Imperial Rule, Liberal Obligations

Uday Mehta, in his landmark study Liberalism and Empire, reflecting on the historic relationship between liberalism and Britain's Indian empire, makes the salient argument that liberal thinkers were quick to settle on the rule of imperial difference. After the East India Company had dispensed with the last remaining threats to its military supremacy in India during the early nineteenth century, most Britons, including reform-minded and enlightened liberals, looked upon India from an absolute position of authority. This is why, Mehta contends, liberal thinking in the empire acquired the “quality of confidence, inner certainty, and the perspective from which unhindered judgments can be issued” (Mehta, p. 11). One of the most suggestive aspects of Mehta's analysis of imperial liberalism is its attention to the pronouncements of liberal commentators on the capacity of Indian society as a whole for future progress. Not only did such a gesture anticipate the perpetuity of imperial rule, it emboldened a view of Indians as children in need of paternal guidance and Indian religious beliefs, despite their genuine antiquity, as superstitious nonsense. Such views were possible, Mehta says, precisely because India and Indians presented a distant and unfamiliar example of a moribund civilization, a tabula rasa where liberal experiments could be carried out afresh. Only one public figure, according to Mehta, advocated a starkly contrary position to this liberal drift: the orator, parliamentarian, and polemist Edmund Burke. Burke's invective against the political ambitions and corrupt excesses of the East India Company in India, exemplified by Governor General Warren Hastings, was based not on the future prospect of British rule in India, but on its present state of governance, which Burke found to be an abdication of Britain's moral responsibility. In this context, Mehta dwells on Burke's invocation of experience and sympathy in his case for the ethical treatment of Indian sovereigns and Indian subjects. Whether or not we agree with Mehta's recasting of Burke's conservative censure of Britain's Indian adventure as a radical critique of imperial liberalism in its time, his study provided a renewed and important context for subsequent discussions of liberalism in British India, especially the impact of Utilitarian ideas that made an impact on the colonial governance of India through the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill.

Eric Stokes (Reference Stokes1959, xi), in his authoritative discussion on India as a testing ground for Utilitarian ideas of governance in the realm of law, taxation, and education, argued that the Indian experience served to introduce “an authoritarian counter-current into the main tide of Liberal opinion” in England, raising doubt in the minds of many contemporary political thinkers about whether the possession of an empire ruled by despotism might prove “fatal to the cause of liberty in England.” It is worth recounting here, following Jennifer Pitts (Reference Pitts2005, 105), that Jeremy Bentham himself was far more critical than any of his followers of Britain's colonial acquisitions, especially James Mill, whose unbending views on the backwardness of Indians he did not share. Bentham did not consider Indians merely barbarous or inept, and observed that while they were subjugated, they still remained capable of telling good laws from bad, and detecting corruption and injustice (Pitts Reference Pitts2005, 118–19). Colonial rule not only was inimical to the happiness of mankind, it also encouraged despotism and corruption at home.

Moral Custodians of Empire

In his 1859 essay A Few Words on Non-Intervention, written in response to the Crimean War and the Suez crisis, John Stuart Mill announced that rules of reciprocity that govern the relationship between civilized nations could not be applied to the relationship between civilized nations and barbarians. Nations that had not yet progressed beyond the barbarian stage might in fact benefit from being “conquered and held in subjection by foreigners,” and in this case, wrote Mill, independence and nationality were “either a certain evil, or questionable at best” (Mill Reference Mill1859, 772). The French in Algeria or the British in India then should not be held culpable for a violation of the law governing the relationship between equal nations but, in fact, for the disavowal of imperial duty.

As Nadia Urbinati has pointed out, Mill made a fundamental distinction between tyranny and despotism. Unlike the tyrant, the despot wielded an absolute form of power eliciting both love and fear from its subjects. In other words, despotism was a specific form of denial of liberty (Urbinati Reference Urbinati2002, 176–77). However, just as parental authority over children and their subjection to such authority might be justified as a means for the nurture of their future autonomy as adults, despotism should be viewed as a necessary stage in the political tutelage of a nation. The exclusion of subjects from direct political participation in a colonial dependency could only be justified in terms of a responsible and mature despotism (Urbinati Reference Urbinati, Urbinati and Zakaras2007, 76–77). Liberty thus had to be measured not just against the general asymmetry of power, but within the particular order and vitality of civilizations. A vigorous despotism was the “best mode of government training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization” (Mill Reference Mill1861, 329).

