SIMON J.POTTER INDIAN THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

SIMON J.POTTER INDIAN THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

It is difficult to enumerate the full range of Indian thought during the course of the nineteenth century, and, indeed, to elucidate the depth and complexity of this vast region’s intellectual movements. After all, by the late nineteenth century, the Indian subcontinent was home to well over 200 million people, many of whom lived in highly

Entries A-Z 301

literate urban centres. Indian thought encompassed deliberations upon topics ranging from political theory, logic and metaphysics to ethics, theology and science. Moreover, the region incorporated not only a majority Hindu population, but also sizeable minority communities with distinctive socio-intellectual traditions such as the Sikhs, and Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims. It is impossible, therefore, not to be highly selective when discussing the intellectual history of the subcontinent. As such, this essay seeks instead to identify just a few of the most important trends and debates within South Asian intellectual life during this period, primarily with reference to northern India. In particular, it will interrogate the impact of British colonialism upon the region’s intellectual production; the relationship of intellectual movements to religious and cultural change; and, importantly, the emergence of nascent forms of nationalism by approximately the 1870s and beyond.

The nineteenth century was, of course, a time during which important transformations took place in the Indian subcontinent. The century’s commencement was marked by the presence of numerous powerful regional states, such as the Marathas of the Deccan. Yet British political control was gradually extended throughout the region, so that by the mid- to late nineteenth century Britain effectively dominated India politically and militarily. Many of the historical accounts of this process written before the post-colonial era have emphasized the intellectual and civilizational ‘improvement’ wrought by British rule, and have thereby acted as a species of justification for that rule. To take but the crudest example, T.B.MACAULAY noted in 1835 that colonial rule, and more specifically the imposition of English education, would serve to produce ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. The purpose assumed by Macaulay was, of course, the ‘intellectual improvement of the people’ that would lead eventually to the emergence of India as a full ‘partner’ to Britain in the wider world. Yet even during much of the twentieth century, very similar preconceptions about British colonial rule drove the analysis of the intellectual, social and religious activities of Indians during this period. As such, Indian intellectual productivity came to be viewed by many historians as the symptoms of an enforced modernization, necessary for the subcontinent’s emergence into the world of self- determining nation-states.

This is quite clearly an unacceptable way to conceptualise the trajectory of Indian intellectual and cultural activity during the nineteenth century, for it not only adheres to an overtly imperialist developmental model, but it also fails, significantly, to grasp the complexities inherent in the diversity of Indian intellectual production at this time. Moreover, the subversive, and distinctly anti-imperial, component of many Indians’ engagement with Western knowledge forms can be easily under-estimated by this mode of investigation. Even so, contemporary historians are still largely divided upon the best way to theorize the intellectual and cultural impact that British colonialism had upon the subcontinent, and, by extension, the roles that British ideas and ideals played in the trajectory of Indian thought. Speaking broadly, the debate turns upon the issue of the measure of continuity that can be perceived in Indian social and cultural forms from the pre-colonial era into the period of British rule, and the attendant power of the colonial state to remould India in its preferred image. While cruder historical portrayals of absolute British power and intellectual hegemony in the subcontinent have now been largely discounted or qualified, there remains for historians the challenge of producing a This is quite clearly an unacceptable way to conceptualise the trajectory of Indian intellectual and cultural activity during the nineteenth century, for it not only adheres to an overtly imperialist developmental model, but it also fails, significantly, to grasp the complexities inherent in the diversity of Indian intellectual production at this time. Moreover, the subversive, and distinctly anti-imperial, component of many Indians’ engagement with Western knowledge forms can be easily under-estimated by this mode of investigation. Even so, contemporary historians are still largely divided upon the best way to theorize the intellectual and cultural impact that British colonialism had upon the subcontinent, and, by extension, the roles that British ideas and ideals played in the trajectory of Indian thought. Speaking broadly, the debate turns upon the issue of the measure of continuity that can be perceived in Indian social and cultural forms from the pre-colonial era into the period of British rule, and the attendant power of the colonial state to remould India in its preferred image. While cruder historical portrayals of absolute British power and intellectual hegemony in the subcontinent have now been largely discounted or qualified, there remains for historians the challenge of producing a

