Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, and: Educating Seeta: The Anglo-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (review)

Sukanya Banerjee's excellent research monograph Becoming Imperial Citizens examines the ways in which British Indians formulated notions of citizenship across the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the birth of the nation-state in South Asia. By analyzing the formulations of citizenship well before decolonization, Becoming Imperial Citizens goes against the grain of reading British Indians only as subjects and not as citizens. Banerjee is right to argue that imperial citizenship has not received the critical attention it deserves, particularly when compared to the wealth of scholarship on colonial nationalism.

Banerjee explores the cultural, imaginative, and affective locations of imperial citizenship for British Indians rather than more traditional statutory enactments. She highlights the importance of colonial figures including Dadabhai Naoroji, Mohandas Gandhi, Cornelia Sorabji, and Surendranath Banerjea to Victorian liberalism as manifested by discussions of bourgeois familiarity, cleanliness, circulation, credit, and professional expertise. While many of the figures who people the study are well known, the concept of imperial citizenship prompts readers to re-examine them.

The study explores citizenship across a variety of locales, from the imperial metropolis (London), to the imperial diaspora (South Africa) and the colony (India), paying attention as well to the connections between these spaces. The first chapter focuses on Naoroji, the Indian nationalist and parliamentarian, and brings the literary model of fin-de-siècle gothic to bear on Naoroji's drain of wealth thesis with highly embodied tropes of bleeding and bloodletting, vampirism, poor circulation, and monstrosity. Naoroji's election campaign, which culminated in his election as Britain's first Indian MP, exemplifies the shared imperial citizenry that connected Indians, English, the Irish (through his support for the Home Rule campaign), and women's emancipation (via the Women's Franchise League). Although Naoroji's time in Britain has already been considered, most notably by Antoinette Burton, Banerjee's interpretation brings a very welcome new dimension to the literature.

The second chapter explores the possibilities and limitations of imperial citizenship for migrant colonial Indian populations by focusing on Gandhi's formulation of imperial citizenship for South African Indians around the ideas of industriousness, character, credit, and cleanliness. Consequently, as Banerjee argues, "credit begets character, which begets citizenship" (103). On the other side of the balance sheet, however, was the maligned labourer who had to bear the burden of negative accusations of dishonesty and uncleanliness by white settlers. Though these accusations were levelled at the Indian community as a whole, Gandhi refuted them on behalf of merchants but not labourers. Yet labourers were crucial to the economic health of the colony. Banerjee thus highlights a perverse logic: the labourers were acknowledged in their presence and contribution but disavowed in their personhood and citizenship, resulting in a spectral sort of citizenship. The tropes of the balance sheet and creditworthiness are very well deployed in this chapter, revealing the difficulties of forging a collective Indian identity that would unite Indian merchants and indentured labourers around campaigns for enfranchisement. Although Banerjee does cite the ambivalent role of Africans in Gandhi's campaign for Indian citizenship rights, I would have liked to have heard more about this missed opportunity to forge Indo-African solidarities.

The third chapter highlights the career of Sorabji, the pioneering female Indian lawyer, for whom citizenship was more about duty and service than political rights. Banerjee stresses the importance of work as crucial to the construction of gendered imperial subjecthood, but not through a formal career structure, as Sorabji's post as legal adviser was specially manufactured to accommodate her unique position at a time when women barristers were not permitted to practice. She...