Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain by Lynn Zastoupil (review)

The Bengali religious and social reformer Rammohun Roy has received perhaps more scholarly attention than any other figure associated with the so-called Bengal renaissance of early nineteenth-century Calcutta. An idealization of the Bengal renaissance and a hagiography of its prominent figures were common currency in the historiography of Bengal until at least the middle of the twentieth century, and Rammohun has often been bestowed with the title of the father of modern India. More recently, Rammohun’s relationship with modernity and the West has been complicated by historical research which has investigated the extent to which the encounter of Bengali elites with Western forms of knowledge in the early nineteenth century may be regarded as an instance of the power of cultural imperialism to colonize minds.

While the impact of Rammohun’s ideas and activities on Indian society is generally accepted to have been extensive, Lynn Zastoupil contends that Rammohun also exerted considerable influence in Victorian British society. Zastoupil locates Rammohun within a nexus of British (and, to a lesser extent, North American) social, political, and religious reformers—including Unitarians, radicals, early feminists, and advocates of the liberty of the press and of free trade—and analyzes the ways in which Rammohun’s “passions intersected with the projects of reformers and humanitarians in Britain.” The book pays particular attention to Rammohun’s visit to Britain between April 1831 and his death in Bristol in 1833, a period during which he was transformed into a “transnational celebrity.” This celebrity, Zastoupil contends, may be viewed as a “mirror in which the making of Victorian Britain is reflected” (1).

Zastoupil is particularly successful in delineating in meticulous empirical detail the networks through which Rammohun’s writings were circulated, published, and republished, and he makes a convincing case that Rammohun’s name was invoked in Britain in support of a variety of political, religious, and social causes. Rammohun’s contribution, alongside Charles Grant’s, to jury reform is made clear, and Zastoupil’s account of the interconnections between attempts in Britain and Bengal to secure and maintain freedom of the press serves as a fascinating example of the imperial dimensions of metropolitan discourses. The ways in which Rammohun sought to “provincialize” England through critiques of aspects of British Christianity, society, and government are explored in some detail, and Zastoupil also illuminates the extent to which these critiques were utilized and manipulated by pressure groups and politicians in Britain (138). Zastoupil’s analysis of the interconnections between Rammohun’s ideas and the discourses of early British feminism, however, is less persuasive: while Rammohun may have been celebrated in early feminist circles as a “champion of women” (88), there were undoubtedly important divergences between Rammohun’s views on the condition of women and the views of his British interlocutors.

Indeed, the book would benefit in general from a greater attention to points of divergence and rupture between the ideas of Rammohun and his British associates, and to the ways in which Rammohun’s status as a colonial subject set limits to the meanings he could carry for British audiences. Zastoupil’s characterization of Unitarianism as “Christianity’s permeable boundary zone” (10), based on a “heritage—open-minded, tolerant, cosmopolitan—that allowed Unitarians to embrace Rammohun in whatever guise he appeared” (170), rather occludes questions concerning the boundaries of Unitarian inclusiveness when faced with an individual who was neither Christian nor British in the conventional contemporary sense. A greater attention to the limits to influence and agency that existed for colonial subjects would also have enriched Zastoupil’s account of the possibility of Rammohun becoming an MP. While Zastoupil presents evidence suggesting that Jeremy Bentham proposed that Rammohun might stand for Parliament, his contention that Rammohun thus “inspired Britons to imagine a multi-ethnic House of Commons” surely overstates Rammohun’s degree of influence and popularity (165).

The author states that his intention is to analyze encounters between Rammohun and interlocutors...