Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India

Provincializing Progress: Developmentalism and Anti-Imperialism in Colonial India Inder S. Marwah, McMaster University As critics have recently demonstrated, developmentalist thinking sustains modern Euro- pean imperialism by portraying non-Europeans as further back on a fixed scale of civiliza- tions. The problem persists in the developmental logics underlying contemporary Marxist and liberal political theory, suggesting that developmentalism is implicitly bound to domina- tion and imperialism. This article complicates this connection by drawing out anti-imperial developmentalist arguments articulated from the other side of the colonial divide. I elaborate three distinctive developmental logics in anti-imperialisms advanced by Surendranath Banerjea, Aurobindo Ghose, and Shyamji Krishnavarma, leading figures in India’s inde- pendence movement, to show the particularity of the form of developmentalism so inti- mately bound to domination. This exposition aims to provincialize it by uncovering alter- native developmentalist schemas offering distinctive conceptual resources for understanding progress in relation to anti-imperialism. By reaching beyond the Western lens framing the problem of developmentalism, I show its instabilities and consider its utility in resisting impe- rialism. Keywords: political theory, imperialism, postcolonialism, developmentalism, India, de- colonization I n recent years, an expansive literature in political theory and postcolonial stud- ies has drawn out the implications of developmentalist thinking in sustaining European colonialism and imperialism from, depending on the critic, the fifteenth century into the present. Most broadly, and glossing over substantial divergences in their articulations, developmentalist accounts of progress depict human advance- ment as unfolding according to a set internal logic, or series of stages, through which all societies move and in relation to which they can be ranked. These have This article benefited from presentations at the University of British Columbia’s “What is a Col- ony? What is Colonialism?” workshop and the Association for Political Theory meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 2017, as well as the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Alex Livingston, Tejas Parasher, and Inés Valdez for their generous comments and discussions on various iterations of the paper, as well as to Polity’s editors and three reviewers. The article’s shortcomings are, of course, mine alone. Published online Month XX, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/704190 Polity, volume 51, number 3 (July 2019), pp. 000–000. 0032-3497/2019/5103-00XX$10.00. © 2019 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved. 000 | Provincializing Progress comprised a—perhaps, the—central conceptual ballast upholding the West’s ascen- dency over the non-West by portraying the latter as farther back on a fixed track of social, political, and moral advancement. From Vitoria’s reflections on new world “barbarians,” to the Enlightenment’s conjectural histories, to nineteenth century civ- ilizational hierarchies, to contemporary neocolonialism, developmental schemas have justified Western civilizing missions in their many guises. The problem isn’t just historical. As Amy Allen, Thomas McCarthy, and Dipesh Chakrabarty dem- onstrate, both liberalism and Marxism remain entangled with developmentalism, raising particular challenges for contemporary critical theory. How are we to retain critical theory’s progressive, normative ambitions without reproducing develop- mental logics sanctioning domination, hierarchy, and dispossession? The problem is both political and epistemological: beyond vindicating political paternalism, Chakrabarty argues, developmentalism secures the primacy of Western intellec- tual traditions and norms, relative to which non-Western bodies of thought have little choice but to set themselves.1 The non-West, even in the realm of ideas, is al- ways just catching up. Developmentalism, then, appears implicitly bound to impe- rialism and colonialism (narrowly) and to political domination (generally), infect- ing the languages and categories of our modern political imaginary. This article complicates the internal connection between developmentalism and domination by drawing out the anti-imperial tenor of developmental logics artic- ulated from the other side of the colonial divide. I flesh out three distinctive forms of developmental thinking advanced by three leading figures in India’s early inde- pendence movement: Surendranath Banerjea (in the pages of the Bengalee, a mouth- piece of the moderate faction of the Indian National Congress); Aurobindo Ghose (in Bande Mataram and Karmayogin, two radical nationalist papers); and Shyamji Krishnavarma (in the Indian Sociologist, an anti-imperial broadsheet). By exposing the variability of developmental frameworks shaping their conceptualizations of the colonial condition, and of India’s social, political and moral progress, I demonstrate the particularity of the form of developmentalism so intimately linked to imperial- ism and domination. The idea is, in a sense, to provincialize that form by uncov- ering alternative developmentalisms offering distinctive conceptual resources for 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27–28. See also Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13; and Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), for careful treatments of the hegemonic spread of Western knowledge, such that “all other traditions of reasoning are only Unreason, or earlier stages in the march to- ward Reason,” at 3. Inder S. Marwah | 000 understanding progress in relation to imperialism—and, more particularly, in re- lation to anti-imperialism. My goal is to contest the widely held view that developmentalist logic necessarily entails the marginalization of non-Europeans, while also identifying certain short- comings in recent attempts to salvage an ideal of development from such lines of criticism. Rather than arguing that Western political thought (and critical theory, more narrowly) can be cleansed of its imperialistic features—a claim concerning the viability of Western political theory—I demonstrate how political thinkers un- der colonial rule marshaled developmentalist arguments to resist imperialism. This approach helps open up