A wide variety of intellectual movements can be adduced in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, the seat of British political power in the subcontinent and arguably the most important interface between Indians and Britons during this period. The topic that dominated much of the work of Indian intellectuals and social activists, however, was the notion of India’s ‘decline’, specifically the religious practices of Hinduism and Islam, as well as the need for their ‘reform’. During the eighteenth century, Britons had attempted in their orientalist scholarship to discern ‘value’ in Indian intellectual heritages, and, indeed, this had been necessitated largely by the mandate of governmental rule according to India’s ‘ancient constitution’, which had marked the Governor-Generalship of Warren Hastings (1773–85). But the second decade of the nineteenth century was then witness to the more aggressive expansion of the Company’s rule into the subcontinent, the introduction of Christian missionary activity from 1813 and governmental imperatives to introduce Western ideals and knowledge in the name of ‘improving’ Indian society. During the regime of Governor-General William Bentinck (1828–35), for example, the influence of British liberalism, the utilitarianism of JAMES MILL and the evangelicism of Charles Grant all came to bear upon British governmental policy in India. For example, educational institutions were to prioritize Western learning in their curricula, and legal measures were taken to curtail a variety of cultural practices deemed ‘immoral’, most notably that of suttee, or the burning of a Hindu widow upon the funeral pyre of her husband.

So how did members of the Indian intelligentsia in Calcutta respond to these attempts at Anglicization? At the most radical level, members of the Young Bengal movement, led by the Eurasian Henry Derozio (1809–31), advocated that Indian society and religion should be judged by the dictates of European rationalism. As a teacher in English Literature at the Hindu College in Calcutta, Derozio drew on the writings of Hume and Maine, for example, and advocated the wholesale adoption of British culture and European rational thought. Other Bengalis such as K.M.Banerjea (1813–85) converted to Christianity, and spent their lives promoting its teachings as a regenerative force for Indian society. Most Indians, however, took a rather more measured view. Ram Mohun Roy (1772–1833), for example, an influential member of the Bengali bhadralok (the emerging middle class, lit. ‘respectable people’) attempted to promote a vision of an ‘improved’ and ‘enlightened’ monotheistic, rational Hinduism based in the ancient Sanskrit texts known as the Upanishads (i.e. the vedanta). Without a doubt, Roy viewed Western knowledge as a principal source of rational thought, and thus advocated Indian education in it, even making a direct request to government in this regard in 1823. Yet the longer-term trajectory of Roy’s thought amply illustrates his engagement with a variety of intellectual influences, and thus most likely reflects the long tradition of cultural and intellectual syncretism within pre-colonial India. Indeed, Roy was himself a brahman

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 302

Entries A-Z 303

knowledgeable in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Bengali and later in English. Roy’s early Persian work, Tuhfat-ul-Muwahidin (1804), for example, drew upon contemporary Islamic rationalism (see below) to promote his ideas on monotheism, while in later works one can discern not only a deeper appreciation of the advaita (non-differentiated) vedanta of the eighth-century philosopher Shankaracharya, but also the teachings of European deism and Christian ethics. Yet Roy in no way ‘aped’ Christian thought, for he subjected it to a searching critique based in reason, criticizing the notion of Christ’s divinity, for example. Ram Mohun Roy founded a series of organizations, including the influential Brahmo Samaj in 1828, to promote his highly textualized and rational vision of Hinduism, and to help purge Hindu religious practice of accreted ‘degraded’ practices, such as idolatry and overly elaborate ritual, which he viewed as being largely the product of priestly intervention. In this regard, Roy’s reappraisal of Hindu religious doctrine included a specifically social element, for he believed that religion must not only be inherently rational, but also supportive of an egalitarian social order. As such, the Brahmo Samaj introduced a series of social reforms, including the abandonment of caste and a revised marriage ritual.

