The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography.Footnote 1 Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography.Footnote 2 One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, who themselves claimed liberal terminologies and pressed forth liberal arguments. Are they to be assessed by the same criteria as European liberals who argued for the rights of the individual, the free press, and individual property rights?
Significant scholarly attention has been placed on Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), the iconic philosopher, political theorist, and reformer, and, by most accounts, the first liberal of India. However, though Roy's life is well documented and researched, like that of the Calcutta in the era of the British East India Company in which he lived, the Indian intellectual landscape from Roy's death in 1833 through the rest of colonial India regarding Indian liberal thought and practice is quite hazily understood. One particular strand of historiography deems the search for an indigenous Indian liberal tradition actually quite useless, and perhaps impossible, as the racialized distinctions of colonial India were so stark, and the ideological walls that liberalism itself built so impenetrable, that liberalism for Indians was simply not possible.Footnote 3 Another strand argues that Indians after the Roy moment of the 1820s moved away from liberalism toward “culturalism,” a form of Indian nationalism that emerged out of the misrecognition of the materialist foundation of the abstract subject in the category of abstract labor in capitalism.Footnote 4
And yet in his new book, Recovering Liberties, C. A. Bayly has set out to document and examine a range of Indian intellectuals, reformers, and philosophers who, for him, were liberals. And through them, he has attempted to tell the story of Indian liberalism writ large. Is the enterprise itself, to chart Indian liberal thought in the colonial period, an intellectually tenable one? As Bayly himself suggested in his earlier landmark The Birth of the Modern World, liberalism was “Western exceptionalist,” except for Rammohan Roy.Footnote 5 He gestured to a broader world of liberalism beyond Rammohan Roy without providing any substantive details. In this work, he addresses what happens when he takes that further step.
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A revision of his Wiles Lectures given at the Queen's University of Belfast in 2007, Bayly's Recovering Liberties offers a synthetic and at times detailed view of Indian liberalism's history from the 1780s to 1950. Claiming that “liberalism was much more than a discourse masking the exercise of social and political power,” Bayly argues that liberalism was instead a cultural project, inclusive of “political representation, the obligations of the state or the basic meaning of the Good Life” for Indians (1–2).
This cultural project included a range of religious and other influences specific to India, and distinguished liberal politics as particularly Indian. Bayly details in the introduction how liberalism in India held elective affinities with Euro-American ideas, but emphasizes that “even if Europeans or Americans set the broad terms of debate Indians did not simply copy Western ideas from the texts they received through metropolitan sources . . . [but] cannibalized, reconstructed, and re-authored” those ideas (3). What made Indian liberalism distinctive, in Bayly's account, was that unlike British liberalism, “Indian liberalism was embattled from the beginning by powerful ideologies that largely rejected it”—including communism, Hindu nationalism, subaltern revolt, and other such challenges (5). A concern for private property, a free press, and rights for free association linked Indian liberals to their European counterparts, but Bayly describes how Indian liberals selectively used elements of Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions as well as various types of historicism, specific to Indian intellectual circles, within their liberalism. This distinguished Indian liberalism from being a mere “copy” of liberalism in the West.
Bayly offers a methodological principle that he maintains throughout the work, of sustaining both an “upward” (developing out of actual human experiences) and “downward” (proceeding from intellectuals to affect everyday life) hermeneutic strategy for understanding the history of ideas. Bayly contextualizes Indian liberal thought from 1800 to 1850 in British, European, and US arenas, to develop “the notion of a global or trans-regional sphere of intellectual history” with a primary focus on the great Indian liberal, Rammohan Roy, termed by Bayly a “proleptic civic republican” (42, 50). Roy, like many British liberals, focused on issues like the constitution, juries, and a free press. His emphasis on the constitution linked him to British radicals like Samuel Burdett, Sir Richard John Cartwright, and William Cobbett, and also presaged later Indian thinkers like Jyotirao Phule, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, major protagonists in later colonial India (51). Rammohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, and others like Ram Raz in Madras debated amongst themselves about the ways juries should be composed as well as the role of press freedom and public order.