novel political horizons by, in David Scott’s words, “un- learning the presumptive privilege of one’s own moral-intellectual traditions, and . . . learning something of the internal composition of questions and answers through which the relevant traditions of others have been historically shaped.”2 The article thus reaches beyond the strictly Western theoretical vantage point within which the problem of developmentalism is commonly figured to draw out devel- opmentalism’s instabilities, complexities, and variations, and consider its utility in resisting imperialism. As a secondary objective, this article contributes to the exposition of “the mean- ing and the life of ideas in colonial South Asia,”3 whose political thought, Shruti Kapila observes, is typically treated either as “an adjunct to the political history of the Indian nation and state . . . obfuscat[ing] much of the Indian intellectual in- novation and reflection of the period,”4 or as derivative of Western political think- ing.5 By focusing on the originality and variety of developmentalisms mobilized to oppose empire, I aim to illuminate one facet of this intellectual innovation, along with the rich synthetic political imagination on which it drew. This joins recent work in global intellectual history examining, more generally, the porous- ness of imperial intellectual contexts and the complexities of what Duncan Bell 2. David Scott, “The Traditions of Historical Others,” Symposia on Gender, Race and Phi- losophy 8 (2012): 1–8, at 3. For a similar argument, see Godrej, Cosmopolitan, 53 (see note 1 above). 3. Shruti Kapila, ed., An Intellectual History for India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vi. 4. Ibid. 5. For elaborations of the originality of Indian nationalisms, see Partha Chatterjee, The Na- tion and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1993), 75; and Sugata Bose, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: A Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought,” in An Intellectual History for India, ed. Kapila, 117–33, at 119 (see note 3 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress describes as the “ideologies of resistance”6 surrounding them.7 Colonized popula- tions were anything but supine objects or recalcitrant subjects of epistemic vio- lence; the article’s reconstructions show the permeability of colonial knowledge- formation and the vastly different ways that Western ideas were adopted, adapted, integrated, resisted, and rejected by anti-colonial activists.8 The colonial condition, these thinkers reveal, is something of a liminal state between cultures of knowledge, and as such retains what Harald Fischer-Tiné describes as an “openness to cultural bricolage and wholesale borrowing”;9 the resulting anti-imperialisms are accord- ingly diverse in their analytical, critical, and normative orientations. Far from uni- formly resisting a cohesively perceived imperial power, I demonstrate (a) the sub- stantive differences among Banerjea’s, Ghose’s, and Krishnavarma’s understandings of the colonial condition, (b) their still-deeper departures over the time-scales and developmental-evolutionary frameworks contextualizing those views, and (c) their distinctive ways of integrating and mobilizing Indian and European bodies of thought in formulating them.10 I undertake this through a close engagement with their thought, as articulated in the broadsheets that each wrote and/or edited. I focus on the period between 6. Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 110. 7. For recent work in global intellectual history exploring the transnational transmission of ideas in colonial India, see C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liber- alism and Empire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Seth, Subject Lessons (see note 1 above); Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Kapila, Intellectual History (see note 3 above). For a wider treat- ment, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 2015). For the diversity of anti-imperial ideologies, see Bell, Reordering, 110– 15 (see note 6 above). 8. For an examination of political theories of the colonized beyond the Indian context, see Burke A. Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold, eds., Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2017). 9. Harald Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperial Struggle: The Life of Shyamji Krishnavarma (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 84. 10. This resists the inclination in Partha Chatterjee’s early work to treat all anti-imperialist nationalisms—in India and “in the political life of every post-colonial nationalist regime in the world”—as little more than negotiations of the implicit tension “between the modern and the national.” See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 169 and 80, respectively. While in many ways illuminating, this flattens out these nationalisms’ substantive political, ideological, and ide- ational variations; liberals, anti-liberals, and everything in between remain “equally prisoners of the rationalism, historicism and scientism of the nationalist thematic” (Ibid., 80). My aim here is, rather, to recover the idiosyncratic political languages of Indian anti-imperialists, “the nu- merous fragmented resistances to th[e] normalizing project of the colonial state” that Chat- terjee’s later writings explore; see his Fragments, 13 (see note 5 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 1905 and 1910, for three reasons. First, I aim to capture a set of arguments ad- dressing the same political phenomena and circumstances. All three figures are re- sponding to an identical colonial context at an especially generative moment in the early nationalist movement. Still further, they engaged one another directly: Ghose and Banerjea sat on opposite sides of the moderate-extremist divide follow- ing the Indian National Congress’s 1907 split, and Krishnavarma was an interloc- utor of both. As such, they reveal the divergent visions of power, politics, and prog- ress at the inception of the nationalist movement, the complexities within what J. G. A. Pocock characterizes as a particular language of politics.11 Second, their writings during this period illustrate the distinctive ways that In- dian anti-imperialists drew on and synthesized Western and non-Western bodies of thought. While the dissemination of Western