Liberalism, Modernity, and the Nation (review)

In this first of two planned volumes of collected essays drawn from a lifetime's study of India, Robb assesses how the colonial experience shaped the construction of identities in India. The essays are divided into two sections—the first a set of reflections on the larger issues of the book and the second four previously published case studies. At the outset, Robb argues that the "colonial inputs" to the defining of India have been "unwisely neglected" and that scholars have "averted their eyes" from the colonial state (3–4). This assertion is hard to credit given the outpouring of studies in recent years on colonial discourse and the institutions of colonial governance. Robb also claims, in opposition to those who see colonialism as invariably exploitative, that the Raj was a liberal empire, dedicated to improving India, though he hastens to add that the reality often fell short of the promise (9). Liberalism, as he writes in a mostly favorable account of Lord Ripon's 1881 to 1885 viceroyalty, "often stayed hidden beneath the calm waters of British complacency and special pleading" (28). Robb then discusses how the experience of living in the empire, not just its existence, helped to develop a national consciousness among Indians (54). There is little that is original here. The contrast with a work such as Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004) could not be sharper.

The essays in the second part of the book, all previously published, take up a number of particular topics loosely brought together under the title "Some Boundaries and Identities." They examine Colin Mackenzie's 1799–1810 survey of Mysore, the delineation by the British of a Naga district in far northeastern India during the 1880s, the 1865 trial of an alleged Wahabi leader, and the growth of a distinct Muslim identity in the 1920s and 1930s as seen through the life of Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari. The most intriguing of these essays is the endeavor to bring the Nagas into the story of India's colonial history. Mackenzie's surveying and collecting activities have elicited much study recently, as has Muslim nationalism. Given the current obsession with jihadi movements, Robb's account of Maulvi Ahmadullah's trial might have thrown light upon the larger issues of Islamic identity. Unfortunately, however, he veers away from a close analysis of the trial to a general account of the British efforts at reforming and restructuring life in the Indian countryside (182–183).

Robb sees the British, though "weak on the ground," as nevertheless influential in helping create communal sentiment. But, ever cautious, he concludes, "The story is one of myriad influences bearing upon a multitude of attitudes, in which general characteristics and tendencies can be observed" (195). Despite such banal observations, historians will find in this book a number of useful insights. The most suggestive are those regarding the important but often neglected role of boundaries and borders in shaping identities. Nonetheless, the format of "collected essays" inevitably falls short of the satisfactions provided by an original work of scholarship.