Recovering Liberties
Recovering Liberties
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.
- One of the world's leading historians examines the great Indian liberal tradition
- Provides new insights into the nature of European political thought and reconsiders the origins of Indian democracy
- A vibrant contribution to the growing fields of global intellectual history and the history of South Asia
Reviews & endorsements
"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."
Reginia Gagnier, Victorian Studies
Product details
December 2011Hardback
9781107013834
404 pages
235 × 160 × 23 mm
0.77kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
