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Victorian Studies 47.2 (2005) 260-271



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Political Economy, Gothic, and the Question of Imperial Citizenship

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
We hold ourselves bound to the Natives of our Indian Territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects; andthese obligations, by the blessing of Almighty God, we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil. . . . And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to Offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.
(qtd. in Naoroji, Poverty v)

Thus spoke Victoria in 1858, in a proclamation announcing the sovereignty of the Crown over British India. The Queen's Proclamation, and other like pronouncements, hailed Indians as British subjects, a status that, as scholars like Dipesh Chakrabarty have pointed out, also perpetually confined Indians to the "waiting room of history": they were always subject and rarely citizen, or, never quite ready to be citizen (8). However, despite, or precisely because of, this inevitable deferral of citizenship, British Indians did variously, and at various moments, delineate their status as citizens, often referencing the Proclamation as proof of their rights as imperial citizens. In fact, over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century, ideas of citizenship were articulated not so much within the context of an anticolonial nationalism as under the aegis of empire. However, given the paradoxical stance of the liberal rhetoric of empire that promised citizenship only to withhold it, and given the consequent evasiveness of the politico-juridical framework, what were the registers that enabled and substantiated these enunciations of imperial citizenship that in fact became coterminous with the envisioning of Indian nationalism and nation-space? Along which narrative frameworks did these articulations accrue resonance? And, for the purposes of this paper, how did the question of imperial citizenship for British Indians inform and interpellate metropolitan assumptions and anxieties, in light of the fact that a [End Page 260] context of empire and a metropolitan audience provided, in many ways, the implicit subtext for such articulations?

In tracing the imperial traffic that questions of citizenship necessarily generated, it is impossible to ignore the centrality of a figure like Dadabhai Naoroji. An academic and reformist of repute in Bombay, Naoroji moved to England in 1855 and resided there until 1907 to establish, his biographer points out, "an intimate connexion" between England and India (Masani 71). His place in imperial history is ensured by the fact that while he was to lose the 1886 parliamentary elections which he contested from Holborn, he was elected as the Liberal candidate from Central Finsbury to the House of Commons in 1892, becoming its first non-white member. Naoroji's monumental economic treatise Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), on which this paper centers, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering texts of Indian economics. Although its economic analysis is focused on arguing for the sociopolitical status of Indians, contemporary discussion of Poverty has noticeably not extended into the realm of cultural analysis.1 It is almost as if in providing, as it does, the "first statistical estimate of India's national income" (Chandra 16), Poverty precludes itself from the realm of narrative, and, consequently, from an analysis of its rhetorical import. In light of Mary Poovey's argument about the tension between numbers and rhetoric as competing and often exclusive modes of representation—a debate that accrued particular resonance from the early decades of the nineteenth century onward (History 313)—this paper proposes a reading of Poverty and Un-British Rule that foregrounds its narrative logic, not the least because its economic data is interspersed with and dependent on Naoroji's letters, essays, and speeches included in the volume but often ignored, given the text's designation as one of the progenitors of India's national income accounting.

Thecentrality of rhetoric to the precepts of classical political economyhas drawn considerable attention...

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