Bayly points to a landscape built by Roy but nonetheless inclusive of several other voices beyond Bengal. In particular, Bayly builds his analysis of liberalism beyond Roy with a consideration of Bal Shastri Jambhekar, a “direct parallel to Rammohan Roy” (121). In the work of Jambhekar, Bayly finds condemnations of sati (the practice of widow immolation, first critiqued in the modern era by Roy himself, which led to the abolition of the practice), nautch dance practices, and other local traditions. Bayly grounds this discussion in global themes, such as the worldwide assault on slavery (Indians often couched their critiques of local traditions in languages of slavery and abolition) and a concern with human progress, while also yoking it to the specifics of Indian issues and the reform of religious practices not deemed progressive. Through examples like Jambkhekar and others, Bayly shows how a generation of Indians in the from the 1830s to the 1860s “created a sociological imagination, and notions of class and oppression not derivative of, but analogous to, Euro-American notions of slavery and disempowerment” (131).
In a further expansion of his analysis of liberalism beyond Roy, Bayly looks at “newspapers, educational foundations, law, public meetings, and learned societies” such as the Bethune Society, the Dalhousie Society, the British Indian Association, and others attached to Calcutta (132). He shows how liberals were imbued with the forensic and oratorical skills honed in the Brahmo Samaj, a society aimed at reforming Hinduism and Indian religion, begun by Rammohan Roy himself in the 1820s. As the colonial Indian context dictated that race and other controversial topics were officially banned, Indians focused on issues like “true” religion, true science, and good literature. Within this foundation he discusses pivotal nineteenth-century thinkers like Girish Chandra Ghose, Bholanath Chunder, Keshub Chunder Sen, and B. M. Malabari. All of these thinkers created what Bayly terms a “benign sociology” of India, or selective appropriations of metropolitan discourses of race and cultural differentiation to describe an emergent modern Indian cultural landscape. This “benign sociology” was enacted by these writers as they traveled to different portions of India and in the service of liberal reform of Indian cultural practices. All of these thinkers had deep ties to the public worlds of learned societies, newspapers, and Western education. However, as opposed to merely mimicking nineteenth-century race science, these men imagined a cultural order in India, influenced by nineteenth-century European thought about hierarchy in caste, race, language, and region, but through their own empirical observations and in the service of the reform of outmoded rituals and corrupted religious practices. This was significant as these Indian thinkers would place the worlds of whiteness on display and situate class hierarchy, alcohol consumption, and greed in the West as equally in need of reform as Indian practices such as child marriage and the bigotry evidenced by certain caste groups.
In addition to creating a “benign sociology” of India, these liberals initiated a form of what Bayly terms “counter-preaching,” which involved addressing certain criticisms back to the colonial power. From the 1840s to the 1880s, in what Bayly calls the “maturing of benign sociology,” Indian liberals incorporated aspects of their education and training in Western subjects, such as statistics and economics, to critique the policies of the colonial government. Counter-preaching in action was initiated by a range of thinkers, including Girish Chunder Ghose, Phirozeshah Mehta, Kishory Chand Mitra, Dadabhai Naoroji, R. C. Dutt, and Pran Nath Saraswati. Using statistics, Ghose and R. C. Dutt, for example, argued that impoverishment and famine were not natural outcomes of human improvidence and overpopulation, but rather derived from excessive enhancements of rent and extra-market coercion. Mitra, in 1866, directly critiqued John Stuart Mill's proscriptions against state action during famine by advocating for state intervention and enhanced irrigation in times of crisis, contravening liberal orthodoxy at the time. This demonstrates how Indians were not only close readers but also critics of liberal thought in colonial India. Meanwhile, other liberals, like Naoroji, Malabari, Keshub, Vidyabhusan, and Telang, all used philological, textual, and various historicist arguments to develop ideas of an Indian political economy and the rationality and value of Indian religious and literary cultures. As Bayly succinctly puts it, “they proclaimed India's racial and civilizational equality with the West, using increasingly sophisticated historicist arguments and fashioning an original political ethics out of fragments of Western arguments and the Shastras” (204).
