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  • Imperial Citizens
  • Siobhan Carroll
Sukanya Banerjee . Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. ix + 272 pp. Cloth $84.95 Paper $23.95

The title of Banerjee's richly detailed study plays on the idea of "becoming." The British Indians whose biographies anchor each chapter are people engaged, she argues, both in defining what it means to be an attractive, appropriate citizen of the British Empire and in claiming the political rights that citizenship can connote. Drawing on a diverse set of texts that includes economic treatises, autobiographies, novels, and bureaucratic records, Banerjee traces the different conceptualizations of "imperial citizenship" appearing in the writing of Indians such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Cornelia Sorabji, Surendranath Banerjea, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. By engaging with "the narrative strategies through which these civilizational credentials were established or discredited by Indians in their specific negotiations with the extant rhetoric of liberal citizenship," Banerjee succeeds admirably in decoupling her analysis of citizenship from the nation-state and in complicating nationalist teleologies of postcolonial India.

Banerjee's ambitious book is less successful in achieving two of the other goals she lays out in her introduction: while subsequent chapters do shed "light on the complex mutations of the category of citizenship" (16), they only touch lightly on the legal complexities faced by imperial citizens migrating within the British Empire and do not engage with Britain's own complex history of citizenship as deeply as her introduction implies. Similarly, Banerjee's suggestion that the narratives she examines "limn other ways of imagining the nation" in ways that anticipate their authors' subsequent dismissal by nationalist histories is fascinating, as is her suggestion that these excluded imaginings return in these narratives as "the languages of the gothic, of the spectral, of mourning, and of liminality, which insinuate themselves into formulations of a citizenship that is and is not of the nation-to-be." However, this latter claim is not as thoroughly or consistently pursued as it could be, an understandable neglect, given the impressive scope and archive [End Page 400] of Banerjee's project, but one that perhaps signals the need for further development in a future book or series of articles.

The core of Becoming Imperial Citizens's argument is sketched out in a substantial introduction and then developed in four chapters, each of which nominally focuses on a different Indian's formulation of imperial citizenship. A brief "Afterword" gestures towards the continued relevance of imperial citizenship to Indians during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Chapter one, "Of the Indian Economy and the English Polls," focuses on Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), a political economist who successfully campaigned to be elected to British Parliament as the Liberal candidate from Central Finsbury in 1892. Banerjee begins this chapter by considering Naoroji's Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), a significant economic treatise that combines statistics with images of public health to formulate a vision of a unified imperial citizenry. From here, Banerjee turns to a reading of the rhetoric surrounding Naoroji's election campaigns, arguing that "it was precisely the uncertainties underlining generalized articulations of race that, when placed alongside the purported certitudes of an emerging, allegedly scientific racial discourse, allowed for a discourse of citizenship that could at once accommodate and disavow the political claims of racialized colonial subjects." The latter portion of this chapter provides strong support for Banerjee's central thesis: Naoroji's political success suggests that his self-representation as a citizen of Empire (albeit as one possessing a masterly command of the English language and "gentlemanly" manners) found support with British voters, while his support for Irish Home Rule provides Banerjee with an opportunity to briefly explore the political alliances formed between different British colonies.

However, the first part of this chapter, in which Banerjee argues for Naoroji's "conjunction of the principles of political economy with elements of gothic narrative," is less successful. Banerjee conflates medicine with the gothic, focusing, for example, on Naoroji's image of Englishmen draining India of money in the same way that overeager surgeons could "bleed" a patient into dangerous weakness. While Naoroji clearly means this image to be a negative one...

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