Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the late Victorian empire (review)

The field of imperial studies sometimes seems in thrall to dichotomies: metropole and periphery, formal and informal imperialism, orientalism and ornamentalism, and of course black and white. Yet, empires were as much about the creation of commonality as difference. Such commonalities were most often weighted in favour of Europeans to be sure, but they help explain why empires lasted as long as they did. This was especially so for the British Empire, where the common status of British subjecthood provided a means of uniting, in rhetoric if not always in reality, the multitudinous societies over which the Crown governed. Given the British Empire’s intrinsically unequal nature, it is sometimes difficult to understand why all colonial subjects were not colonial nationalists. Yet many used the language of subjecthood to claim for themselves and their societies an equal place within, rather than outside, the Empire. For those who were not active collaborators (whose motives seem transparently self-interested, whether in reality this was actually the case), or active resistors (of whom there were comparatively few in most colonial settings until the twentieth century), subjecthood provided the basis for claiming a political, economic, and cultural place within the Empire; in other words, a claim of imperial citizenship.

This is the subject of Sukanya Banerjee’s inventive and insightful book. Through an investigation of Indian claims to imperial citizenship in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she provides a fresh perspective on a familiar historical subject, namely the development of Indian nationalism. Banerjee’s focus is on moderate Indian nationalists’ articulation of a form of imperial citizenship which appealed both to a desire for a deeper imperial relationship between Indians and Britons and an expression of Indian autonomy. As she persuasively argues, such an argument was not on its face untenable. The concept of imperial citizenship was an elastic one, capable of expressing appeals to a common imperial loyalty and the heterogeneous identities of the empire’s multitudinous subjects. This argument was especially attractive to many Indians, for whom it provided simultaneously a language of imperial inclusion and national (and indeed regional and even individual) identity.

Banerjee organizes her study around four individuals, each well-known public figures: Dadabhai Naoroji, the Indian economist and the first Indian Member of Parliament in Westminster; Mohandas K. Gandhi, with the focus here on his legal work on behalf of Indians in South Africa before the First World War; Cornelia Sorabji, the first female Indian lawyer; and Surendranath Banerjea, who before he became a leading Indian nationalist was one of the first Indians to be admitted to the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Each of these actors used the language of imperial citizenship to press their particular claims for a more inclusive place for Indians within the British Empire. Banerjee’s analysis of their respective activities reminds us of the significance of moderate Indian nationalism, especially in the later decades of the nineteenth century when more extreme nationalist manifestations had not yet fully formed.

Naoroji epitomized the dictates of imperial citizenship in a literal sense, travelling to the imperial metropole and eventually winning the seat of Central Finsbury in London as a Liberal Home Ruler. As Banerjee shows, Naoroji drew on the language of imperial citizenship in his Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, where he developed his theory that the British presence in Indian represented a drain on India’s economy and contradicted the pronounced British imperial goals of moral progress.¹ Here Banerjee’s argument connects with those of scholars like Karuna Mantena who have highlighted the “crisis of liberal imperialism” in the late nineteenth century.² As Banerjee demonstrates, this crisis was, inter alia, a result of Indians being denied the equality of citizenship implicitly promised to them through their shared status as British subjects.

Gandhi’s career in South Africa is well-known. Banerjee reminds us how his campaign for the rights of Indian indentured labourers was predicated on their imperial subjecthood, and argues convincingly that South African Indians instantiated their status...