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THE CURIOUS CAREER OF LIBERALISM IN INDIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

PARTHA CHATTERJEE
PARTHA CHATTERJEE*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University E-mail: pc281@columbia.edu
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Extract

There is a long-standing myth that the history of modern India was foretold at the beginning of the nineteenth century by British liberals who predicted that the enlightened despotic rule of India's new conquerors would, by its beneficial effects, improve the native character and institutions sufficiently to prepare the people of that country one day to govern themselves. Lord William Bentinck, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, while presenting as governor-general his case for the opening up of India to European settlers, speculated on the possibility of “a vast change to have occurred in the frame of society . . . which would imply that the time had arrived when it would be wise for England to leave India to govern itself”, but added that such change “can scarcely be looked for in centuries to come”. The doctrinal basis within liberal theory for justifying a democratic country like Britain exercising despotic power in colonies such as Ireland and India was securely laid out by mid-century liberals such as John Stuart Mill. The project of “improvement” was revived at the end of the nineteenth century by Gladstonian liberals who inducted elite Indians into new representative institutions based on a very narrow franchise in preparation for some form of self-government. When power was ultimately transferred to the rulers of a partitioned subcontinent in 1947, the history of liberal progress in India was complete. The storyline was laid out, for instance, in Thompson and Garratt's Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India or in Percival Spear's revised edition of the hugely successful textbook by Vincent Smith. Even nationalist Indian scholars adopted at least a part of this story, nowhere more so than in the histories of constitutional law which traced the foundations of the postcolonial Indian republic to the progressive expansion of liberal state institutions under British rule.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 687 - 696
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Minute of the Governor-General, 30 May 1829, Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company 1832, General Appendix V, 273, in Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons.

2 The best treatment of this subject is Mehta, U. S., Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 Thompson, E. J. and Garratt, G. T., Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India, revised edn (Allahabad, 1958Google Scholar; first published London, 1934); Smith, V. A., The Oxford History of India, 3rd edn, ed. Percival Spear (Oxford, 1958)Google Scholar.

4 For instance, Banerjee, A. C., Constitutional History of India, 3 vols. (Delhi, 1977–78)Google Scholar. An influential model for these post-independence constitutional histories was Keith, A. B., Constitutional History of India, 1600–1935 (London, 1936)Google Scholar.

5 The classic account of these policy debates is Stokes, E., English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar.

6 The classic history of this transition is Metcalf, T. R., The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1857–1870 (Princeton, 1964)Google Scholar.

7 Stephen, J. F., “Foundations of the Government of India'”, Nineteenth Century 70 (Oct. 1883), 541–68, 548Google Scholar.

8 For a review of these colonial debates see Guha, R., Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar.

9 Robinson, R. and Gallagher, J., Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

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11 Maier, C. S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 An aspect recently highlighted by Bayly, C. A., ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30’, Modern Intellectual History 4/1 (2007), 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See, in particular, the collection Joshi, V. C., ed., Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India (New Delhi, 1975)Google Scholar; and Bagchi, A. K., The Evolution of the State Bank of India: The Roots, 1806–1876, 2 vols. (Bombay, 1986)Google Scholar.

14 Kolsky, E., Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.