The ending years of colonial India are examined through individuals like Radhakamal Mukherjee and B. R. Ambedkar. Bayly shows how these liberals were deeply invested in the central tenets of liberalism but also committed to reworking Indian textual traditions and histories as well as using Indian data to rework theoretical and political models of liberalism. This serves as an example of the upward hermeneutic in action. Ambedkar, the best-known in the global anglophone world, “represents a transformation and reorganization of principles once described by Rammohan: the ancient constitution, need to protect the vulnerable, India as a federal unity, and the working of religion in society as the origin and guarantee of human sympathy and intercommunication” (305). A long analysis of Ambedkar demonstrates Bayly's thesis: Indian liberals were at once engaging their own traditions and at the same appropriating and critiquing existing liberalism to better serve the needs of Indians.
Bayly concludes by reflecting on the long life of liberalism by stating that “liberalism was a broad field on which Indians and other South Asians began not only to resist colonial rule but to engage in debates about the Good Life as would-be citizens of a global republic” (344). India, according to Bayly, had its own Sonderweg: Indians clung to representative government and democracy in the face of colonial oppression, mass murder, endemic corruption, and restrictions based on caste “reservations” and economic inequality. The long-lasting nature of liberalism is not, for Bayly, a result of colonial imposition, as “British liberal ideas were deconstructed and reassembled to reflect Indian conditions and structures of thought” (346). These Indian structures of thought included Indic and Indo-Islamic textual and lived traditions, enlivened by tropes and themes from Indian classics, neo-Vedanta, and, particularly, the Bhagavad Gita. His final statement on liberalism relates to the durability and longevity of liberal ideas in India: “Indian liberalism as a diffuse sentiment and a set of loose political practices has apparently outlasted socialist centralization, Gandhianism, and even thus far, Hindutva” (357).
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Going beyond Rammohan Roy is a difficult task and Bayly succeeds in identifying and productively analyzing a range of thinkers who may be new to South Asian historians, and of whom other audiences have certainly not heard. This success is derived from his survey approach, as the book is a compendium of lectures. However, his analysis of most of his figures who wrote and lived after the death of Rammohan Roy remains superficial, in large part because it is tethered mostly to English translations. He includes a selected bibliography with a few Hindi titles, but most of his citations in the text are from secondary sources, biographies, collected speeches, and English-language newspaper articles. This approach stems, again, from his effort to produce a survey. But for a serious consideration of a subject that requires substantial analysis of ideas as they were originally expressed, it is odd that Bayly offers no discussion of how to deal with Indian linguistic diversity, modes of reading across languages or linguistic contexts, or the methodological issues raised when using English translations.
Furthermore, using only English for prolific thinkers who wrote in Sanskrit, Persian, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, and a few other languages leads to a methodological point about liberalism's coherence and ability to possibly transcend particularity. In 2004, Bayly recommended an approach “to global intellectual history which leaves room for innovative political thought, yet stresses the resilience of old ideas of good government and proper deportment in emerging social and political movements.”Footnote 6 In Recovering Liberties, Bayly provides an example of this strategy in his attempt to situate liberalism in India outside Roy and beyond Bengal after the early 1800s. He does this by focusing continually on the Indic sources for Indian liberals, and the lived experiences of Indians on the ground, interpreted by a range of thinkers in various languages, such as the rights of seamen, the representations of Indians on juries, and localized and quotidian forms of discrimination, emerge as central for Indian liberals. By focusing on these themes, he manages to put lesser-known figures such as Jambhekhar and Radhakamal Mukherjee into conversation with much more familiar thinkers such as Girish Chunder Ghose, Keshub Chunder Sen, Sayyid Ahmed Khan, and Syed Amir Ali.
