Chapter 6 - Thinking as liberals

Summary

This chapter extends the analysis in the previous chapter by considering mid-nineteenth-century Indian liberals’ views on history, race, political economy and law. The constitutional liberal moment of the 1820s and 1830s had been followed by an intellectual and political shift that produced a discourse of popular empowerment linked to a sense of racial and class oppression in Asian port cities and their hinterlands. This chapter moves on to the emergence of fuller patterns of Victorian Indian thought that were characterised by an emphasis on the two forms of knowledge that I have called global historicism and statistical liberalism. These were in turn inflected by the rhetoric of benign sociology and counter-preaching developed by Keshub Chunder Sen and his coevals described in Chapter 5. Before doing so, however, I want to allude to the South Asian order of knowledge more generally.

The majority of the figures discussed here, including major writers, were all political economists of a sort. They tried to turn travel narratives, statistical debates or early sociological investigations into means of empathising with the lands and peoples of Southern Asia. Yet they were also deeply interested in Asian religious life and civilisation. R. C. Dutt, for instance, filled his riverboat with British government blue books, but also took copies of the Vedas and Shastras when he travelled through rural Bengal as a district officer in the 1870s. He wrote simultaneously about the Bengal economy and the spirituality of ancient India.