Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire by C. A. Bayly (review)

Work that illuminates the circulation of actants (human and nonhuman agents, objects, and things) and memes (ideas that combine or transform in transit) is increasingly desirable in a globalised environment, and C. A. Bayly’s Recovering Liberties is a fine study of the circulation and transformation of liberal agents, ideas, and institutions in India from the 1820s. This review will focus on the Victorian period and its immediate aftermath, though the book concludes with the lasting effects of liberalism up to 2011, with Manmohan Singh’s government in the world’s largest democracy. Bayly’s title, Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge University, shows a common transformation in the intercultural transvaluation of values, as historian of empire becomes one of Indian culture and society.

The book concentrates on maritime and trading centres—traditionally the most liberal communities due to continuous contact with other cultures—Bengal, Bombay, and northwestern India, rather than Madras and the south, though chapters often conclude with comparative reference to developments in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Sino-Malay region. Bayly’s thesis is that Indian literati—from Rammohan Roy in the 1820s, Romesh Chunder Dutt in the 1870s, Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1880s, Gopal Krishna Gokhale in the 1900s, to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar from the 1920s—participated in transregional or global spheres of liberal discourse. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Iberia, these global liberals sympathized with American and Irish struggles against Britain, Chartists, and Giuseppe Mazzini’s republican radicalism; and with others who had experienced slavery and racial prejudice. Transnationally, this amounted to a small, emergent global elite of liberals reading, citing, and engaging with each other in the early days of nation-states. Even when they failed to elicit responses from their putative interlocutors in Europe, the Indian liberals took the occasion to employ their discourses for their own audiences at home. The difference between the European and Indian liberals was that the Indians were colonized, that is, their liberalisms developed under conditions of exploitation and humiliation, and that they had their own traditions of Vedantic continuity, that is, revelation stressing self-realisation, as a nation as well as individuals.

The Indian liberals deployed arguments from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Auguste Comte, and John Ruskin, and developed a sophisticated mathematical rhetoric of statistics to undermine the statistics of the colonizers. J. S. Mill was much admired aside from his views on race, deism, and scepticism, and they used him against James Fitzjames Stephen’s colonial theory of benign coercion. Mill’s liberalism, Bayly contends, functioned more as a structure of feeling than an air-tight logical system, and he demonstrates repeatedly that the philosophical eclecticism of these Indian liberal admirers of Mill was not a theoretical weakness but an engagement with a totality of human thought. Theosophy was attractive as a social evolutionism, liberal communitarianism, and Vedantic Hinduism. Theories of amalgamation of Hindu and Muslim were compared to the dynamism of Anglo-Saxons. Darwinism was invoked as Spirit’s evolution in history. Indigenous systems of thought in both Hindu and Islam, more worldly religions, avoided the deep conflicts between science and religion that divided Europe.

Bayly does not confine his study to discourse. Under the constraints of colonization and then under indigenous strands of communitarianism, Indian liberals developed practices and institutions to deal with religious, caste, and racial diversity undreamed of in Mill’s philosophy. Multicultural India revealed relations of individual rights to group beliefs that problematized liberalism to its core. Indigenous law courts, juries, legal systems, and a free press developed against both domination by the British and internal factions. Bayly discusses at length the juries based in ancient systems of the panchayat (literally “five men,” or local representative bodies), the statistical liberalism that developed as a scientific rhetoric to undermine the science of the Raj, Young...