Recovering Liberties
Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire

One of the world's greatest historians shows how Indians appropriated liberalism to argue for rights, representation and a better society.

C. A. Bayly (Author)

9781107601475, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 November 2011

404 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.8 cm, 0.64 kg

'A fine study of the circulation and transformation of liberal agents, ideas and institutions in India from the 1820s. His extensive bibliography in both Indian and English scholarship will doubtless enable further studies of trans- and inter-culturation, liberalization and the nineteenth century.' Regenia Gagnier, Victorian Studies

One of the world's leading historians examines the great Indian liberal tradition, stretching from Rammohan Roy in the 1820s, through Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1880s to G. K. Gokhale in the 1900s. This powerful new study shows how the ideas of constitutional, and later 'communitarian' liberals influenced, but were also rejected by their opponents and successors, including Nehru, Gandhi, Indian socialists, radical democrats and proponents of Hindu nationalism. Equally, Recovering Liberties contributes to the rapidly developing field of global intellectual history, demonstrating that the ideas we associate with major Western thinkers – Mills, Comte, Spencer and Marx – were received and transformed by Indian intellectuals in the light of their own traditions to demand justice, racial equality and political representation. In doing so, Christopher Bayly throws fresh light on the nature and limitations of European political thought and re-examines the origins of Indian democracy.

Preface
Introduction: the meanings of liberalism in colonial India
1. The social and intellectual contexts of early Indian liberalism, c.1750–1840
2. The advent of liberal thought in India: constitutions, revolutions and juries
3. The advent of liberal thought in India and beyond: civil society and the press
4. After Rammohan: benign sociology and statistical liberalism
5. Living as liberals: Bengal and Bombay c.1840–1880
6. Thinking as liberals: historicism, race, society and economy, c.1840–1848
7. Giants with feet of clay: Asian critics and Victorian sages to 1914
8. Liberals in the Desh: North Indian Hindus and the Muslim Dilemma
9. 'Communitarianism': Indian liberalism transformed, c.1890–1916
10. Inter-war: Indian discourse and controversy 1919–1935
11. Anti-liberalism, 'counter-liberalism' and liberalism's afterlife, 1920–1950
Conclusion: lineages of liberalism in India
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]