In her recent study of the ideas of the preeminent jurist and historian Henry Maine, Alibis of Empire, Karuna Mantena makes a persuasive case that similar ideas of imperial paternalism espoused by Mill played a significant role in the redefinition of Britain's political writ in India during the decades after the Mutiny of 1857. This redefinition was most clearly articulated in the idea of indirect rule. The insubordination and violence that engulfed sections of native society were seen by many as a direct result of the native mistrust of missionaries and reformers. After 1857, Utilitarian and evangelical hopes for reform and redemption of Indians were dispelled, argues Mantena, in favor of a custodial conservatism. Such a stance was clearly expressed in the Queen's Proclamation of 1858, which acknowledged “with gratitude the solace of religion” and disclaimed the “right and desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects” (O'Malley Reference O'Malley1859, 5). The end of the era of liberal reform saw the return to a reaffirmation of racial and cultural difference.

Mantena argues that this attitude was particularly evident in the approach of Henry Maine, who pioneered an anthropological view of the primitive and traditional makeup of Indian society threatened and distorted by imperial rule. Maine was responding in part to a crisis of liberal governance, and his attempt to formulate a new basis for the knowledge of native institutions and practices, if Mantena is right, was based on a reinterpretation of theories of human progress and their relationship to history. India was different because Indians were stuck in a different historical epoch, and this difference could not be undone by any colonial administration, however well-meaning. The customs and practices of India, including such institutions as the self-governing agricultural village community, should be studied as the “living past” that European societies had left behind (Mantena, p. 50). While Maine's ideas seem consistent with contemporary conservative views advocating caution against tinkering with native Indian society in the name of improvement, they were also uniquely his own.

Maine advanced the theory that progress in human history took place in clearly identifiable stages (Mantena, p. 75). This was central to the distinction he drew between traditional status and modern contract, and his panoramic depiction of Indian people petrified in various stages of development. This temporal and comparative approach played a significant role in the codification of law in India and the promulgation of the Indian Penal Code of 1862, which Maine oversaw as a Law Member of the Viceroy's Council. Such legislative measures were not just an exercise of sovereign authority backed by sanction and force, but also a recognition of legal principles innate to the peculiar mores of Indian society. As he outlined in his tracts Ancient Law (1861) and Early Law and Custom (1883), the history of traditional ideas and institutions mattered in lawmaking, and it was incumbent upon modern jurists to question how the meaning and character of law had evolved over time.

The Indian empire provided an opportunity for Maine to study forms of primitive property and formulate his critique of both natural and Roman law, directing him to the study of communal property tied to village communities and to the comparative history of land rights in India, which he compared to similar institutions in Ireland and Russia. The gravitas of Indian civilization and history was essential to Maine's legal relativism. Liberal-minded legislators and administrators in British India, he impugned, in order to avoid conflict and confusion, had unwittingly imported legal maxims and economic doctrines about individual ownership, contracts, and the free market that undermined and belittled the “value, power, and interest of that great body of custom and inherited ideas …” that was India (Mantena, p. 147). Maine thus laid down the rules for a new legislative test based on an understanding of India as a traditional society not only removed in time and space from Europe, but also endowed with its own unique history. Imperial policy had been misguided about the obduracy of native customs and beliefs, and Indian society had in fact suffered from the wrongful application of Utilitarian models of progressive reform. Mantena suggests that Maine's forceful critique of imperial rule ultimately reinforced certain deeply held paternalist assumptions about imperial rule. Empire was not really the cause of Indian backwardness, but in fact, its cure. In the late Victorian empire, Mantena argues, such a notion ultimately served as an “alibi for permanent imperial rule” (Mantena, p. 177).

How far did other proponents of imperial authoritarianism, such as Maine's friend, council member, and successor James Fitzjames Stephens, need an exculpatory discourse or moral justification for a less restrained exercise of power? This is a difficult question. There is little doubt that a renewed sense of cultural difference, if not downright racial hubris, played a significant part in the conception of indirect rule. It might be worth pressing this question further and ask when indeed did a view of empire as a handmaiden of progress give way to Kiplingesque notions of thankless duty, or eventually to Orwellian perceptions of incapacity and resignation. Mantena is right to stress the overarching theme of liberal paternalism as a relatively undemanding form of legitimacy. It is an odd irony then that a strain of beneficent and fatherly authoritarianism in fact survived the ideological challenges to imperial rule posed by the upheavals of 1857. One might recall that as early as 1833, Thomas Babington Macaulay, speaking for the renewal of the East India Company's charter before the House of Commons, had described its role as an “enlightened and paternal despotism” (Macaulay Reference Macaulay1880, 3:74).