knowledge was from the mid- 1830s onward an integral facet of the subcontinent’s colonial governance, Sanjay Seth argues that “this knowledge ceased to be merely the colonizer’s knowledge. It found a home in its new locales.”12 It may rather be the case that it found a range of homes, some more hospitable than others, as the intersections of Indian and Western knowledges were as multifaceted as they were variable. In Banerjea, Ghose, and Krishnavarma, we see the diversity in nationalists’ incorporations of Western knowledge, from (respectively) wholesale integration, to near-total rejection, to mediate synthesis. Finally, the period is notable for its particularly rich and politically charged climate of anti-colonial thought and activism, bookmarked on one side by Lord Curzon’s 1905 partition of Bengal and, on the other, by the lead-up to the First World War.13 This moment—particularly between 1905 and 1908—witnessed the rise of the Swadeshi movement, with its attendant strategies (boycott, national 11. J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 3–41. 12. Seth, Subject Lessons, 1 (see note 1 above). 13. An extensive literature catalogues the impact of Bengal’s partition over the early nation- alist movement; see, among others, Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Mac- millan, 1983), 91–126; Sankar Ghose, Political Ideas and Movements in India (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1975), 29–72; Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajendra Kumar Pandey, Modern Indian Po- litical Thought: Text and Context (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), 27–32; Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Anti-Authoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Chico, Calif.: AK Press, 2011), 45; Daniel Argov, Moderates and Extremists in the Indian Nationalist Movement, 1883–1920 (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1967), 109–36; and Stephen Hay, Sources of In- dian Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 84–174. While I draw on these and other historical accounts to contextualize the period’s political landscape, this article focuses more narrowly on the conceptual register on which developmentalist arguments were formed and articulated. 000 | Provincializing Progress education, non-cooperation) and ideals (swaraj), and the Congress’s division be- tween moderates and extremists, both of which would ultimately shape the in- dependence movement.14 It was, then, an exceptionally fertile period for anti- imperialist political thought. In total, this article exposes a mode of political thinking immersed in active political struggle, and the particular efficacy of developmentalist logics in advanc- ing it. In the first section I sketch the problems associated with developmental thinking. The second part details Banerjea’s, Ghose’s, and Krishnavarma’s anti- imperialisms, elaborating the distinctive developmentalisms that each marshaled to resist colonial domination. I conclude, in Section 3, by considering the wider dis- ciplinary, historical, and theoretical implications of their anti-imperial develop- mentalist arguments. The Problem with/of Developmentalism An extensive critical scholarship has, in the last decade or two, persuasively argued that developmentalism is the conceptual lynchpin of imperialism.15 Dipesh Chakra- barty provides a particularly lucid, far-reaching, and by now seminal critique of the historicism pervading both Marxist and liberal political theory. As an “important form [of ] the ideology of progress or ‘development,’” he argues, historicism “enabled 14. The Swadeshi movement was a strategy of resistance to imperial rule chiefly centered around economic non-participation with the British (boycotting British and other foreign goods) and supporting the production of Indian-made goods. The movement’s best known and best de- veloped instantiation was triggered by Britain’s 1905 partition of Bengal, on which I focus here, and also involved mass public mobilizations and a push for national education. These efforts were anchored in the ideal of swaraj, a complex notion of non-subjection and of social, political, eco- nomic, and cultural self-reliance captured in the ideal of Indian self-rule. For Swadeshism’s wide- ranging impacts over the conceptual and political development of the independence movement, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973); Sarkar, Modern India, 96–117 (see previous note); Ranajit Guha, Dominance With- out Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 100–22; Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19–24; and Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 2004), 242–76. 15. A rich literature at the intersection of Indian intellectual history and postcolonial theory treats the problem of developmentalism in relation to imperialism in the subcontinent, more specifically. While historians, political theorists, and postcolonial critics such as Dipesh Chakra- barty, Leela Gandhi, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, Christopher Bayly, Jennifer Pitts, Uday Singh Mehta, and Ashis Nandy have drawn out the complexities of developmental arguments sustaining late-modern British imperialism (on which I draw throughout this article), my focus here is on the developmentalist arguments mobilized by thinkers on the other side of the colo- nial divide that fall outside of their studies. Inder S. Marwah | 000 European political domination of the world” by advancing a “‘ first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global historical time.”16 This developmental logic “posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance . . . assumed to exist between the West and the non-West,”17 portraying the latter as farther down the civiliza- tional ladder which all societies would climb. The theoretical heart of the argument lay in the conceit that “to understand the nature of anything in this world”18—in- cluding, in this case, humanity itself—one needed to treat it as “an historically de- veloping entity,”19 a cohesive unity in potentia. As such, historicism accommodates a great variety of developmental tropes—including evolutionism, conjectural his- tory, and civilizational hierarchies—structuring Western political thought’s under- standing of, and engagement with, the non-Western world. In response, Jakeet Singh notes, “one of the primary tenets of postcolonial and decolonial thought has been to critique and reject stadial, developmentalist metanarratives of historical progress in which societies of the global North-West are construed as more civi- lized, superior, and/or advanced than the rest of the world.”20 The postcolonial scholarship’s ambition to decolonize humanistic and social-scientific disciplines wrestles with developmentalism’s pervasiveness: how, if at all, might we disentan- gle categories of thought, normative orientations, and moral-political ideals from 16. