Chapter 1 - The social and intellectual contexts of early Indian liberalism, c.1780–1840

Summary

The Introduction has set out some of the main concepts which underpinned the broad and contested tradition of Indian liberalism. But intellectual history and the history of political thought have always been dogged by the question of their relationship to so-called ‘social processes’ and social action. I do not feel that an interrogation of this sort of relationship is obligatory for intellectual historians. If political ideas are speech acts, there is no absolute obligation on historians to sketch in their ‘social context’ (whatever this is taken to mean) any more than it should be binding on all social historians to encase their studies in the history of high politics. To reach an understanding of the intellectual formation of political ideas in the context of the dominant debates of specific periods of time is a perfectly proper form of historical investigation. It is the one broadly adopted in the present study.

Yet it is important to examine why certain ideas or intellectual formulations became valuable to people in the light of their day-to-day problems at the same time as asking how controversies and ideologies deriving from a wider, even global, conceptual arena were appropriated by them. In broad terms, the relationship between Indian liberal thought and colonial capitalism posited by S. N. Mukherjee and others in the 1970s has been developed by Manu Goswami and Andrew Sartori. These two latter scholars married Reinhart Kosellek’s notion of ‘concept history’ to a neo-Marxist paradigm. In Sartori’s interpretation, the expansion of global capitalism under early British rule in Bengal elicited a response from Indian elites who elaborated their own forms of liberal individualism. Brian Hatcher also noted that the neo-Vedantist emphasis on the spiritual development of humanity, evinced by the Brahmo Samaj and Debendranath Tagore’s Tattvabodhini Sabha, for instance, was compatible with the role of the individual in capitalist entrepreneurship. The tension between the need to acquire wealth for the future of family and nation and the need to keep a distance between the material and the spiritual became more pressing. This was the context in which the Bhagavad Gita re-emerged as a key text for liberals, Vedantists and radicals alike.