In the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, John Stuart Mill, who worked for over thirty-five years at the Examiner's Office of the India House in London, wrote a salvo of pamphlets and petitions defending the Company as a guardian of India's economic and political interest and casting doubt about its future as a crown colony (Zastoupil Reference Zastoupil1994, 159). Mill was against direct rule: “When a country holds another in subjection,” he wrote, it needs to be “held under powerful restraint” (Mill Reference Mill1861, 353). The Company, despite its alleged corruption and misgovernment, was a valuable, delegated, permanent body that functioned as an “intermediate instrument of government,” and it was a mistake to disband it (Mill Reference Mill1861, 339). An unqualified measure of liberty was not in the best interest of Indian subjects, precisely because it would be endowing them with fruits of the labor of others handed over to them without any effort of their own. Surely law and education could ameliorate despotism, but the pace of such progress had to be carefully regulated in a society that was in a different stage of civilization (Mantena Reference Mantena, Urbinati and Zakaras2007, 303). In this Mill might have anticipated Maine's ideas. Indians did not quite possess the natural freedom or the moral capacity for reason to merit a liberal constitution. However, for Mill, anthropogenic difference was not the absolute position that determined the condition for the political exclusion of Indian subjects from representative bodies (Mehta, p. 49). The difference between Britons and Indians was akin to the difference between adults and children. The fact that Indians had been entrusted to the care of a handful of Britons was merely a capricious result of the uneven march of human civilization. The moral duty of the colonizer was first and foremost to free native Indian subjects from the blind tyranny of previous regimes, and then perhaps from rapacious profiteers let loose by the unbridled free market and the corrupt excesses of imperial power.

Liberalism of the Governed

While British rulers of India in the latter half of the nineteenth century were busy debating the measures by which Indians would one day be taken into confidence in the governance of their own country, a handful of educated Indians had already begun to carve out their own intellectual and political space for an earnest pursuit of liberal ideas. In his recent book Recovering Liberties, C. A. Bayly makes a forceful case that by the time Alan Hume and William Wedderburn had begun to set up the Indian National Congress (1885), liberalism had come of age in British India. Liberalism was institutionalized through schools and colleges, newspapers, and colonial law courts as a paradigmatic body of ideas capable of converting an entire generation of Indians to a way of thinking about their own future. Bayly makes a useful, if provisional, distinction between the terms “liberalism” and “liberal,” admitting between them a “wide range of thoughts and practices” (Bayly, p. 1). Certain identifiable strands of liberalism, according to Bayly, stand out in the Indian context that have not been given their due place in history. In certain instances, these ideas were more ambitious and salutary than run-of-the-mill patriotic nationalism, promising not only liberation from the despotism of foreign rule but also the long-awaited fruits of representative democracy, equal treatment under law, freedom of political expression including a free press, the freedom of political assembly, and the enjoyment of private property under the law.

Bayly argues that the kind of liberal thinking that eventually emerged in India was not plagiarized but reconstituted. John Stuart Mill's idea, therefore, according to Bayly, “does not translate directly, either intellectually or conceptually” in the Indian context. Rather than a finished doctrine, the liberal impulse bequeathed to India was subtler and more persuasive, amenable in the long run to the demands of fairness and justice in an imperial dependency (Bayly, p. 4). While their ideas were conflicted and uncertain, often stymied by the prejudice of caste hierarchy and the vaunt of Westernized education, mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals from Bengal to Bombay developed their own burden of liberalism within the constraints of imperial rule. By the 1840s, Indian thinkers had begun to move away from the heady rationalism of old Benthamites, not the least perhaps because of James Mill's History of British India being seen as an affront to Indian civilization and its harsh diagnosis difficult to assimilate.

