Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire

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Cambridge University Press, Nov 10, 2011 - Political Science
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.
 

Contents

the meanings of liberalism in colonial India
1
Chapter 1 The social and intellectual contexts of early Indian liberalism c17801840
26
constitutions revolutions and juries
42
civil society and the press
73
benign sociology and statistical liberalism
104
Bengal and Bombay c18401880
132
historicism race society and economy c18401880
161
Asian critics and Victorian sages to 1914
188
Indian liberalism transformed c18901916
245
Indian discourse and controversy 19191935
276
Chapter 11 Antiliberalism counterliberalism and liberalisms survival 19201950
311
lineages of liberalism in India
343
Glossary
358
Select bibliography
360
Index
380
Copyright

north Indian Hindus and the Muslim dilemma
214

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About the author (2011)

Professor Sir Christopher Bayly, KB, LittD, FBA, is Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catherine's College. He is currently Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. He has published works on the history of the city of Allahabad in north India, Indian merchant communities, empire and information in India and the origin of nationality in South Asia. Professor Bayly was awarded the Wolfson Prize in History for 'lifetime achievement' in 2006 and the Royal Asiatic Society's medal in 2008. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. He became a trustee of the British Museum in 2008.

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