Introduction

When Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars appeared in 1983, both admirers and critics immediately recognized it as a landmark contribution to revisionist accounts of India's transition to a new colonial order. Bayly eschewed the conventional focus on the East India Company's impact on traditional society. He instead focused on the emergence of new kinds of Indian actors in the course of the early-modern period who inhabited the space between ruling elites and agrarian producers. These ‘intermediate groups’, he demonstrated, played a crucial role in shaping the dynamics of political transformation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in relation to both pre-colonial states and the emergent colonial order. The result was, without question, one of the handful of truly great works of South Asian historiography—a book to which scholars will return, whether with sympathy or with scepticism, to frame their narratives of this crucial period of transition. What made Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars so innovative was not primarily its focus on the agency of Indians in shaping the emergence of the colonial order under the British. That emphasis in fact placed it within a broad problematic it shared with other scholars of Asian history, including those who were otherwise among the most critical of Bayly's intervention: those associated with the Subaltern Studies collective (whose formation was almost exactly contemporary with it).Footnote ¹ The more striking intellectual achievement was rather the way in which Bayly was able to conceptualize developments in society and economy in early-modern South Asia as uncompromisingly specific to the region, yet without compromising the possibilities of comparison across regions. He was able to bring a scholarship deeply informed by regional specialization to bear on this history, without for a moment falling into the spatial silo-ing so characteristic of area studies.

This is the greatest legacy of his work, and the challenge it presented remains the key challenge for the field to this day: to repudiate the lazy integration of the history of the subcontinent into predictable and pre-scripted historical patterns and trajectories, without correlatively blasting the subcontinent out of its historical connections to the different worlds within which it has been embedded over the centuries. The category of ‘intermediate groups’ was not intended to homogenize those groups into a uniform ‘middle class’. Yet, at the same time, it treated the emergence of such groups in relation to processes of commercialization and state formation that were shared across and intertwined with different locations in and far beyond the subcontinent; and it offered a conceptualization of those groups in a way that made it possible to think about the specific structural positions they occupied, and the peculiar forms of mediating agency they exercised, in relation to other groups occupying similarly intermediate positions between state agents and producers in other parts of the world. The result was not merely the integration of South Asian history into wider historical narratives of early modernity; it offered the possibility that a new approach to South Asian history might make it possible to approach the comparative and connected histories of the early-modern world from the perspective of categories developed out of the specificities of South Asian history.

Nearly 30 years later, Bayly published Recovering Liberties.Footnote ² In between, he had extended his range of expertise across an extraordinary range of topics, from his initial grounding in the history of British India, to the history of the British empire more broadly construed, to the global histories for which he is best known beyond the field of South Asian studies. He brought the full range of these concerns to bear on what he construed as the history of a specifically Indian liberal tradition. He set out to frame another magisterial narrative, this time of the development of a crucial strain of modern Indian political thought from the early nineteenth century through to the twentieth—indeed, in some sense, through to the present. In a very broad sense, the book could be said to have reprised the strategy of the earlier work. Its analysis of the history of liberalism in India is little concerned with the liberalism of its colonial rulers; and it is as sceptical of any suggestion that liberal ideas and Indian traditions existed in parallel, incommensurable cultural universes as he is of the assumption that liberal values were simply an ever-present dimension of Indian tradition.Footnote ³ If, as Bayly had argued in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, the relationship between states and peasants was mediated in significant ways by the dynamic agency of intermediate groups, then why couldn't the history of Indian political thought find itself in an analogous space between imperial liberalism and regional traditions of interpretation, coexistence, and domination? If the agency of intermediate groups was not derived out of the agency of ruling elites (colonial or otherwise) but from the dynamics of social reconfiguration, then the history of Indian political thought could be imagined, not as an echo of metropolitan liberalism, but as a response to the shifting circumstances of colonial society. If that were the case, then the history of Indian liberalism would inhabit two spaces simultaneously: on the one hand, a specifically regional space defined by pre-colonial histories of state formation, commercialization, and territorial patriotism; and on the other hand, a space of circulating and parallel ideas that reached to the North Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. Indian liberal political thought could be part of a global intellectual history without thereby being reduced to a mere iteration of some more general story that we already know.

There is an enormous amount to admire in Bayly's last book. If in what follows, I focus on the intellectual dilemmas with which it has left us, it is not to disrespect the memory of a scholar whom I greatly admired. I was always astounded by his intellectual generosity and constructive kindness in the face of disagreement; the respectful egalitarianism and extraordinary modesty he displayed in interactions with scholars so much less accomplished (myself included); and the impossible equanimity and productive creativity he maintained in the face of the institutional burdens he carried. But to take stock of his death is to take stock of the state of the field he left behind. His turn to intellectual history and the history of political thought in the last years of his life was representative of wider developments in South Asian history; and the dilemmas that Recovering Liberties leaves us with are in many ways the dilemmas with which the field of South Asian history will continue to struggle for years to come. Chris always invited and encouraged respectful disagreement, and thrived on exposure to new and different approaches. This article is intended to be in the spirit of conversations that his death has unhappily foreshortened.

