At the beginning of XIXe century, European liberal ideas penetrated India. Christopher Bayly traces their progressive adaptation to the political, social and intellectual context of the subcontinent. His book contributes to the renewal of intellectual history through a global and transnational approach.
The Indian democratic miracle never ceases to amaze. How, almost alone among the large states resulting from decolonization, has India been able to preserve a representative regime and respect for the fundamental rights of individuals and minorities? ? In his latest work, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and EmpireChristopher Bayly offers a new, nuanced and enlightening response, which emphasizes the reappropriation of liberalism of European origin and its progressive adaptation to the political, social and intellectual context of the subcontinent by several generations of Indian thinkers.
Christopher Bayly, professor of imperial history at the University of Cambridge, is one of the most influential historians in the English-speaking world. His work has profoundly changed our understanding of the origins and functioning of the British Empire, while his synthesis, The Birth of the Modern World (1780-1914)presented a new vision, more polycentric while taking the right measure of European domination, of the processes of globalization in XIXe century. In line with this vision, Recovering Liberties seeks to broaden the horizons of intellectual history, a discipline long confined to the history of the great European thinkers.
The Ram Mohan Roy moment
Bayly situates the emergence of Indian liberalism within the framework of a global enthusiasm for the liberal constitutional model in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, from the proclamation of the constitution of Cadiz by the Spanish Cortes in 1812 to the constitutions adopted by the ancient Iberian colonies in America. European liberal ideas entered India not only through British radicals hostile to the despotic regime of the East India Company, but also through more direct contacts with European revolutionary movements, via the Portuguese enclave of Goa or the French counter in Pondicherry.
The concepts of representation and individual rights received a warm reception among Bengali Brahmin intellectuals, particularly adherents of Vedānta, a Hindu philosophical doctrine that emphasizes the development of the individual. The major figure in this intellectual encounter was the Hindu reformer Râm Mohan Roy (1772-1833). Hostile to idolatry and Satī (the immolation of widows), Roy also denounces the confiscation of the wealth of the subcontinent by the East India Company and the lack of regard of the British administration for the fundamental rights of its Indian subjects. Highlighting the important role played by representative institutions in ancient India, such as the panchayat or village assembly at the local level, Roy and his disciples called for respect for property rights, freedom of the press, and the right to natives to sit on juries in the British justice system. The 1820s saw the emergence of real public opinion, driven by a growing number of periodical newspapers, such as the Mirut-al-Akhbar (in Persian) and the Calcutta Journal (in English) by Roy, and the beginning of the gradual improvement in the legal condition of the wealthiest and most educated Indians.
Changes and persistence of Indian liberalism
After 1840, Roy’s heirs transformed and radicalized his doctrine. Drawing up a gallery of portraits of intellectuals dizzying with erudition, Bayly distinguishes two main trends: the development of a “ pleasant sociology » (benign sociology) to counteract the rise of racial stereotypes in European thought, and the development of a “ statistical liberalism », which accumulates data on Indian society and economy in order to challenge the policies pursued by the British administration. Moving away from British constitutional liberalism, Indian liberals draw their inspiration from the positivism of Auguste Comte, the republicanism of Giuseppe Mazzini and the protectionism of Friedrich List. As a representative of this second generation of Indian liberalism, let us cite Girsh Chunder Ghose (1829-1869) who, at the time of the great Rebellion which shook North India in 1857-1858, drew a parallel with the English revolution of XVIIe century and the French revolution of 1789, and condemns the obscurantism of the rebels at the same time as the excesses of the British reaction.
At the end of the century and even more so after the First World War, the erosion of Indian liberalism increased in the face of the progress of “ communalism » (tensions between religious communities), an integral nationalism inclined to legitimize the use of violence in the face of British colonialism, and Marxist revolutionary ideas. According to Bayly, liberal principles nevertheless remained an essential source of inspiration for the Indian intelligentsia during the march to independence. The jurist Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), defender of the untouchables and principal drafter of the 1947 constitution, would thus be less an anti-liberal than a “ counter-liberal » (a concept inspired by the “ counter-democracy » by Pierre Rosanvallon), supporter of positive discrimination to compensate for the inadequacies of constitutional liberalism rather than to overcome it. Despite his ostensible rejection of liberalism, even Mahātmā Gandhi remained faithful to the principles of freedom of expression and freedom of association, and to an overall very liberal distrust of state voluntarism.
There “ creolization » as a mechanism for spreading liberalism
Recovering liberties is also an invitation to rethink the origins of liberal thought throughout the world and in particular in its European cradle. The global enthusiasm for liberal constitutionalism in the 1810s and 1820s appears here as a fundamental conjuncture: the Râm Mohan Roy moment in India responds to the Guizot moment identified in France by Rosanvallon. Like Roy, Guizot and the other inventors of French liberalism, such as Benjamin Constant and Jean-Baptiste Say, produced original liberal doctrines following an intellectual and political encounter with the effectiveness of the British liberal model. France in 1815 was not colonized, but still defeated and occupied by British forces. French liberalism could be redefined, according to Bayly’s terminology, as a “ Creole ideology “, that is to say the product not of a pure diffusion, but of a work of reappropriation carried out from indigenous intellectual traditions. From this perspective, the ideas of the Enlightenment, but perhaps also Protestant culture (Guizot, Constant and Say all three came from reformed backgrounds), would fulfill the relay role played by Vedānta in Bengal.
Bayly’s neo-diffusionism cannot be accused of Eurocentrism because it emphasizes the autonomy of Indian actors and because it places French, Italian, Iberian liberalism, etc. on the same level as Indian liberalism. On the other hand, one could accuse him of Anglocentrism, since Great Britain still appears to be the ultimate center of impulse for liberal ideas. But this centrism is perhaps legitimate: the golden age of liberalism does not coincide by chance with the British preponderance of the years 1810 to 1860. The withering of liberal ideas after 1870 is undoubtedly explained in part by the geopolitical decline of Great Britain, even if the legacy of the liberal era often persists in disguise: the Third Republic’s attachment to bicameral parliamentarism owes more to Anglophile Orleanism than republicanism proper.
Anglo-Indian affinities and Franco-Arab connections
It is tempting to look for other “ elective affinities » than those identified by Bayly between British and Indian liberals. A particularly interesting case would be the reappropriation of French patriotic discourse, both more authoritarian and more egalitarian than British liberalism, in the Arab world. Albert Hourani has already underlined, in a work more classically diffusionist than that of Bayly, but to which the subtitle of Recovering Liberties pays homage, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939the power of attraction of French political ideas on Arab political thought after 1800. If the beginning of the XIXe century experienced a liberal constitutional moment, it also experienced, at the same time, a Jacobin-Bonapartist moment. This modernizing and egalitarian authoritarianism had less appeal for the upper castes of Bengal than the aristocratic liberalism of British origin. But he found fertile ground in the Arab world, where the emphasis on national cohesion as a means of promoting the progress of civilization could relate to the notion of “ ‘asabiyya » (solidarity) inherited from Ibn Khaldoun. Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), director of the first Arabic-language newspaper and founder of a Franco-Arabic translation school in Cairo, worked tirelessly to adapt French progressive patriotism to the geopolitical and ideological circumstances of the Egypt of XIXe century.
Recovering Liberties is an important book for its content and for the avenues of research it suggests. It is also an optimistic book, full of welcome faith in the renewal of intellectual history through a global and transnational approach, in the future of liberal democracy and, in contrast to the conflictual declinism of Samuel Huntington or Niall Ferguson , in the fertility of exchanges between the great human civilizations.