Bayly presents a wide cast of characters to make his case, including social reformers like the founder of the Brahmo Samaj, Keshub Chandra Sen, a tolerant man devoted to the cause of Vedantic thought; or the inflammatory orators of the Young Bengal group, who embraced all things English and warned against the stultifying weight of unquestioned religious dogma; or indeed the tireless Parsee reformer and social critic Behramji Malabari, who heaped caustic remarks on the social ills afflicting Gujarati society. His choice of some characters is surprising. They include the volatile Bengali playwright Girish Ghose, who penned one of the first commentaries on the origins of the Indian mutiny; Bholanath Chunder, a pioneer in travel writing; and a host of others from various walks of Indian public life—social reformers, pamphleteers, religious revivalists—figures who might not fit the usual description of the term “liberal.”

Bayly takes up Bengali historian B. B. Majumdar's thesis about the emergence of certain modes of liberal thought in imperial India as the result of education, heightened forms of civic association, and the burgeoning sphere of law, which began to make a decisive impact on the Indian political landscape. Here he makes an important point, that “Indian liberalism unlike its British counterpart, emerged against the background of persistent state violence” (Bayly, p. 173). It was not easy to take up the pen against the Indian empire at the height of its supremacy, which might be one of the reasons why so many Indians took up the cause of social and economic reform rather than direct political opposition, a habit that Bayly terms intriguingly as “benign sociology” (Bayly, pp. 19, 176). It is in this vein that R. C. Dutt began to write about the woes of the Bengal peasantry, and made the Lockean argument, partly filtered through Henry Maine, that the age-old ties between landlord and peasant had been destroyed, and that there were no manifestly natural leaders left (Bayly, p. 180). Dutt laid the foundations for an argument about India as a dependent economy.

Another example of such far-reaching perspectives on the material well-being of Indians under imperial rule was the Bombay school of statistical liberalism. Its prime exponent was Justice Kashinath Telang, who argued against doctrinaire free traders and spoke of more forthright action pace J. S. Mill, John Elliot Cairnes, and Herbert Spencer. Soon after, Dadabhai Naoroji, located in London, put forward the argument that the economic inequities of empire were contrary to the principles of just rule, and the persistent drain of both economic capital and resources to finance the acquisitive ends of empire was a blot on Britain's imperial character. Naoroji made the demand for Home Rule appear more amenable to the interests of India and Indians. Starving peasants in India and Ireland were not children waiting to be saved, but subjects who deserved basic rights and a fair standard of living.

In Bayly's wide-ranging study, a host of ideologies and beliefs appear under the guise of liberalism, stretching its very definition. The inclusion of the nineteenth-century Hindi writer and traditionalist Bharatendu Harishchandra of Benares, or of Pandit M. M. Malaviya, defender of Hindu interests and the advancement of the Hindi language, as ramifications of Indian liberal thinking begs the question of whether popular forms of religious and linguistic nationalism can reliably be traced to the influence of Bentham or Mill. It is possible that certain democratic and rationalist impulses behind movements of religious reform, as witnessed in the rise of Sikh associations in the Punjab, or the increasing appeal of the teachings of the Arya Samaj, could be attributed to the currency of liberal reform in a very general way. Similar ideas can also be found in Sir Syed Ahmad's attempt at reconciliation between the post-Mutiny Raj and reformist Islam, or indeed the less conciliatory public stance taken against imperial policies by early members of the Indian National Congress. However, they are not as clear cut as the political convictions of self-styled Indian liberals of the early twentieth century such as Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru or V. Srinivasa Sastri.

Bayly's capacious and at times somewhat unwieldy history does open up the question of liberalism as a criterion that affected all manner of politics in British India. How forthcoming were Indian liberals when it came to the injustices plaguing their society? Did they inherit the same paradoxes of imperial liberalism? It would be hard to argue against the basic contention in this book that on occasion Indian nationalists indulged, appropriated, and “cannibalized” the thought of British and American liberals to forge a language of rights and representations (Bayly, p. 11). However, the sequitur that eventually a truly Indian liberalism emerged across the divides of region, caste, and language is not as self-evident. There is much to be said about the democratic intent and altruistic posture of Indian political actors during the period of the rise of the Indian National Congress. The problem, of course, is how to separate liberalism from equally demotic forms of militant, anti-colonial nationalism. Ultimately, Bayly sees the rise of an indigenous liberal tradition in India as a “contentious and dialogic” response to the promises and failings of British colonial rule that created the conditions for the emergence of an educated and empowered political subject (Bayly, p. 187). Liberalism was thus not just a façade for the unrestrained exercise of power, or a device to placate native hostility and resentment towards foreign domination. Here Bayly turns briefly to Judith Shklar's arguments about liberalism rooted in the politics of fear. Shklar defined liberalism as having only one essential goal, to ensure the political conditions for the realization of personal freedom. She argued that all governments inhibit freedom by breeding fear and dispensing favors (Shklar Reference Shklar1998, 3). They also inflict pain and systematic, institutionalized cruelty. Bayly suggests that liberals in colonial India held on to their hopes and convictions despite their misgivings about the abuse of power, waging a Sisyphean struggle to wrest the smallest of political initiatives in a vastly iniquitous, hierarchical, and structurally oppressive society.

