Abstract
Hans-Georg Gadamer once observed that, “There are no propositions which can be understood exclusively with respect to the content that they represent. . . . Every proposition has presuppositions that it does not express.”3 Applying these hermeneutical insights to the subject of this book, then, I wish to commence my interpretive journey with an investigation of the unexpressed presuppositions in Gandhi’s nationalist imagination. In his exemplary study on Utopian experimentalism, Richard G. Fox, too, focuses on these conceptual forestructures of Gandhi’s political thought. With much care, Fox’s account unravels the development of new sets of cultural meanings as Gandhi originated his political vision from pre-existing cultural traditions and then proceeded to experiment with its key concepts. As he labored to implement new ideas, existing material conditions and cultural meanings defined, limited, but did not completely compel, the ultimate outcome. Rather, these structural factors enabled him to contemplate still more cultural innovations that might be realized through purposeful actions.4
I hope that some of you will follow in my footsteps and after you return from England you will work wholeheartedly for big reforms in India.
—M. K. Gandhi1
We should not envy the nation [Britain], but emulate its example. Those who have faith in God recognize that the British do not rule over India without His will.
—M. K. Gandhi2
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Notes
Richard G. Fox, Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 16.
For example, for a discussion of the colonial discourse on labor, see Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Richard Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice (London: Routledge, 1990);
See also Thomas R. Metcalf, The New Cambridge History of India III. 4: Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 28–9.
See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 194–5.
For a concise account of the Anglo-Indian War, see Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 233–8.
See also Thomas Pantham, “Post-relativism in Emancipatory Thought: Gandhi’s Swaraj and Satyagraha,” in D. L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy, eds., The Multiverse of Democracy: Essays in Honour of Rajni Kothari (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), p. 212.
Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge and Stanford, CA: Polity Press and Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 115.
See also Uday S. Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 59–86.
For an erudite account of the development of nationalism in England, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 27–87.
John Stuart Mill, “Representative Government,” in Three Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 409;
and On Liberty, ed. Currin Shields (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 14.
Dadabhai Naoroji cited in Elie Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York: The New American Library, 1970), p. 82.
Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” in J. Clive, ed., Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 249.
Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 33–4.
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xiv.
See also Mrinalini Sinha, “Chathams, Pitts, and Gladstones in Petticoats: The Politics of Race and Gender in the Ilbert Bill Controversy, 1883–84,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 98–116.
and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992), pp. 5–6.
See James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Stuart D.Warner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993)
Stephen, “Letter to The Times,” (1 March 1883), in Philips et al., The Evolution of India and Pakistan, pp. 59–60; and Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 209.
John Hutchinson, “Moral Innovators and the Politics of Regeneration: the Distinctive Role of Cultural Nationalists in Nation-Building,” in Anthony Smith, ed., Ethnicity and Nationalism: International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Leiden: BriU, 1992), p. 103.
Dennis Dalton, “Introduction,” in Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings, ed. Dennis Dalton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 7.
V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 101–2.
James D. Hunt, Gandhi in London (New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 1978), p. 38.
Thomas K. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 129.
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© 2000 Manfred B. Steger
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Steger, M.B. (2000). The Promise of British Liberalism. In: Gandhi’s Dilemma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62186-6_2
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