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.

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.