I happened to be reading Sukanya Banerjee’s Becoming Imperial Citizens while attending a conference in London called “Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain, 1870–1950” (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain/conference.htm). The coincidence was felicitous. Both projects are concerned with how people of South Asian descent navigated what Banerjee calls “the extra-legal life of citizenship” (7) in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperialism. Such life was often lived in tense and tender relationship to liberalism and the promise of equality it nurtured for a certain class of colonial subjects seeking representation at the heart of the empire. Banerjee’s focus is on four prominent late Victorian figures: Dadhabai Naoroji, elected MP on the Liberal ticket in 1892; Mohandas K. Gandhi, called to the bar in 1887; Cornelia Sorabji, Oxford-educated barrister and reformer; and Surendranath Banerjea, one of the first Indians to pass the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination. She uses them to argue that we need to pay closer attention to how claims to national/imperial belonging were narrativized during an extended moment when the space between subject and citizen was technically foreclosed but appeared to be vulnerable to appropriation, especially by those colonial subjects who were loyal to empire. She emphasizes the Victorian life of colonial narrative on the grounds that the textual forms through which Indians’ claims to citizenship were articulated tell us volumes about the ways they imagined themselves as imperial subjects–and about the limits of those discursive gambits as well.

Banerjee’s tightly argued, interlocking case studies are reminiscent of Mrinalini Sinha’s 1995 study, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, one of the first monographs to plot the idioms of colonial subjectivity in Victorian imperial culture A decade and a half on, Becoming Imperial Citizens asks a set of different but related questions. What were the implications—political and affective—for Indians who were recognized only as subjects, not as citizens? How did a collective Indian identity consolidate in metropole and colony in this state of suspended animation? And how did those who, like Sorabji, warmed her hands at “two fires,” cope with the contradictions of a universalist promise of citizenship cross-hatched by racial, class, and gendered exclusions? Each of Banerjee’s examples offers a distinctive angle of vision on these questions.

She reads Naoroji’s tract, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), in conjunction with his election bids to suggest the gothic character of his political rhetoric—rhetoric he juxtaposed with urban tropes, images of Mutiny violence, and Anglo-Irish references in a shared, familial frame to make a case for the legitimacy of Indian self-representation. In one of the most incisive readings of Gandhi’s early South African career to date, Banerjee takes an unsparing look at the ways his protonationalist politics operated through logics of class that recognized indentured labor as part of Indian “community” mainly by negation and placed the African worker in an expressly subordinate position to the coolie. The result here as elsewhere for this generation of Indian nationalists was a set of equivocal, if not compromised, claims to universality. Seen in this context, Sorabji’s proempire sentiments and her antinationalist rhetoric seem more aligned with than radically disjoined from contemporary struggles to carve out a loyalist species of colonial citizenship. Like her peers, she was working through a decidedly conservative modernity, albeit an imperial one. Last, but certainly not least, is Banerjee’s reading of Surendranath Banerjea’s autobiography, A Nation in Making (1925). Here it’s clear that the role of Indians who sought bureaucratic pathways to inclusion via agencies like the ICS cannot be discounted as part of the history of Indian nationalism. Breaking with accounts that rely on a narrative of presumptive discontinuity between anticolonial nationalist and postcolonial practices—and rematerializing the body politics of nation-building in the process—Banerjee draws a bright line between the “bureaucratic self-fashioning” (180) of the first generation of examination candidates and the habitus of future leaders of the postcolonial state.

In so doing, Banerjee insists not simply that we reconnect moderate nationalism to its “extremist” versions but that we see them as simultaneous rather than serial in historical terms. This is in keeping with her conviction that Indians’ quest for selfhood in legal and cultural domains was not an exclusively emancipatory project, glossing as it did both coolie labor and questions of class, caste, and color more generally across a variety of biographies and colonial spaces. If her readings bring Gandhi closer to Sorabji than postcolonial work has tended to do, they also echo the findings of the “Bharat Britain” project, cited above, which maps the convergence of a variety of mobile, diasporic Indian subjects on the metropole, where so many colonial selves were forged. Banerjee’s study narrows the gap between canonical accounts of anticolonial struggle, on the one hand, and nationalist history, on the other. In her capable hands, attention to the protocols of narrative reveals “what are always checkered and uncertain formulations of the liberal universalist ideal” (14). Her approach is informed by feminist theory (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and by an appreciation for the capacity of close reading to align “the narrative registers of citizenship alongside its political histories” (15). So, the crisis of manliness generated by the new “breed” of civil servants in the wake of the Northcote-Trevelyan report (1854) is part and parcel of her story, as is the agency of colonial subjects in marking the limits and possibilities of liberalism at the very center of geopolitical debate from the Victorians onward. Beyond these invaluable insights, this book is indispensible reading for those who want to understand the timing of nationalisms sponsored by colonial modernity. For by far the most far-reaching of Banerjee’s provocations is her suggestion that the ideas about “Indian” citizenship that ended up being enshrined in the 1950 constitution were in train well before the founding of the nation itself—a state of anticipation conditioned, if not fully determined, by empire and entangled irrevocably in its postcolonial histories.