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7 (see note 1 above). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 23. 19. Ibid. 20. Jakeet Singh, “Colonial Pasts, Decolonial Futures: Allen’s The End of Progress,” Theory & Event 19 (2016), at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633281. For an overview of postcolonial critiques of developmentalism, see Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30–48. For a defense of certain strands of liberal developmentalism, see Inder S. Marwah, “Two Concepts of Liberal Developmentalism,” European Journal of Political Theory 15 (2016): 97–123. For wide-ranging critiques of the developmentalism pervading nineteenth-century liberal imperialisms, see Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For just a few critiques of the developmentalism pervad- ing modern Western political theory, see James Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism,” in Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought, ed. Duncan Kelly (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–29; James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, Vol. II: Imperialism and Civic Freedom (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15–42; Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” boundary 2 20 (1994): 65–76; Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 721–48, at 722; and Gurminder K. Bhambra, Re- thinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 000 | Provincializing Progress the developmentalist foundations—and ensuing racial ordering—on which they rest? It’s a question that also preoccupies contemporary political theorists. Given the depth to which it saturates the Western political imaginary, both liberal and critical theory continue to grapple with the enduring problem of developmen- talism. Thomas McCarthy and Amy Allen have undertaken the most sophisticated and ambitious attempts to disentangle the ideal of development from its historical and philosophical baggage and recover critical theory’s normative ambitions. McCarthy’s “critical theory of development”21 is self-consciously Kantian (filtered through Habermas’s chastening influence), pursuing the “guiding assumption that the resources required to reconstruct our traditions of social and political thought can be wrested from those very traditions, provided that they are critically appro- priated and opened to contestation by their historical ‘others.’”22 Allen, for her part, aims to sever “the forward-looking notion of progress as a moral-political imper- ative” from “the backward-looking idea of progress as a ‘fact’ about the processes of historical learning and sociocultural evolution”23 treated in dominant strands of contemporary critical theory (Habermas, Honneth, and Forst) as indissolubly linked. By extricating the former from the latter, she argues, we can recover a con- tingent, contestable, and always-indeterminate ideal of (forward-looking) develop- ment from the implicitly Eurocentric (backward-looking) account of progress to which contemporary critical theory is tethered. Both, then, treat developmentalism as historically entangled in schemas of human hierarchy; as carrying the traces— and prejudices—of those histories into the present; but, ultimately, as separable from them and as normatively necessary for progressive politics. And yet, McCarthy and Allen remain firmly committed to the conceptual re- sources and ideational landscape descended from Western critical and political theory, narrowing their notions of development—and more particularly, of the problem of development. At least part of developmentalism’s intractability, as they frame it, stems from the bounded intellectual context containing their theorizations. For McCarthy, as for Allen, the problem of developmentalism and its solution lie— and must lie—within critical theory’s problematics, and the contortions of their ef- forts to salvage an ideal of progress reflects its limitations. McCarthy’s critical theory 21. Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 242. 22. Ibid., 14. 23. Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 15. Inder S. Marwah | 000 of development is shaped by precisely such foundational assumptions: (a) that the structural elements of a rationalized, Western modernity impose non-negotiable constraints on the developmental paths open to all late-modern societies—“three basic ‘facts’ of global modernity” that, he argues, make “certain modern institutions unavoidable”;24 (b) that the only alternative to pursuing some ideal of development is to lapse into post-modern nihilism; (c) that Kant offers the most viable formula- tion of universal history on which to erect a critical theory of development; and, fi- nally, (d) that developmentalism’s harms are best redressed by drawing in histori- cally excluded voices. The choice, then, is to incorporate non-Europeans in an appropriately updated Kantian global framework or give up on the ideal of progress altogether. Allen more directly confronts the postcolonial challenge by limiting herself to “the urgent project of decolonizing critical theory . . . draw[ing] on the- oretical resources that can be found in or nearby the Frankfurt School tradition,”25 rather than elaborating a fuller critical theory of decolonization. In both cases, as with much of the political theory grappling with the quandary of developmentalism, our analytical, critical, and normative options remain firmly anchored in Western intellectual traditions, whose confines are well captured by Singh. “What does it mean—especially when it comes to the task of decoloniza- tion,” he asks, to continually treat the Enlightenment as self-correcting, or at least as con- taining the necessary resources for its own correction once others help to diagnose the problem? Is decolonization not a distinctive sort of challenge (or set of challenges) that requires solutions that are distinctive from those of other sorts of philosophical and political problems? . . . And for how long can critical theorists defer the actual work of deep engagement, dia- logue and learning across subaltern difference that they often only gesture toward while nonetheless insisting that it is necessary to the work of decol- onization?26 In what follows, I’d like to take up Singh’s injunction, understood broadly, to en- gage political horizons beyond the Western contexts within which the question of developmentalism is persistently figured. What might developmental thinking look like from the other side of the colonial divide? 