Cultural Critique

Sunil Agnani
Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke
Cultural Critique - 68, Winter 2008, pp. 131-162

University of Minnesota Press

Sunil Agnani - Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke - Cultural Critique 68 Cultural Critique 68 (2008) 131-162 MUSE Search Journals This Journal Contents Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke Sunil Agnani Our Government and our laws are beset by two different Enemies, which are sapping its foundation, Indianism and Jacobinism. In some cases they act separately, in some they act in conjunction: but of this I am sure; that the Wrst is worst by far, and the hardest to deal with; and for this amongst other reasons, that it weakens[,] discredits, and ruins that force, which ought to be employed with the greatest Credit and Energy against the other; and that it furnishes Jacobinism with its strongest arms against all formal government. --Edmund Burke, 1796 Just what did Edmund Burke fear in the Jacobins of France, and what might that tell us about concurrent events taking place in far-off colonial Bengal? Perhaps the question is better answered if we reverse it: just what can colonial Bengal -- or, more broadly, events occurring at Britain's mercantile colonial frontier -- tell us about Burke's fear of the emergence of modernity and revolutionary aspects of the Enlightenment that he saw in France? This paper aims to raise questions of one field (eighteenth-century studies or studies of the...