The emphasis of Ram Mohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj upon the authority of textual sources and the exercise of reason in the understanding of religious doctrine drew criticism from a variety of sources, including bewildered Christian missionaries and self- styled defenders of Hindu ‘orthodoxy’. Nowhere were the conflicting understandings of ‘Hinduism’ more pronounced in this period than over the debate surrounding the cultural and religious validity of the practice of suttee. Roy argued in an 1818 tract against the practice upon the basis of Sanskrit scriptural authority, characterizing it instead as a product of contemporary Hindu degeneracy. Others, however, such as the religious conservative Radhakant Deb, a founding member of the Calcutta Dharma Sabha (‘society for [the preservation of] religion’), argued for the cultural importance of suttee as an integral component of religious practice. In this regard Deb also argued from the basis of Hindu scriptural authority, but he wished to reinvigorate Hindu religious practice by an appeal to ‘tradition’, thereby insulating it from undue outside influence, whether from Christianity or radical reformers such as Roy.

It is important to note here that it is possible to discern something of a double genealogy for many of the principal ideas that Bengali reformers drew upon. The prevalent notion of Indian civilizational ‘decline’ can be traced to late eighteenth-century orientalist writers, and which then became institutionalized in one way or another in most nineteenth-century discourse on India. Scottish mathematician and astronomer John Playfair (1748–1819), for example, believed that Indian knowledge of astronomy had once been considerable, but that over time it had been largely forgotten. In this way, the orientalist model conformed broadly to a biblical conception of knowledge as Providential. Yet Hindu thought also conceptualized the trajectory of human civilization by reference to a cyclical decline, and it was widely understood that we live in the last of the four great eras, the Kali Yuga, in which the proper observation of religion and its dictates is said to become increasingly scarce. In addition, it is apparent that the focus upon the cultural authority of textual forms, and the need to return to a more directly Sanskritic religious practice, reflected both European orientalist preconceptions of a ‘religion of the book’ as well as the religious importance granted to Sanskrit (as a divine language) and the corpus of Sanskrit literature by the elite brahmans of India. Indeed, the

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 304

very centrality of religion to discussions of Indian identity and history was based not only upon European orientalist imaginings of India as ‘inherently religious’, but also derived from the concerns of the brahmans and maulavis (the religious elites of India) whom the colonial government came to rely upon for authoritative cultural and social information.

In addition to Calcutta, the older cities of northern India also witnessed during the early part of the nineteenth century socio-intellectual movements to assert forms of revivalist religion. Attempts to revive a ‘true’ understanding of Islam, for example, traced their intellectual heritage to Shah Waliullah (1703–63) of Delhi, and the Madrassa-i- Rahimiya. But rather than interaction with the West, Waliullah’s brand of reformism found its inspiration from within Islamic intellectual traditions, and from the Arabian peninsula in particular. Waliullah desired a restoration of Islam to its former position of power and influence in the subcontinent, and so advocated an understanding of Islamic belief and practice with reference to its most authoritative sources: the Koran and the hadith (sayings of the Prophet). Simultaneously, he wished to cleanse Islam of what he considered to be its debased practices and beliefs, by moving away from many of the populist teachings and customs of Sufism, such as saint worship. In effect, Waliullah understood the authority of religious knowledge to lie in the key texts of Islam, rather than popular custom or belief. Key to his thought, however, was the notion that the ‘gates of reason’ had not closed (ijtihad)—an innovation to Sunni orthodoxy—and that qualified Islamic scholars could, as such, apply their learning and reason to the Koran and the hadith so as to return Islam to its original purity. Waliullah’s views are systematized in his Arabic commentary, Hujjat-allah al-Baligha, but so as to promote the ‘original’ source of Islamic knowledge throughout India, Waliullah translated the Koran into Persian, and one of his sons even translated it into Urdu, the vernacular of northern India.

Waliullah’s successors, particularly his son Shah Abdul Aziz (1746–1824), and Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831), successfully popularized his ideas throughout northern India, and brought to them an overtly political imputation. Abdul Aziz, for example, declared India to no longer be dar ul-Islam, a land under Islamic political control, in a famous 1803 fatwa that followed the East India Company’s conquest of Delhi. This opened the door for the declaration of jihad by the leader of the Tariqat-i- Muhammadiya movement, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, and an unsuccessful attempt to assert direct political control of northern India by way of armed conquest. In Bengal, Shariat Allah (1781–1840), leader of the Faraizi movement, similarly drew upon Waliullah’s teachings and those of the Wahhabis of the Arabian peninsula to lead a series of violent peasant uprisings against the largely Hindu landlord class. Here it may be seen that religious thought was translated into a rationale for direct political action based on the desire for economic redistribution.