What was the ultimate dénouement of such liberal aspirations during the later phases of the nationalist movement in India? The arena of liberal political opinion, Bayly contends, operated independently of the traditional sphere of religion, and this separation broke down after 1914, when Indian liberalism lost its coherence. Some might question Bayly's summary judgment that after Gandhi, V. D. Savarkar, and the rise of a “sacrificing, ascetic subject,” this separation of religion and politics was no longer tenable and Indian liberal ideology “sank virtually without trace” (Bayly, p. 276). Such a stark formulation also seems on the surface to be at odds with the idea that virtually all forms of Indian political thought were ultimately influenced by some facet of liberal thinking. Indeed which aspects of liberalism could have appealed in similar ways to Hindu traditionalists, reformist Sikhs, Tantric practitioners, and Wahhabi Islamists? Or indeed, which elements might the leader of the Indian National Army, Subhas Bose; the founder of the Mexican Communist Party and the Bengali revolutionary, M. N. Roy; the poet Allama Iqbal; or the doyen of Hindu philosophy, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, have had in common? Bayly's sprawling account of these divergent figures, engaging and suggestive as it is, runs the risk at times of erasing any distinction between liberal and nationalist strands of Indian thought.

Agrarian Liberalism and Peasant Politics

In his recent book Liberalism in Empire, Andrew Sartori takes a very dissimilar and nonconformist view of liberalism and its relationship to the ideological foundations of the British Empire in India. Certain “normative forces of liberalism,” he argues, are manifest in “practices of commodity exchange” and in the regimes of labor that sustained landed property in colonial Bengal. Liberalism in Sartori's view has a deeply ambivalent relationship to capital, which oddly enabled and also resisted forms of inequity and expropriation. Here, if Sartori is to be believed, liberalism appeared in the peasant society of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal in the guise of the struggle over tenancy and rents. This, he argues, is a “diffusionist” approach to the history of imperial liberalism that focuses on indigenous and vernacular claims to land and its cultivation that have remained largely unexplored.

Sartori detects a certain liberalism from below, implicit in longstanding arguments in defense of landed property in colonial revenue settlements, where he sees an enduring legacy of John Locke's ideas about labor and its vital connection to usufruct as a foundational basis of property. These ideas ultimately flowed from natural law, which remained a basis for property rights independent of constituted political authority in England and had a significant impact on John Stuart Mill's advocacy of law and political economy as instruments of progress. Here, he echoes C. B. Macpherson's arguments pace Marx about the rise of possessive individualism as a culmination of certain key contradictions in European capitalist society. Liberalism seen through the lens of property relations and the history of unfree labor thus appears in his account as both emancipatory and restrictive. Given the colonial context, one may well ask how these contradictions might have appeared differently from the colonial office in London, as opposed to Calcutta or the Bengal countryside.

Sartori questions Uday Mehta's notion of how reason and progress came to occupy a central stage in ideas of imperial custodianship and civilizing mission. Sartori here seems to argue that such abstractions mask the dominance of ideas and practices that are intrinsically Eurocentric. He also seems to suggest that there is a more salutary Marxist reading of imperial liberalism as an ideology tied to a particular history of class antagonism and global capital (Sartori, p. 27). From this perspective, Mill's odium towards tyrannical authority seems drawn not from the elemental cultural difference between India and imperial Britain, but from basic class antagonism, and Burke's much vaunted sympathy for India and its traditional gentry and aristocracy from his fundamental hatred of parvenu wealth and the corrupting agency of money in late Georgian England.