However, Bayly also consistently refers to Indians as avatars of other Indians or non-Indians: Rammohan Roy, Bayly says, is the Bengali Benjamin Constant, Bal Shashtri Jambekhar is a Maharasthrian Rammohan Roy, Christopher Elliott is a Ceylonese Buckingham, Pran Nath Saraswati “an antagonistic version of William Gladstone,” Radhakamal Mukherjee the Indian Spencer (72, 121, 128, 186, 289). What is to be gained by doing this? The continual use of various cultural labels or personifications implies that liberalism was created somewhere else as a coherent set of ideas (in Great Britain, by and large, or by Rammohan Roy as the “originator” of Indian liberalism) and then Indianized or regionalized later, as Indians “cannibalized, reconstructed, and re-authored” liberal ideas, using them to assault the moral derelictions of their rulers (3). If indeed Indians went so far as to “re-author” these ideas into a manner that was not necessarily comprehensible as liberal, why classify them as liberal in the first place? On the other hand, if the canvas of liberalism is so large, then why continually define these iterations as “Indian”? Why aren't the Indian components worthy of transcending the label “Indian”? After all, the premise of Bayly's argument is that British liberals were never merely “British.”
This avoidance of a clearer route toward identifying what is liberal in Indian thought leads Bayly to continually mention “elective affinities” between Indians and non-Indian thinkers.Footnote 7 These observations are tantalizing, but are not pursued in any systematic philological, textual, proposopographic, or sociological way. Therefore, readers are left with a maze of free-floating conjunctures. For example, in his section on the anti-caste reformer B. R. Ambedkar, Bayly discusses his affinity with the “Dewey tradition”:
Dewey himself emerged from the Unitarian freethinking and anti-slavery tradition that had an early Indian analogy in Rammohan's Hindu Unitarianism and the anti-casteism of Phule in Ambedkar's own Maharashtra. Equally, Boas had emerged from the universalist tradition represented by Alexander von Humboldt, which was given new force by the 1848 revolutions. (300)
This maze of linkages claims that a global conjuncture of antiracism and anti-caste-ism coalesced in Ambedkar from a tapestry of influences. But what are we to make of this jumble of conjunctures, in which many thinkers across the Anglo-American-European-Indian spectrum share a “deep affinity”? What explains this “deep affinity”? Without providing a systematic consideration of whether the ideas of Ambedkar, Radhakamal Mukherjee, and others were perceived and received as liberal both in Indian intellectual traditions and in Indian society, it is difficult to accept the blanket definition of these thinkers as “Indian liberal.”
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The microscopic problem of Bayly's linkages is connected to the macroscopic difficulty of the relationship between hegemony and the formation of ideas. Bayly mentions how nearly all Indians in his study “had been the victims of direct racist humiliation at some point in their lives” (11). In the first substantiation of his “upward hermeneutic” approach, he cites lascars (seamen) and their relation to rights and property. According to Bayly, this prompted the first iterations of liberal discussions in the 1820s and 1830s, as “it was in relation to a different type of right, those of mobile people—seamen, traders, and Indian soldiers—that some of the earliest Indian theories of modern polity and society were generated” (31). This is a powerful proposition, but can it be sustained as a coherent case for the upward hermeneutic at work? Precisely how much of Indian discussions of rights were based in recognition of “mobile people” and not landed rights? How much of the racism and lived experience of colonial India informs these ideas? Does the lived environment of racialization, segregation, and violence merely provide a backdrop for liberal ideas? Does it transform ideas into a shape that may not be recognizable in a metropolitan form?
These questions relate to the salvo launched by Partha Chatterjee in his recent Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. It contains a critique of Bayly's analysis of Roy, in the preview form published in this journal in 2007.Footnote 8 In Chatterjee's view, after the 1820s it was impossible for Indians—given the racism and civilizational difference that liberalism itself relied upon—to continue the sort of abstract liberalism initiated by Roy in the 1800s and 1810s. Chatterjee states that “there can be no linear history of liberalism in India from the battles in the early nineteenth century over a free press or the right of Indians to sit on a jury to the liberal–democratic constitution of the republic of India in 1950.”Footnote 9 Chatterjee asserts that early nineteenth-century battles over a free press (in which Roy played a key role, which Bayly details) occurred in a space of interracial commingling in which liberalism was possible for “nonofficial Europeans, Eurasians, and members of the new Indian elite.”Footnote 10 But as Chatterjee argues in his book, such an open space disappeared—never to return—by the 1830s, because of the structural racism of colonial Indian society and the unwillingness of European liberals to accept equality between Indian and non-Indian in both theory and practice. Therefore “Indian liberalism” from the 1830s onward was simply impossible. Roy, for Chatterjee, occupied a world that ceased to exist after the 1830s and simply has no connection to the later developments in colonial India.