To write any history of liberalism, one must first have a sense of what traditions of political thought count as liberal, and what criteria determine inclusion and exclusion. Political theorists have a standard canon around which to construct such a characterization. Even in political theory, however, the question of whether ‘liberalism’ has ever actually been a coherent object of theoretical analysis, the degree to which the canon of liberal theorists is a retrospective fiction, and which elements of its primary representatives’ thought should be identified as the core of the ‘tradition’ that the canon claims to represent are all wide open to debate, as are the degree to which the core elements of the liberal tradition are to be found in the content of specific claims or in the performative forms that their argumentative presentation have assumed.Footnote ⁴

Yet the problem Bayly set for himself in attempting to expand the history of liberal political thought to India was even stickier, because he was trying to construe a tradition of liberalism without taking recourse to the ready-made contours of the European tradition. In opening up the history of liberalism in such a way that Indian thinkers could be construed as participating in its articulation and ongoing formulation, Bayly was decisively stepping outside of a discourse in which the established canon of Western political thought could adequately function as a centre orienting debates in political theory, even for those sceptical of the canon-function. While his biographical focus could be read as an attempt to constitute a new canon for a specifically Indian tradition of political thought, this only more acutely raises the question of what should count as inclusionary or exclusionary criteria in the absence of any authoritatively canonical list of authors or texts out of which to derive such criteria. There might be a canon of Indian political thought—but it is far from obvious how we should go about distinguishing the ‘liberals’ within that list. The only way to designate Indian liberals as ‘liberal’ was by implicit comparative reference to the canonical liberal theorists of Western Europe. Yet too stringent a definition of liberalism threatened to lock a historian of Indian liberalism into a narrow set of zero/one binaries: this author is liberal, this author is not, this text is liberal, this text is not, this argument is liberal, this argument is not . . .–. Any Indian history of liberalism would then necessarily have to express itself, willingly or otherwise, as a predictable series of judgements about affiliation and divergence. If Bayly set himself the task of identifying a specifically Indian tradition of liberalism, its specifically ‘Indian’ quality would then inevitably fall on the side of divergence—reconstituting India as Other. At stake in this tangle was not only the question of what it meant to think about South Asians as subjects of political thought, but also the question of what it meant to think of the specificities of South Asian history within the larger framework of world history.

In order to open a space for the kind of history he wanted to tell, Bayly relied on two key strategies. First, in order to lessen the power of the colonial binary and of the canon to delimit the boundaries of liberal argument, he sought to unearth Indian connections to the larger world of self-conscious liberalism that was playing such a crucial role in political movements across southern Europe and the Americas. Secondly, he deliberately proceeded from a minimalist characterization of liberalism: liberalism, as he would later note, was for him ‘the “least bad” heuristic category of political thought’.Footnote ⁵

Bayly used liberalismo as a means to leverage open the space of discourse constitutive of ‘liberalism’. Liberalismo allowed him to distance himself from an account that emphasized unilateral flows of influence diffusing outwards from Britain, and to appeal instead to Maurizio Isabella's conception of a transnational ‘liberal international’. This approach has a very big advantage: it expands the space within which liberal ideas were being produced without blurring the lineaments of what counts as liberalism. It can do this because the liberalism Bayly was invoking was based on a self-conscious identification with a common front opposed to the reactionary regimes of the post-Napoleonic period and bound together by networks of direct communication.Footnote ⁶ The key figures around which the first phase of Bayly's story centres—James Silk Buckingham and Rammohan Roy—fit well into this conception. Even later in the century, there is little doubt that Indian liberals saw the Gladstonean Liberals as the key to their hopes—and, indeed, it was as a Liberal that Naoroji contested and won his seat in the British parliament. It might be too pedantic to demand that an individual can only be considered a liberal if they identify themselves explicitly in such terms. Nonetheless, a workable approach to determining the content of liberalism might well be to see liberalism as defined by a broad identification with a common cause that was talked about at the time as ‘liberalism’.