Sartori pins his argument on the debates that ensued following the tenancy bill known as the Act X of 1859, which sought to secure the occupancy rights of Bengali raiyats against certain claims of rural zamindars. This unleashed a series of appeals during the years 1862–65 brought before a newly constituted Calcutta High Court, and led also to an outpouring of legislative ink on what became the Great Rent Case of 1865, whereby certain traditional claims of the Indian peasant to tillage were newly recognized. This admission of customary claims to ownership, if not outright bestowal of property rights, may appear as a sign of reticence on the part of the colonial state to expose its revenue arrangements to market laissez faire. Here, once again, Sartori detects a Lockean impulse in the rhetoric of colonial lawmakers in Bengal, who seemed to be wedded to the idea of property as the cornerstone of a liberal polity and who plunged into an exhaustive inquiry into the traditional and historic norms and customs of the Bengal raiyat. Sartori argues that the Bengal peasant became the unlikely beneficiary of liberal protectionism during a period of heightened commercial exchange.

The fierce debates that took place in the higher courts of colonial Bengal around tenancy cases also challenged certain Malthusian notions of rent in favor of native custom and usage. The idea of peasant freehold was in itself a questionable notion (Sartori, p. 110). Was the Bengal raiyat a tenant or cultivator? Act X of 1859 had not fixed the rights of occupancy with sufficient clarity. Some judges sought to restrict the grasp of zamindars, giving peasants greater value for their labor, while others, like Chief Justice Peacock, argued in favor of protecting the property rights of zamindars. Sartori considers this decisive turn to custom and customary rights of tenants, recognizing the renter and the small proprietor (Sartori, p. 66), as rooted in a neo-Lockean paradigm. Such constructions were picked up fairly quickly by members of the English-educated Bengal intelligentsia, such as author Pearychand Mitra, who argued that ancient laws and usage once protected the humble tiller against the encroachment of landlords, who started out as no more than tax gatherers. Similarly Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay, the noted essayist and brother of Bankimchandra, wrote feelingly about the Bengal Ryots' “immemorial proprietary rights” (Sartori, p. 79), which they derived from Hollingbery's account of the zamindari settlement of Bengal. They owed taxes but not rent, and their titles predated the imposition of the state or its agents.

These generic, universal claims were consonant with the idea of a liberal empire, one that connected the Bengal raiyat to the Irish tenants of Ulster. In this context, the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 may be seen as an attempt at social engineering, designed to curb the age-old urge of zamindars to ratchet up rent. The convictions and sentiments behind its passage, Sartori argues, stemmed from liberal misgivings about the pernicious forces of the market, and an eroding faith in classical political economy advocating a return of the custodial state as a bastion of liberal values. It seems plausible that the peasant mobilizations taking place in Bengal in the later nineteenth century unfolded in this peculiar official climate of ideas that recognized the producer as a primary economic agent. Sartori seems to insist that Bengali peasants producing for the market had also imbibed these arguments in favor of labor as inherently constitutive of ownership. During the disturbances in indigo plantations known as the Blue Mutiny, peasants were quick to articulate that while being coerced to plant indigo, they were losing out on other profitable crops like tobacco. Planters defended their investments in the court, accusing the government of undermining valid contracts.

No doubt, agriculture in Bengal had already undergone successive stages of commercialization, ever since rice production became closely aligned to the currency market in the eighteenth century. Is it possible that an indigenized notion of agrarian surplus had already emerged in Bengal? Sartori seems to argue that when Muslim cultivators joined the Faraizi rebellion under the leadership of Shariatuallah and Dudu Miyan during the 1820s in north Bengal, when they were asserting certain claims on land under the plough, or refusing to pay unfair rent following certain moral injunctions of Hanafi law, they were in fact operating under the logic of a certain form of peasant capital. Similarly, during their fight against debt bondage in indigo, they might have been aware of new opportunities of production for a burgeoning market. In fact, the very rumors of government clampdown over planter appropriation may have helped rebels fill their ranks (Sartori, p. 119). While there is little doubt that the evolving legislative framework of colonial landed property or the movement of prices for agricultural products played a significant role during such moments of political awakening, Sartori's larger contention that there is in fact a “fit between such aspirations and the Lockean conception of property” (Sartori, p. 122), or indeed that the liberal discourse of customary rights and commodity production based on the peasant household provided the key experimental ground for particular tenets of political economic thought, remains largely speculative.