24. McCarthy, Race, 155, 160 (see note 21 above). 25. Allen, End of Progress, 5 (see note 23 above). 26. Singh, “Colonial Pasts,” n.p. (see note 20 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress Three Views of Development from Colonial India Is developmentalism so ineluctably—internally, conceptually, logically—bound to imperialism and political paternalism? Its harm lies in the monological impulsions of what Chakrabarty describes as “History 1,” that is, “the universal and necessary history” that both portrays non-Western forms of life as irrational holdovers and papers over subaltern histories (which constitute “History 2”) that resist its “total- izing thrust.”27 These “central ideas of development theory,” McCarthy holds, “have retained their place in scholarly and popular social imaginaries.”28 And yet, these are imaginaries of a very particular type. Part of the problem, I will argue, is that the vantage point framing the problem of developmentalism forecloses its valences in different political and intellectual contexts. In this section, I examine three distinctive anti-imperialisms from the early In- dian independence movement—Banerjea’s liberal anti-imperialism, Ghose’s spir- itualist anti-imperialism, and Krishnavarma’s sentimentalist anti-imperialism—to draw out developmentalism’s utility in resisting political domination. As Christo- pher Bayly demonstrates, historicist and developmentalist arguments—the “ideo- logical ‘deep work of history’ ”29—were deployed by Indian liberals throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contest imperial power. Yet, developmen- talist claims also extended well beyond that tradition’s political reach and theoret- ical vocabulary, taking hold in a wide range of non-liberal and even anti-liberal na- tionalisms.30 While Indian liberals excavated endogenous liberal norms, ideals, and practices from the subcontinent’s history, this intellectual strategy remained para- sitic on Western liberalism’s historicist premises (though, I argue below, Baner- jea’s developmentalism is no less original for it), and was only one among many. By canvassing both liberal and non-liberal variants, I draw out developmentalisms that not only manipulated or subverted Western tropes surrounding progress, civ- ilization, and self-government, but also drew on entirely different time-scales, mea- sures of advancement, political ideals, and ethical standards. This aims to show not only the breadth of developmentalist arguments, but the distinctive conceptual 27. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 63–66 (see note 1 above). 28. McCarthy, Race, 195 (see note 21 above). 29. Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 25 (see note 7 above). 30. Bayly’s exposition of developmentalism in Indian liberalism is, like his exposition of In- dian liberalism more generally, masterful and exhaustive, yet it remains limited to liberal devel- opmentalisms, drawn largely in relation to Western thinkers, ideas, and histories. See, for instance, his treatments, in Recovering Liberties, of Grish Chunder Ghose, at 170–71; of Dadabhai Naoroji, at 196; and of B. R. Ambedkar, at 301 (see note 7 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 registers—political, religious, and sociological—to which they appealed in advancing the imperatives of decolonization. Liberalism, Developmentalism, Organicism: Surendranath Banerjea on the Colony Over the course of the nineteenth century, India developed a robust liberal tradi- tion that shaped the early independence movement—and yet, it was by no means an uncontested position. Indian anti-imperialisms, like all ideologies of resistance, “cover a broad spectrum, ranging from moderate positions that reject only some aspects of imperial rule and seek accommodation with the existing order, through to defenses of violent rebelling and the revolutionary transcendence of the sys- tem.”31 Surendranath Banerjea fell into the moderate camp, which did “not reject im- perialism in principle,” but rather “focus[ed] on certain expressions of it.”32 He was a prominent journalist, editor, and leader of the early independence move- ment, twice serving as Indian National Congress president and remaining among the leadership of its moderate faction following the split with its extremist mem- bership in 1907.33 The moderates, led by Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Mahadev Govind Ranade, helmed the Indian National Congress for its first two decades (1885–1905) and were “uncritical ad- mirers of Western political values”34 whose commitments to English liberalism shaped their visions of colonial rule and of India’s political future. The Bengalee, which Banerjea purchased in 1879 and edited until 1921, “propagated the views of the moderate wing of the liberal school of Indian political thought.”35 From the political standpoint, Banerjea aimed to better incorporate Indians into the country’s governing structures and to loosen colonial rule, rather than seeking political autonomy outright. “We appeal to England gradually to change the char- acter of her rule in India, to liberalize it,” he proclaimed in his 1895 presidential address to Congress, “so that in the fullness of time, India may find itself in the great confederacy of free states, English in their origin, English in their character, English in their institutions, rejoicing in their permanent and indissoluble union 31. Bell, Reordering, 94 (see note 6 above). 32. Ibid., 111. 33. For a wide-ranging account of Banerjea’s life and thought, see Bani Banerjee, Suren- dranath Banerjea and History of Modern India (1848–1925) (New Delhi: Metropolitan, 1979). 34. Chakrabarty and Pandey, Political Thought, 24 (see note 13 above). 35. A. R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2010), 209. 