Such an approach presumes some broad common commitments and a shared sense of what they were fighting against, but it does not presume that liberalism was itself any overly specific paradigm of normative propositions or institutional commitments. Bayly introduced us to the concept of liberalism that underwrote his narrative as a ‘broad and internally contested range of thought and practice directed to the pursuit of political and social liberty’.Footnote ⁷ Indian liberals shared some characteristic commitments like an opposition to despotic governance, the advancement of Indian representation in state institutions, the defence of property rights, a free press and free assembly, and the promotion of education. But what appears to have made these various commitments ‘liberal’ was first and foremost that it was (broadly self-identified) ‘liberals’ who embraced them. Several decades of Cambridge scholarship have been spent demonstrating that a commitment to ‘political and social liberty’ was central to the development of neoclassical forms of political thought that long preceded the innovation and embrace of the kinds of argument that nineteenth-century liberals advanced. Such pre-liberal, neoclassical commitments might similarly entail opposition to despotic governance or a defence of property rights—but such commitments were then being defended on the basis of presuppositions potentially quite different from Benthamite or Smithian or natural law assumptions; or on the basis of presuppositions that were shared by some liberals, but that therefore could not be characterized as exclusively or constitutively ‘liberal’ in character. From this perspective, an Indian liberalism identified in terms of the post-Napoleonic conjuncture and a loosely defined commitment to liberty might be said to have been ‘conjunctural’ all the way down to the specific content of its commitments. That is, in so far as it was part of the larger moment of liberalismo, it could encompass within its range of possibilities specific forms of argument that were variously ancient-constitutionalist, neoclassical, utilitarian, political-economic, or communitarian in form. It was not ‘liberal’ in the more substantial sense of participating in a common conceptual or normative paradigm that was characteristic of ‘liberalism’.

Given the remarkable range of arguments and commitments that travelled under the banner of liberalism—just in nineteenth-century Europe, let alone in the wider circulation of self-identifiedly ‘liberal’ thought and practice—this nominalism would appear to be a prudent approach. It allowed Bayly to think about liberalism in India as specific without thereby collapsing into the kind of identity/divergence principle that could otherwise so easily overcome the project. But it carried some difficult implications for the larger agenda of his argument in Recovering Liberties. The significance that Bayly attributed to Indian liberalism did not rest solely on its centrality to the development of forms of political argument and political organization in the nineteenth century. He clearly wanted to show that Indian liberalism bequeathed to the subcontinent a set of commitments to equity and justice that saturated even the political thought of twentieth-century intellectuals who were self-consciously hostile to liberalism. Liberalism thereby helped to lay intellectual foundations for the establishment and longevity of post-colonial India's democracy. This is why he spoke of an Indian liberal ‘tradition’ rather than an Indian liberal ‘moment’.

Bayly's specifically causal argument about the power of ideas was (I think) a bit muddy, but his larger point here was very important. One cannot make sense of many key developments in twentieth-century Indian political thought—including forms of political thought that were distinctly post-liberal or even anti-liberal in inclination—without recognizing the role that nineteenth-century Indian liberals had played in elaborating their conceptual point of departure. Bayly's argument for the longevity of liberalism's legacy in India, however, turned more on the claim that specific arguments and norms articulated by Indian liberals persisted across the divide that separated them from their predominantly post-liberal ideological successors after the First World War. It is quite reasonable to argue that a commitment to, say, popular sovereignty was first made available in Indian political thought by Indian liberals. But if what made some specific commitment ‘liberal’ was no more than the fact that it was embraced as part of a larger constellation of commitments by the nineteenth-century ‘liberal international’, then there is no reason to consider that commitment as an expression of the persistence of liberal thought once it has been divorced from the ‘common front’ that constituted liberalism's coherence as a political formation. If the commitment to popular sovereignty was espoused on strikingly new grounds, or as part of an ideological formation that was deeply hostile to the specific conceptions of ‘political and social liberty’ that the ‘liberal international’ had advanced, then in what sense should it still be considered part of liberalism's legacy? From this perspective, what gained Bayly the breadth of his vision might be seen to cost him his case for the longevity of liberalism's role in the political development of post-colonial India—and vice versa. Both dimensions are indispensable for any serious engagement with the history of political thought; and we are left in the wake of Bayly's death to continue the task of working out a coherent way to render them commensurable.

‘Liberalism, in any rigorous definition, certainly did not exist in pre-colonial India, any more than it did in European classical antiquity.’Footnote ⁸ Bayly's point here was not to emphasize the need for a ‘rigorous definition’, but rather to emphasize that his capacious conception of Indian liberalism was as capable of finding intellectual resources in pre-colonial Indian traditions—‘the tradition of spiritual openness in both the Hindu and Muslim traditions, represented by the Kabir Panthis, the Chishti Sufis or the memory of the Emperor Akbar, for instance’Footnote ⁹ —as European liberalism had been capable of finding them in the traditions of classical republicanism and feudalism. Indian liberalism's novelty did not correlatively imply an impassable separation from the repertoire of political and social discourses that had preceded it. One of Bayly's main aims in Recovering Liberties was to emphasize the centrality of Indian liberals’ engagement with indigenous political, social, and religious traditions and practices to their thought. Bayly used his ‘non-rigorous definition’ of liberalism as a basis to conceptualize that ongoing engagement as something more substantial than a dressing-up of conventional liberal concerns in the fancy dress of Indian particularity. Some of Bayly's most novel insights derive from this focus on the ways in which Indian liberals mined the subcontinent's own histories for ways to conceptualize, institutionalize, and domesticate liberal aspirations.