The elaboration of a public sphere in India during the first decades of the nineteenth century, and particularly the adoption of printing technology by Indians for vernacular languages, allowed such intellectual discourse to impact relatively widely, though of course at this early juncture such impact must be considered as being limited largely to literate elites. Originally introduced by Christian missionaries for the production of Bible translations, the printing press was utilized by Indians to produce not only books (including school text-books in English as well as editions of Bengali, Persian and Sanskrit literature) but also a wide variety of journals, newspapers and polemical pamphlets. Indeed, the debate over the ‘legality’ of suttee was conducted largely through

Entries A-Z 305

the production of pamphlets, and one can also find instances of overtly anti-Christian polemics in print produced by members of the Bengali intelligentsia. Moreover, although Muslim reformers such as Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi were amongst the most successful at popularizing their views beyond intellectual elites, it is significant that they also made use of print media, issuing a variety of books and polemical pamphlets in both Persian and Urdu. As the nineteenth century reached its middle years, print and other informational media continued to expand in the subcontinent, most notably in the form of ‘native newspapers’. Taken together with the increased patronage of literary and educational activities by the emerging middle classes, wealthy merchants, pensioned-off Indian princes and the British government itself, this led to a substantial widening of intellectual discourse and its cultural impact, and renewed debate about the nature of Indian religion, history and the nation.

One can perceive in the early nineteenth-century intellectual movements and religious debates discussed above much which foreshadows the intellectual productions of the later decades of the century. Indeed, the whole of the later nineteenth century may largely be characterized as a time during which Indian religious and historical thought was progressively, and more aggressively, systematized, and thereby formulated for deployment in a variety of social, cultural and political projects by Indians. In particular, visions of Hinduism’s exalted ancient status, as well as its inherent rationality and spirituality, popularized by a variety of religious reformers, would take on important resonance for the production of a national identity deemed sufficient to substantiate claims to political independence from Britain. Yet thought about the nature of Hinduism and Indian civilization also became substantially fractured during this later period, reproducing the gross dichotomy of reform/tradition witnessed in earlier Bengal-centred debates. Simultaneously, Muslim thinkers increasingly began to engage with the intellectual impact brought by Britain’s colonial presence in India, often advocating a programme of modernization by reference to Western knowledge and values. Yet mirroring the dichotomy present within debates about the nature of Hinduism, Islamic thought also fractured into several identifiable trajectories.

Indian attempts to systematically define the nature of ‘Hinduism’ as well as the cultural significance of Hindu religious thought and practice were often carried out in a context of politically charged intellectual disputation. In the middle of the century, Christian missionaries and their supporters developed increasingly sophisticated arguments to combat the myriad attractions of Hindu belief systems. For example, the Scottish administrator John Muir (1810–82) published in 1839 a text entitled Matapariksha (‘an examination of [religious] doctrine’), in which he attempted to demonstrate the rational basis of Christianity in comparison with the irrationality of Hinduism. Writing in Sanskrit, Muir argued, for example, that the miracles of Christ were confirmed by the weight of testimony and historical evidence, while the recorded deeds of Hindu deities were clearly ‘born from delusion’. Indians, and in particular the traditional Hindu intelligentsia, the pandits (‘learned men’), now actively engaged with Christian polemics. In response to Muir’s text, for example, the pandit Nilakantha Shastri (1825–95) argued in his 1844 Shastra-tattva-vinirnaya (‘a verdict on the truth of the shastra [the Sanskrit corpus]’) that the tenets of Christianity could not be established by reference to reason, as the Bible contained many more palpable contradictions than Sanskrit texts did. Moreover, Nilakantha argued that the proper place of reason should be

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 306

to more fully understand a body of scripture, and in this regard he also outlined the way in which the distinct ‘traditions’ within Hinduism simply represented different paths to the same ultimate goal. In so doing, Nilakantha effectively broke the British attempt to monopolize important intellectual values for Christian doctrine, such as conformity to reason, and declared an overarching unity to Hindu thought.