000 | Provincializing Progress with England.”36 Banerjea endeavored to push India toward this great confederacy through nonviolent and lawful action, reflecting his commitments to liberalism, le- gal order, and political petitioning. Against the extremists’ often more forceful modes of political activism, he retained a firm conviction that “constitutional ag- itation will secure for us those rights and privileges which in less favoured countries are obtained by sterner means.”37 India’s movement toward political autonomy, following England’s example, would proceed gradually, through the “laborious process of training in the art of parliamentary self-government”38 imparted by pa- tient lobbying and British instruction. He thus echoed the common liberal conceit that Indians’ gradual incorporation into the mechanisms of government would, over an ever-receding timeline, develop their skills and capacities for indepen- dence. Banerjea’s conceptualization of the ends—and not just the means—of political reform were equally distinctive, and equally steeped in liberal ideals. Rather than aspiring to unqualified sovereignty, he aimed at democratic self-government within an imperial framework—to have Britain “grant India a constitution on the Cana- dian model.”39 Far from wanting to divest India of its ties with Britain, he militated to maintain the colonial relationship, but with greater independence, “as it obtains in the self-governing Colonies of the British Empire.”40 “Self-Government, as rep- resented in the colonial system” involved “not separation from, but incorporation into, the Empire.”41 Banerjea’s liberalism sat between radical demands for full au- tonomy, on one hand, and Anglo-Indian conservatism, on the other, which treated Indians as inexorably stunted and their aspiration to self-government as a “fantas- tic dream.”42 Against both alternatives, Banerjea advocated “the ideal of a democratic 36. Chakrabarty and Pandey, Political Thought, 24 (see note 13 above). For a clear exposi- tion of Banerjea’s (and more generally, of the moderates’) full-throated endorsement of Western education in advancing the nationalist project, see Seth, Subject Lessons, 159–82 (see note 1 above). 37. Ghose, Political Ideas, 17–18 (see note 13 above). As Stephen Hay observes, despite moving “from blind loyalty to British rule to stubborn resistance against its evils,” Banerjea’s lifelong commitment to legal and constitutional agitation never wavered; see Sources, 98 (see note 13 above). For a fuller examination of Banerjea’s transition from supporting to resisting colonial rule, see Argov, Moderates and Extremists, 1–29 (see note 13 above). 38. Ghose, Political Ideas, 18 (see note 13 above). 39. Surendranath Banerjea, The Trumpet Voice of India: Speeches of Banerjea (Toronto: Uni- versity of Toronto Libraries, 2011), 105–06. 40. “Indian National Congress,” in the Bengalee, January 1, 1907; all citations to this source come from archival research at the British Library in London. 41. “The Pioneer on Indian Aspirations,” in the Bengalee, January 8, 1907 (see previous note). 42. “Further Liberal Opinions,” in the Bengalee, January 17, 1907 (see note 40 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 and self-governing India [that] can only be realised in the form of a United States of India”43—again, within a wider imperial federation conferring the prosperity, stability, and progressiveness which British institutions alone could secure. The end of political reform was, then, to generate a greater parity between Indians and Britons within the colonial system through a steady process of “receiv[ing] self- government by instalments.”44 This was accompanied by a concurrent faith in the civilizational hierarchy and stage-based developmentalism sustaining nineteenth-century liberal imperialisms by portraying Indians as farther back on a fixed scale of social, political, and moral progress. Reflecting an implicit—and at points, explicit—endorsement of liberal- ism’s historicist premises, the moderates had little hesitation in consigning Indians to a state of political nonage. “We do not wish to see installed in our midst anything like a democratic form of government,” Banerjea proclaimed in 1890. “We do not think India is ripe for it yet; nor do we want Home Rule. . . . We want something much less than an English House of Commons.”45 While he would by the turn of the century come to recognize Indians’ capacities for self-government, the Bengalee’s push for greater democratic incorporation nonetheless retained its de- velopmental logic: Despotism represents a certain stage in the evolution of nations, and all com- munities have to pass through it, whether they belong to the East or to the West. It is a half-way halting-house—a temporary stage in the process of evo- lution, and to regard it as the permanent doom of any community is to mis- read history and to reverse the mandate of the Almighty, who has made free- dom the ultimate goal, the destined portion, of every nation.46 While militating for political independence, Banerjea’s pitch remained firmly en- trenched in a liberal historicist framework: the harm lay not in the developmental presumptions denying Indians their political independence, but in the unjust (and still worse, ahistorical) failure to treat their political immaturity as a temporary rather than as a fixed condition. The problem, then, lay in resisting the “inexorable 43. “Local Autonomy,” in the Bengalee, January 17, 1907 (see note 40 above). 44. Ibid. 45. Ghose, Political Ideas, 15 (see note 13 above). 