Sartori drives his thesis on agricultural labor and property further, noting a degree of convergence between similar ideas in the cultural claims and pastoral nationalism of Swadeshi, and ultimately, as a generative force behind impoverished Muslim peasantry rising up against zamindars seen primarily as abusive Hindu rentiers and moneylenders. In this latter context, he offers an alternative account of the history of agrarian politics in Bengal during the interwar period. Revisiting the fundamental shift in rural politics in Bengal around the passage of the Bengal Tenancy Bill of 1928 and the rise of the Muslim Bloc championing the interest of cultivators, he sifts through a congeries of political claims in search of the property-making potential of labor, which seems to be a guiding refrain of this book.

Not every historian of colonial Bengal would agree with this characterization of the politics of Bengali Muslim identity rooted in a demotic form of liberal discourse committed to the sanctity of peasant property rights. Others may disagree in principle with the assertion that a subaltern recapitulation of colonial labor and property relations had such an impact on contemporary politics (Sartori, p. 143). While Sartori asserts that the rise of leaders championing the interests of smallholders, such as Shah Abdul Hamid of the Muslim League, or Fazlul Haq, architect of the Krishak Praja Party, can be attributed to the appeal of liberal ideology, he is not quite as sure that all peasant resistance was a direct outcome of liberal politics. The history of Bengali Muslim pietism and its moral claims to cultivated land, he is forced to conclude, might have had little to do with legislative theories of landed property in British India, and it may even be “absurd to characterize it as a form of liberalism” (Sartori, p. 196). The problem here lies perhaps with the very formulation of liberalism as a virtual projection of certain normative forms of colonial capital. While Sartori has given us a valuable insight into the arguments by which liberalism arrived in rural Bengal, and the surprising degree to which it animated the struggle to define its application and purpose beyond the immediate purview of imperial legislation, in the realm of lived historical experience it threatens to dissolve into the incoherence of unrealized possibilities, inconsistent practices, and contested rhetoric.

Epilogue: Liberalism Revisited

The question remains whether liberalism can be pieced together as a reasonably coherent body of ideas that uniquely shaped the attitudes of the British Empire towards the Indian subject population. During the earlier part of the nineteenth century, when they were closely allied with Utilitarianism, liberal ideas of reform and improvement in India converged on certain basic questions of rights, responsibilities, and social improvement. And once again, during the crisis of governance after the Mutiny of 1857, certain urgent questions of liberal governance came to the fore. It would be a mistake in these instances to simply think of liberalism as a front for ulterior economic or political interests. The task is not to disabuse imperial ideology of its liberal claims, but in fact to ask how liberalism provided the very historical framework in which the political imagination of empire could sustain a public awareness about its higher purpose. The manifest legitimacy of the company state that built the Indian empire, after all, was also based on the strength of its military victories and its flow of profit, and not merely on a mandate for equitable, moral governance. A similar assertion of uncompromising political mastery became evident after the suppression of the rebels of 1857, the dissolution of the Mughal Empire, and the declaration of direct crown rule. And yet, liberal critics of the Indian empire at home and abroad, Britons and Indians alike, undauntedly and in good faith went on arguing their case for a more progressive, enlightened, and just governance.

The very historiography of empire has been so suffused with the liberal discourse of freedom and progress that one might find it difficult to divest them in any straightforward way. Many would argue that residual forms of liberalism have continued to mediate the reach and effect of post-imperial global capital, although the history of liberal thought may not be folded neatly and without problem into a singular history of capitalism. At the same time, liberalism as a doctrine seems to obscure rather than illuminate at times the long and tortuous history of imperial subjection and citizenship. To adapt a phrase from Karl Popper (Reference Popper2013, 139), liberal thinking in this instance operates much like a “framework of preconceived ideas” detached from any particular order of moral or political interest. Although Popper might not have entertained the wider implications of his critique of J. S. Mill's historicism and faith in the incontrovertibility of historical laws of human progress for a history of imperial liberalism, some of his admonitions regarding the delusions of historical determinism are particularly relevant to the questions I have outlined. The foregoing discussion makes it clear that for both rulers and subjects, empire set the essential stage for utopian and prescriptive social change, much as it sought to constrict the rights and freedoms of the governed on the basis of race, civilization, or geographical and temporal distance. To that extent we can agree that the history of political rights in India will always be tied inextricably to the history of empire.