Recovering Liberties functions partially as an extended response to Chatterjee's position. Bayly does not offer a “linear history” but does presume that Indian liberalism after Rammohan Roy comprised a coherent set of ideas developed by many diverse Indian thinkers working in different languages, such as Jambekhar, B. R. Ambedkar, Radhakamal Mukherjee, Girish Chunder Ghose, and Keshub Chunder Sen, as well as figures often not examined in South Asian history, like Munshi Abdullah, Lim Boon Keng, B. M. Malabari, James de Alwis, and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike. Bayly simply does not enter into a debate about liberalism's relation to empire; he rather identifies and probes how Indian thinkers in the colonial period thought about “liberties.”
When read with Chatterjee in mind, Bayly's approach makes sense only if readers accept his claim—unsupported by any sustained investigation—that the defense of such liberties was more than a mask of power. The claim itself depends on the Whiggish nature of Bayly's framework: since India is now a parliamentary democracy, with functioning liberal institutions, Bayly reasons, liberalism was the core idea that enabled the creation of the contemporary Indian state. Another interpretation of the present-day Indian state would show the vitality of Indian state institutions through the contingencies of decolonization, affected much more by global changes brought about by World War II and financial and international system-based politics that emerged in the 1940s.Footnote 11 If this interpretation is addressed, the intellectual landscape of Indian thinkers in the colonial period would then belong to a different sort of world. Anticolonial thinkers, then, like B. R. Ambekdar, Radhakamal Mukherjee, and others may have incorporated aspects of liberalism into their anticolonial, and perhaps other as yet unnamed, types of political thought. The trouble is that if the historical nuances of decolonization supplemented Bayly's interpretation of many of the figures under review, those figures might cease to fit in any recognizable category of “liberal.” Being liberal for colonial Indians may simply have been so different to being liberal in metropolitan European locales that the overarching appellation “liberal” may simply be unhelpful.
In his latest volume, Bayly goes beyond his magisterial Birth of the Modern World and continues to stimulate a vibrant current debate about the nature of modern ideas, institutions, and networks in global frameworks.Footnote 12 Identifying under-researched figures, isolating methods of intellectual history for India, and inquiring about the nature of liberalism in the waning days of the British Empire in India will spur future scholars of the topic into newly productive territory. In particular, Bayly's meticulous and insightful attention to the intellectual world outside Bengal and beyond Rammohan Roy will surely inspire fresh research and fresh readings. But what is the value of categorizing colonial India's past in Bayly's particular way?
Reflecting on this particular point leads one to consider Thomas Babington Macaulay's infamous “Minute on Education” of 1835, in which the great liberal announced the intention of the East India Company “to produce a class Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. Rather than accept the clichéd actualization of Macaulay's fantastical Indians who would be Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect, Bayly has instead offered a wide-ranging history of Indians whose tastes, opinions, morals, and intellects were not at all constrained by such a false dichotomy. But he has also reproduced—in reverse—the nineteenth-century liberal tendency to project back onto history (now after decolonization, postcolonialism, and intellectual insurrections about the meaning and purpose of history) a narrative that explains the present state of India. Because liberalism is shorn of any complicity with hegemony, Bayly ignores the ways the liberal Indian state, like the colonial state before it, has developed its various powers, at times through declaring a national exception, and at times through brute force, and never by contravening its putative liberal origins. Without engaging such history and its relation to the formation of ideas, Bayly turns liberalism into a transhistorical, mystical set of ideas that individual Indians were free to use for their own purposes.Footnote 13 As Bayly states on his first page, “Indian liberal ideas . . . were foundational to all forms of Indian nationalism and the country's modern politics.” One might be tempted to believe Bayly by reading about all the star-studded Indians in the book who appear alongside the Cobbets, Mills, Constants, and others, but only if one deletes from the equation the complications of power and hegemony that go into the making of ideas themselves.