46. “The Islamic Conception of Sovereignty,” in the Bengalee, September 13, 1907 (see note 40 above). Banerjea here perfectly captures the nationalist argument, sketched by Partha Chatterjee, that alien rule “was restricting and even violating the true principles of modern gov- ernment”; see Chatterjee, Fragments, 74 (see note 5 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress law”47 of social development. In this, the Bengalee also adopted a view of societies as aggregated wholes commonly associated with J. S. Mill’s account of progress. This view portrayed societies as composed of entwined social, political, economic, industrial, and moral phenomena moving through stages of social evolution as co- hesive entities. For McCarthy, Pitts, and Mehta, aggregationism is a central prob- lem of developmental thought generally, and the cardinal sin of Mill more partic- ularly. Mill is understood to have believed that by treating societies as conjunct totalities moving through fixed stages of social advancement, the Benthamite leg- islator could determine the laws best suited to draw any given people up the civi- lizational chain. And yet, the Bengalee didn’t just reproduce these presumptions, but rather up- dated them through a peculiar and self-consciously organicist conception of the so- cial body integrating developmental arguments about progress with evolutionary tropes figuring societies as unified organisms.48 Banerjea understood “social insti- tutions, customs, and habits from the point of view of a new conception of life,” as an organic “whole in the biological sense—there is undoubtedly an interdepen- dence of parts and functions, and through every part and every organ it is the life of the organism as a whole that is perpetually manifesting itself.”49 Where Mill’s developmentalism was articulated in strictly sociological terms, the Bengalee moved to a biological model of socio-political evolution which remained aggregative—and liberal—by treating the social organism’s constituent elements as integrated, co- hesive, and progressive. “The organic view of life,” one article reads, revealed that “a people who care . . . little for social reform can hardly expect to achieve any real progress in any other direction. . . . The different departments of life should be regarded as inter-dependent, each acting on every other and being reacted on by it in turn.”50 The political body was a “synthetic whole . . . [and] whatever de- velopment it may have must be from whole to whole.”51 Aggregationism remained central to Banerjea’s reformulated historicism: political progress was tethered to India’s developmental level, given that “social phenomena,” in such an interconnected 47. “The Situation,” in the Bengalee, September 8, 1908 (see note 40 above). 48. For a brief overview of social Darwinism, evolutionism, and organicism in Indian liber- alism of the period, see Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 245–59 (see note 7 above). For the same themes in the extremist faction of the nationalist movement, see Goswami, Producing India, 256 (see note 14 above). For a wider examination of the intersections of science and politics in colonial India, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 49. “Conscious Social Reform,” in the Bengalee, May 29, 1909 (see note 40 above). 50. “Social Reform,” in the Bengalee, January 4, 1907 (see note 40 above). 51. Ibid. Inder S. Marwah | 000 organic entity, were “invariably associated with a certain stage of political exis- tence.”52 Through this organicist-evolutionist framework, Banerjea effectively tied India’s movement toward self-governing independence to its capacity for internal social transformation, rather than external (colonial) steering. Political advancement, then, was directly contingent on the reform—unsur- prisingly, along liberal lines—of “barbaric” social practices. From the organicist- historicist standpoint, India’s political development turned on relinquishing re- gressive social customs and adopting Western ideals, norms, and institutions. “In England,” the Bengalee proclaimed, “there is no such thing as caste,” which was “opposed to such general conceptions of the rights of man. . . . There is no such thing as early marriage in the Western countries, therefore there should be no early marriage among us.”53 The inequities pervading Indian customary prac- tices—dowries, denying women education, prohibiting widow remarriage, caste divisions—“are eating into the core of our social life,” and one “cannot strike at the political system without striking at ignorance and superstition [and] indefen- sible social laws.”54 The interconnectedness of social reform, political progress, and liberalization recalls James Mill’s ambition to eradicate the hierarchies shap- ing Indian societal order, updated through evolutionary tropes treating the social body as a singular and cohesive organism. Given that “the several problems in the life of an organic being—and surely society is an organism—are absolutely inter- dependent . . . it is no more possible to solve the social question without attending to . . . the laws of political and economic growth.”55 Political institutions and pro- cesses could not be isolated from communal practices; as an organic unity, “an or- ganism among similar organisms,”56 a social fabric shot through with irrational- ism and injustice was incapable of sustaining political development. “Those who think that we can work out the political regeneration of India . . . in the present state of our social conditions,” Banerjea concluded, were “living in a pleasant land of dreams.”57 The solution, then, lay in what Bayly describes as “a comprehensive ‘reconstitution’ of the body politic as a whole. In this way, the Indian version of organicism was made congruent with the need for immediate political action.”58 52. Ibid. 53. “Conscious Social Reform,” in the Bengalee, May 29, 1909 (see note 40 above). 54. “Nationalism and Social Reform,” in the Bengalee, May 30, 1909 (see note 40 above). 55. Ibid. 56. “Conscious Social Reform,” in the Bengalee, May 29, 1909 (see note 40 above). 57. “Indian National Social Conference,” in the Bengalee, January 1, 1907 (see note 40 above). 58. Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 253 (see note 7 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress In total, Banerjea’s liberal developmentalism undoubtedly adopted and re- produced tropes justifying British imperialism. But, adapted into an organicist- evolutionary framework, it also animated his conceptualization of, and advocacy for, India’s advancement toward self-determination. Indian liberals, Bayly recog- nizes, are all too often and all too easily dismissed by folding them into what Partha Chatterjee describes as a long-running “Hindu elitist, colonial, almost com- prador, framework.”59 The characterization is in some ways undoubtedly true; it is also incomplete. It neglects the malleability and utility of liberalism’s implicitly protean norms, and their capacity to challenge colonial depredations. As Judith Butler argues, “exposing the parochial and exclusionary character of a given histor- ical articulation of universality is part of the project of extending and rendering substantive the notion of universality itself.”60 