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TRANSLATED LIBERTIES: KARSANDAS MULJI'S TRAVELS IN ENGLAND AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE VICTORIAN SELF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2017

J. BARTON SCOTT
J. BARTON SCOTT*
Affiliation:
Department of Historical Studies and Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , November 2019 , pp. 803 - 833
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the participants in the 2017 University of Michigan–Thyssen Foundation workshop on Global Cultural Encounters, hosted by Kira Thurman and Stefan Hübner, who, along with the blind reviewers for Modern Intellectual History, helped me to substantially reframe and improve the argument of this essay. I would also like to thank Thom Dancer, Daniel Elam, Caroline Levine, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Aileen Robinson for sharing their own research, commenting on mine, or just generally offering words of enthusiastic encouragement. Finally, I owe particular thanks to the staff of the Forbes Gujarati Sabha in Mumbai, for providing access to rare materials, as well as to Yurou Zhong, who read several drafts of this article and patiently listened to me as I thought through several others.

References

1 For examples of the rich recent historiography see Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Glenda and Rouse, Timothy, eds., forum on “Global Liberalisms,” Modern Intellectual History 12/3 (2015), 523–626CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 Dave, Jayantkrishna Harikrishna, Gujarātī Sāhitya kā Itihās (Lucknow, 1963), 129–36Google Scholar; Joshi, Umashankar, Raval, Anantray, and Shukla, Yashvant, Gujaratī Sāhityano Itihās, vol. 3 (Ahmedabad, 1978), 166–8Google Scholar.

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9 In this article, I use the word “ethics” in a broadly Foucauldian sense to refer to embodied practices for the cultivation of the self and its habitual dispositions. Compare the definition in Pandian, Anand and Ali, Daud, eds., Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington, 2010), 2Google Scholar.

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23 The extant travelogues from this period are Ardaseer Cursetjee's Diary of an Overland Journey from Bombay to England and of a Year's Residence in Great Britain (1840) and Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee's Journal of a Residence of Two and Half Years in Great Britain (1841). See Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism, 30–32, 339–51.

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35 Ibid., 122.

36 Ibid., 115.

37 Ibid, 106–13.

38 Ibid., 112–13.

39 Ibid., 77.

40 Ibid., 71.

41 Ibid., 10.

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93 Quoted in Kucklick, Savage Within, 7.

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103 Ibid.

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105 Ibid., 214–15.

106 Ibid., 211, 215–18.

107 Ibid., 214.

108 Ibid., 212. Gujarati differentiates between two first-person plural pronouns. Where one “we” (ame) specifically excludes the addressee, the other “we” (āpṇe) specifically includes the addressee. Mulji uses the latter in referring to India. He thus, by force of pronoun, implicitly includes anyone reading his book in his sense of imagined community. Even so, Mulji's mode of address does tend to conflate this in principle open-ended community with the sort of person who spends their free time reading books in Gujarati—which is to say, the middle classes of cities like Bombay and Ahmedabad.

109 Cf. Hatcher, Brian, Bourgeois Hinduism, or Faith of the Modern Vedantists: Rare Discourses from Early Colonial Bengal (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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111 Ibid., 173.

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114 Ibid., 164–5.

115 Ibid., 205–6.

116 Taylor, A Secular Age.

117 Mulji, Travels, 225–34. One of these extracts is a quotation from F. Buxton that Mulji must have taken from Smiles, although he does not cite him directly. See Smiles, Self-Help, 220.

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135 Smiles, Self-Help, 18.

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138 As part of her vaunted return to “Victorian values,” Margaret Thatcher proclaimed Smiles one of her favorite authors; her mentor Keith Joseph even brought out his own edition of Self-Help in 1986 to encourage British entrepreneurship. While the neoliberal appropriation of the Victorians should not lead us to conflate these two historically distinct periods, it is easy to see the affinity between Smiles's moralizing mistrust of “over-government” and Thatcher's Protestant neoliberalism. For Smiles and Thatcher, see Tyrrell, Alex, review of Jarvis, Adrian, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values, Victorian Studies 41/3 (1998), 536–8Google Scholar; as well as Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help, ed. Bull, George Anthony, Library of Management Classics (London, 1986)Google Scholar. For Thatcher and Protestantism see Filby, Eliza, God and Mrs. Thatcher: The Battle for Britain's Soul (London, 2015)Google Scholar. For a consideration of how neoliberal self-help departs from its Victorian predecessor see Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian, The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society, trans. Elliott, Gregory (London, 2013; first published 2009), 255–99Google Scholar.

139 See, for example, Mazzarella, William, “Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity,” Cultural Anthropology 25/1 (2010), 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

140 Smiles, Self-Help, 299.