But does taking this engagement seriously necessarily mean ascribing specific causal agency to the indigenous histories to which those liberals appealed? And, if so, how much agency? It clearly makes a difference to the character of an Indian liberal's arguments whether they identified Indians’ capacity for participation in political life in the original principles of Islam or in the longstanding institution of the panchayat. How will we know, however, whether that difference is something driven by the engagement with India's pasts, or whether it is driven by other presentist concerns that directed Indian liberals to specific kinds of pasts? The problem I have in mind here is most sharply posed in Bayly's insistence that the communitarian turn in later nineteenth-century Indian liberal thought was tied to its domestication in Indian traditions that were less committed to the normative priority of the individual. That that communitarianism did indeed look to the subcontinent's pasts to find forms of articulation and rubrics of elaboration is indisputable. But in what way were those traditions causal agents of liberalism's communitarian turn? This is an inescapable question as soon as one recalls that liberalism was beginning a tilt towards communitarianism in many places in the second half of the nineteenth century—including in Britain itself. This surely militates against any suggestion that domestication to the specificities of the Indian context drove the shift in India. If we do not particularly need the causal agency of Indian traditions to make sense of what Bayly seemed to have identified as the most strikingly ‘Indian’ characteristic of ‘Indian liberalism’, then we might surely be left to wonder to what extent we can speak at all of an ‘Indian’ liberalism in any sense more substantial than a strictly geographical one.

Bayly rightly insisted on the newness of liberalism in nineteenth-century India. Yet, in the absence of any ‘rigorous’ identification of liberalism as a form of political thought and practice, it is hard to know what exactly was new about Indian liberalism other than the specific conjuncture out of which it had emerged. The same problem that holds for the question of liberalism's longevity above applies to the issue of its novelty. I am nothing if not sympathetic to Bayly's insistence on the historical specificity of Indian liberalism. Yet I worry that he had not yet provided us with adequate analytic grounds to grasp that specificity. What that implies is a profound dilemma that must confront any world historian, and which, unsurprisingly perhaps, had already made itself present in his earlier work, The Birth of the Modern World. There, Bayly had systematically engaged a series of concepts that had largely emerged out of the study of the North Atlantic experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then probed their capacity to serve as broader terms with which to frame discussions of comparisons and connections. In the process, a concept like the ‘public sphere’ could be extended to describe developments in many other places in the early-modern Afro-Eurasian world. The gain was clear: we could now grasp the development of new kinds of ‘publics’ in many different but nonetheless interconnected locations across Afro-Eurasia through the expanded hermeneutic range of the concept of the ‘public sphere’. Any notion of a binary opposition between West and non-West on this basis had thereby been undermined. In the process of its abstraction, however, the concept of the ‘public sphere’ necessarily lost much of the analytic specificity that made it important to those who had embraced and elaborated it in the first place. Whether or not one agrees with Habermas, it was the specific analytical purchase of his characterization of the normative power of the modern bourgeois ‘public’ that made it a concept worth arguing over. Reducing that specificity might still leave us with valuable insights, but they are not the same insights as those proposed by a more stringent formulation. Seen in this light, Bayly's extraordinary breadth of vision might have come at the necessary cost of a degree of conceptual rigour—just as Habermas's conceptual rigour might have bound us to the very geographies that Bayly was trying to exceed. Once again, we are left with the task of trying to find a coherent path forward in the face of a choice between two indispensable dimensions of historical inquiry, and we will surely miss Chris's voice in deliberating that course.

Seen in light of his career as a whole, the dilemmas with which Recovering Liberties has left us return us to the core promise of Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars—that is, to find a way to think of the specificities of South Asian history within the larger context of their embeddedness within historical processes that have always exceeded conventional regional and civilizational geographies. That task remains as fresh and compelling today as it was when Bayly presented it more than 30 years ago. With his turn to the history of political thought, Bayly gestured towards an enormously important task: to make sense of the diversity of political imaginations that exist in the world today, without ignoring the role of geographical space in shaping that diversity, yet also without reducing that diversity to the autonomous operation of discrete cultures and traditions. His role in driving these conversations forward has sadly been interrupted, but he will nonetheless remain a part of those conversations for many years to come. I believe that it would have pleased him to see that he has left us with a set of dilemmas that continue to provoke further reflection, further debate, and further research.