Yet British educators such as James Ballantyne (1813–64), the superintendent of the government’s college in Benares between 1846 and 1861, continued to promote a vision of Christianity’s exclusive relationship with the dictates of reason and Western scientific knowledge. In essence Ballantyne conceptualized Hindu metaphysics and science as being at a lower stage of intellectual development than that of Europe, and so he intended to co-opt the traditional cultural authority of the pandits employed by the college to promote an ‘improving’ educational curriculum in Western ‘useful’ knowledge through the medium of Sanskrit and Hindi. Ultimately, he intended this curriculum as preparatory to Indians’ ‘rational’ acceptance of Christian doctrine. Yet it is possible to discern in the scholarship of the pandits who worked with Ballantyne not only a serious intellectual engagement with Western knowledge, but also, significantly, a resituating of it outside a colonial ideology steeped in India’s need for ‘improvement’. For example, pandit Vitthala Shastri (d. 1867) wrote a long commentary on Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, effectively adopting it into the corpus of Sanskrit-based logic, and also authored a text on Western chemistry, in which he claimed that this system of knowledge, far from being ‘foreign’ to India, was instead perfectly consistent with doctrines of scientific methodology advocated by Hindu intellectual traditions. Vitthala Shastri and many of the other pandits of Benares College actively promoted their views in a variety of journals and through active involvement in literary clubs. This process, which we can see mirrored also in the cities of Poona, Calcutta and Delhi, for example, served to make available to a wider audience these understandings of the significant connections between Hinduism, rationality and scientific discovery.

Throughout the remainder of the century two principal groups of Hindu intellectuals were active in northern India. The pandits, increasingly, seem to have strayed from a direct engagement with Western thought, and instead emerged as promoters of an idealized vision of sanatan dharma (the ‘eternal religion’ of Hinduism). These largely ‘conservative’ movements drew upon the sanctity of ‘tradition’ to authorize their particular visions of Hindu religious thought, and most often promoted this vision through their membership in a dharma sabha. For example, pandits associated with the Kashi Dharma Sabha, centred in Benares, undertook in the 1870s a systematic enquiry into the various fields of Sanskrit literature in order to pronounce authoritatively upon the textual basis of Hinduism. Others, such as Raja Rama Shastri and Bala Shastri, wrote socially conservative texts that argued against the permissibility of widow remarriage (a topic of interest to social reformers) by reference, again, to authoritative Sanskrit texts. Then, in 1987, pandit Din Dayalu Sharma (b. 1863) founded the Bharat Dharma Mahamandala, an umbrella organization designed to provide unity to the variety of local dharma sabhas that had sprung up across northern India. High on the agenda of this organization was the perceived need to protect the symbols of Hindu orthodoxy, including the cow, brahman privilege and pilgrimage sites, and it worked to actively promote an understanding of the ‘traditional’ Hindu social order, varnashra-madharma, as sanctioned in the Sanskrit shastra.

But perhaps the true inheritors of the spirit of active engagement with, and critique of, Western colonial modernity first exemplified by pandits Nilakantha Shastri and Vitthala Shastri are the more radical late-nineteenth-century Hindu reformers such as Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), the founder of the Arya Samaj (‘society of Aryans’) based in northwestern India, as well as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) of Bengal. Dayananda Saraswati, much like Ram Mohun Roy, advocated a return to a purified version of Hinduism, cleansed of its later priestly accretions such as image worship and caste divisions. In this regard, Dayananda understood the ancient Sanskrit texts, the Veda, to be the foundational texts of Hinduism, and so by returning Hindu practice to conformity with them, Dayananda believed he would cleanse it of later degenerative practices. To expound his views, Dayananda wrote Satyarth Prakash (‘the light of truth’), and engaged in relentless debate with his opponents. Among his strategies was the promotion of an understanding of Christianity as an irrational body of knowledge, and the superior ‘truth’ of the Veda, given the latter’s conformity to the principle of reason and the findings of scientific enquiry. Indeed, one of Dayananda’s followers, Guru Datta Vidyarthi (d. 1890), went so far as to translate the Veda into English in such a way as to confirm to British critics their inherently scientific, rather than mythological, nature. In contrast, Swami Vivekananda, a follower of the seer Ramakrishna (1836–86), turned away from a purely rationalist vision of Hinduism, and instead promoted Ramakrishna’s focus upon devotion. In essence, Vivekananda emphasized Ramakrishna’s notion of the universality of all religions, but, equally, the superiority of Hinduism, given its emphasis upon spirituality and tolerance. Interestingly, it has been argued that the entrance of the notion of ‘tolerance’ into characterizations of Hinduism derived from Vivekananda’s time in the USA, where he would have encountered the exalted place of this value in the discourse of Western democracy and modernity.