By laying bare the inequities at the heart of the British Raj, Banerjea’s appeal to all-encompassing liberal commit- ments—constitutional agitation, inalienable rights, self-government—“seizes the language of enfranchisement and sets into motion a ‘performative contradic- tion’ . . . exposing the contradictory character of previous conventional formula- tions of the universal.”61 From an historical standpoint, Indian liberalism was also a pillar of the indepen- dence movement. In spite of their shortcomings, Bayly observes, “Indian liberal ideas were foundational to all forms of Indian nationalism,”62 and were “a broad field on which Indians and other South Asians began . . . to resist colonial rule.”63 More than mere “mendicants” or “elitists delivering a ‘derivative discourse,’”64 In- dian liberals traded in the political vernacular they saw as most likely to achieve self-government. Banerjea’s developmentalist arguments comprised what Anil Seal characterizes as a “technique” for decolonization, “the most persuasive way of bringing the Raj to bargain with [the moderates], particularly when it was ex- pressed in the idiom of British politics.”65 Those liberal ideals and arguments con- tributed, still further, to the “decolonization of the mind [that] long pre-dated 59. Chatterjee, Derivative Discourse, 24 (see note 10 above). 60. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89. 61. Ibid. 62. Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 1 (see note 7 above). 63. Ibid., 343. 64. Ibid. 65. Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later 19th Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 346. Inder S. Marwah | 000 political decolonization,”66 laying the conceptual groundwork that would shape the independence movement. Where critics such as Ashis Nandy, Bhikhu Parekh, and Uday Mehta treat developmentalism “in all its forms as contaminated by its origin in the structure of repression implicit in . . . colonial exploitation,”67 Banerjea shows its plasticity by fleshing out its distinctively anti-imperial registers. These are the registers that we miss when we fail to inquire into, as Scott puts it, “the internal texture and her- meneutic preoccupations and perspectives of one’s historical others”;68 by delving into the ideational space of anti-colonial liberals such as Banerjea, we expose the emancipatory facets of its developmental logic. This isn’t to deny developmen- talism’s implications in imperialism, but rather to provincialize it—to draw out the “History 2,” in Chakrabarty’s terms, the histories of resistance, that it also sus- tained. Liberal developmentalism’s sins are well-catalogued, but not exhaustive; Banerjea’s organicist liberalism countered imperialism by mobilizing its own de- velopmental logic to push India toward political independence. Nationalism, Spiritualism, and Human Evolution: Aurobindo Ghose and the Long Arc of Progress The extremist faction of the Indian National Congress began to take shape in 1905, when the docility of the moderates’ resistance to the partition of Bengal proved po- litically ineffectual. It became cemented in 1907 following a spectacularly fractious split regarding the aims, methods, and direction of the nationalist movement (the Congress dissolved into chaos after Banerjea was hit in the face with a shoe). The extremists were led by Aurobindo Ghose, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal, and they advocated direct action: political change could not be achieved through mendicancy and constitutional agitation, but rather through concerted—and, if need be, violent—activism and resistance. Full independence would require Indians to take control of their economic, social, and political lives, which the boycott, Swadeshi, and national education campaigns aimed to achieve.69 66. C. A. Bayly, “Afterword,” in An Intellectual History for India, ed. Kapila, 150–55, at 155 (see note 3 above). 67. Ashis Nandy, “Culture, Voice and Development: A Primer for the Unsuspecting,” Thesis Eleven 39 (1994): 1–18, at 11. 68. Scott, “Traditions,” 4 (see note 2 above). 69. While developmentalist arguments recur across the extremist leadership’s nationalisms, they are best developed and most explicitly appealed to in Ghose’s anti-colonialism, the reason for focusing on them here. For a schematic overview of Ghose’s place in the nationalist and Swadeshi movements, see Peter Heehs, Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1989), 38–71; for a more expansive one, see Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo 000 | Provincializing Progress This inward turn was accompanied by an explicit rejection of British liberalism and secularism—and in many cases, of Western philosophies more broadly—as the extremists drew on Indian traditions, thinkers, and religion to advance the anti- imperialist cause.70 For Ghose, the Western diremption of politics and spirituality had degraded India’s “national genius”71 by drawing an artificial division between integrated facets of its national life; “the life of the nation which once flowed in a broad stream” was cut into “separate meagre and shallow channels . . . the paths of religion and politics, but they have flowed separately.”72 As a result, he argued, “our political activity has crept in a channel cut for it by European or European- ised minds,” resulting in politics that “were imitative and unreal.”73 A derivative politics was, for Ghose, only the tip of the iceberg. As did Gandhi, he saw the deeper problem in the internalization of Western values antithetical to a distinctively Indian ethos. The misguided adoption of European institutions, he argued, was secondary to having assimilated its conception of the nature, scope, and limitations of the political sphere itself. India’s advancement would depend on the recovery of its own civilizational ideals; “rationalizations” imposed by alien imperialists and absorbed by Indian moderates and Anglo-Indians would only ar- rest its social evolution. Presaging postcolonial lines of critique by a century, Ghose directly contested the historicist canard “that the history of Europe is a sure and certain guide to India in her political development,” arguing that “Asia is not Eu- rope and will never be Europe. The political ideals of the West are not the main- spring of the political movements in the East.”74 Europeans’ hubristic overconfidence in their norms and institutions ultimately stemmed, