Abstract
In 1904, Rabindranath Tagore used a meeting about water scarcity in Calcutta to lecture his audience on the nature of the Indian body politic. What was distinctive about India, Tagore argued, was the absolute separation between samaj and sarkar, or between society and the state. In England, he believed, social organisation depended on the actions of the government. There he supposed, ‘the state is mainly responsible for the welfare of the people’. If the state collapsed, society fell as well. In India, by contrast, ‘the Sarkar has no relations with our social organisation’. For Tagore, the regeneration of India did not depend on ‘a change of sovereignty’. It required recognition of society’s autonomy from politics, and the separation of the forms of sociability that sustained social relations from the exercise of sovereign power. Compared to the important task of social work, of energetic leadership by ‘bands of workers’ going from village to village improving education, industry, religion and sanitation, state politics was an empty and mechanical exercise. ‘Society waits for no help from outside; external irritation undermines its magnificence’, he suggested.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Delhi, 1973).
For some of these tendencies, see J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, CT, 2000);
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, C.1848–C.1918 (Cambridge, 1989).
For a discussion and definition of liberalism along these lines, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and
Graham Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing “the System of Natural Liberty”’ in Graham Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hemstead, 1991).
Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 40. The best introductions to Rammohan’s thought are Bruce Robertson, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India (Delhi, 1995) and
Bimanbehari Majumdar, History of Indian Social and Political Ideas, from Rammohan to Dayananda (Calcutta, 1967). See also
C.A. Bayly, ‘Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–1830’, Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007), pp. 25–41.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 48.
Rammohan Roy, ‘Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females’ in Kalidas Nag et al. (eds), The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy (Calcutta, 1945–1958), pp. 2–3.
‘Minute on sati’, 8 November 1829, C.H. Philips (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, Governor-General of India, 1828–1835 (Oxford, 1977), p. 335.
Ibid., p. 9; Rammohan Roy 1945–1958, ‘Questions and Answers on Judicial and Revenue Systems’ in Kalidas Nag et al. (eds), The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy (Calcutta, 1945–1958), p. 16.
For details of these disputes, see Ramprasad Chanda and J.K. Majumdar, Letters and Documents Relating to the Life of Raja Rammohan Roy (Calcutta, 1938).
Rammohan Roy, ‘The Rights of Hindus over Ancestral Property According to the Law of Bengal’ in Kalidas Nag et al. (eds), The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy (Calcutta, 1945–1958), p. 24.
Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 30–3.
For example, David L. Curley, ‘“Voluntary” Relations and Royal Gifts of Pan in Mughal Bengal’ in Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Bengal (Delhi, 2003).
Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal, The Bengali Press and Literary Writing, 1818–31 (Dacca, 1977).
Bhabanicharan Bandopadhaya, Kalikata Kamalalay (Calcutta, 1823) translated as Bhawanicharan Bandopadhyay, Kalikata Kamalalay (Calcutta, 1990). See also
Hans Harder, ‘The Modern Babu and the Metropolis: Reassessing Early Bengali Narrative Prose (1821–1862)’ in Stuart Blackburn et al. (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi, 2004), pp. 358–401 and
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 219–24.
Brian K. Pennington, ‘Constructing Colonial Dharma: A Chronicle of Emergent Hinduism, 1830–1831’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, 3 (2001).
Binay Ghosh, Samayika Patre Bangla Samaj Jacitra (Kalikata, 1966).
Satyendranath Pal, The Rise of Radicalism in Bengal in the Nineteenth Century (Calcutta, 1991), p. 163.
Susobhan C. Sarkar, ‘Derozio and Young Bengal’ in A.C. Gupta (ed.), Studies in Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta, 1958), p. 486;
Sushil Kumar De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1757–1857 (Calcutta, 1962);
Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘An Ideology of Indianness: The Construction of Colonial/Communal Stereotypes in the Poems of Henry Derozio’, Studies in History 20, 2 (2004), pp. 167–87.
For Rammohan’s complicity in the global circulation of biological ideas of racial difference, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, C.1770–1880’, MAS 41 (2007), pp. 471–513.
For the most part though, as Amitav Ghosh notes in a thoughtful exchange with Dipesh Chakrabarty, ideas of Hindu superiority are rooted in a sense of the superiority of social practice not a scientific notion of physical racial difference, Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Conversation on Provincialising Europe’, Radical History Review 83 (2002), p. 158.
For the role of Comptean positivism in Bengal, see Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology (Colombia, 1975);
for the relationship between Indian thought and another branch of European sociology, see Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj. Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920’, Modern Intellectual History 4, 1 (2007), pp. 109–27.
Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi, 1995); Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 124–5.
Stephen Blore, ‘Miss Martineau Speaks Out’, New England Quarterly 9, 3 (1936), pp. 403–16.
Raj Jogeshur Mitter (ed.), Speeches by Mr. George Thompson (Father of Political Education in India) (Calcutta, 1895), pp. 144, 154.
Peter Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation” in Mid-Victorian Thought’ in Stefan Collini et al. (eds), History, Religion and Culture. British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000) and
Peter Mandler, ‘What is National Identity? Definitions and Applications in Modern British Historiography’, Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006), pp. 271–97.
The first set of lectures were on Hindu law, Herbert Cowell, The Hindu Law: Being a Treatise on the Law Administered Exclusively to Hindus by the British Courts in India (Calcutta, 1871).
Copyright information
© 2008 Jon E. Wilson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wilson, J.E. (2008). Indian Liberalism and Colonial Utilitarianism. In: The Domination of Strangers. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584396_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584396_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36533-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58439-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)