In each of the examples outlined above, whether of ‘reformists’ or ‘traditionalists’, it is possible to identify many common points of reference in their respective thought. These may include the productive relationship of the Hindu religion with reason and the findings of Western science; the textual basis for authoritative understandings of Hinduism; the exalted antiquity of Hindu-Indian civilization; the notion of Hinduism’s relative decline and therefore need for strengthening through systematization; and, finally, the impression of Hinduism as being under siege both from within and without. While none of the intellectuals discussed here were overtly nationalists, in the sense that none were active in political engagement with the colonial state, they did, however, popularize a variety of understandings of Hinduism forged in defence of largely Western critiques. These would then become important for the twentieth-century construction of a nationalist Hindu-Indian identity. For example, the Arya Samaj, while largely unsuccessful in popularizing its views on Hinduism, did, however, stress the importance of a systematic belief system set out within an identifiable body of text, and, moreover, the importance of Hinduism’s rational and scientific character. This would become an important element in the development of a nationalist vision of Hindu scientific practice, exemplified in the work of Brajendranath Seal and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Vivekananda’s vision of Hindu spirituality, in turn, was utilized by M.K.GANDHI, as well as the chauvinist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to express India’s superior claim to nationhood over the materialist West. Indeed, so pervasive has this idea become that it informed Indian nationalist understandings of pre-colonial religious syncretism in India,

Entries A-Z 307

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 308

as well as nationalist historiography that viewed the partition of the subcontinent as an ‘aberration’ of that syncretism. This is not to mention, of course, India’s ‘spiritual’ character being a principal selling point for contemporary Western tourism to the subcontinent.

Finally, it must be mentioned, however briefly, that very similar debates were taking place within the sphere of South Asian Islamic thought during the mid-to late nineteenth century, and followed much the same trajectory as well. Following the ideals outlines by Shah Walliullah and his intellectual descendants, later Islamic ‘traditionalists’ associated with the Deoband madrassa (school), such as Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (1833–77) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829–1905), were drawn from the established class of Muslim theologians, the ‘ulama. The Deoband madrassa was a ‘modern’ educational institution that emphasized the importance of the Koran and the hadith as the true source of Islamic knowledge, as well as the explanations of these by qualified ‘ulama. The Deobandis also participated in debates with Christian missionaries and the Arya Samaj to defend their vision of Islam. Yet other Muslims in India began an active engagement with Western knowledge forms. Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), for example, who was in active service to the British Government, and who remained loyal during the Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857, became convinced of the need to reinvigorate the Indian Muslim community by reference to Western knowledge and education. As an acknowledged ‘modernizer’, Sayyid Ahmad advocated a knowledge of Western science, as well as the adoption of British values such as discipline and order. In this regard, he drew upon the notion of ijtihad, and argued that, as lived circumstances changed, the interpretation of Islamic religious norms must also change. This view hardly endeared Sayyid Ahmad to the traditional ‘ulama, yet he nevertheless promoted his ideas through the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College established in Aligarh in 1875. Here Sayyid Ahmad hoped to prepare young Muslims to work within the British governmental service, and, ultimately, to bring them into positions of political power that would enable them to protect the Indian Islamic community.

The nineteenth century in India is witness to an intellectual diversity and vitality that defies the demands of imperial rhetoric. Yet this is also a period of intellectual history that has been shackled by historiographies primarily concerned with either reproducing that rhetoric, or analysing the pervasiveness of British colonial power and representational authority. As such, there remains much work yet to do in order to restore

a pervasive historical understanding of Indian intellectual and cultural agency.