, ones that make “religion” a monolithic concept in contrast to constitutionalism, secularism, and so forth. An umbrella term like “religion” needs to be disaggregated and attention paid to how the language of political theory, the relevant issue here, is actually argued. Ansari interacted closely with Islamic scholars who in those years were using a (vernacular) language of representative government, federalism, human rights, and international law to support an Islamic vision of a free India whose central government would be religiously neutral.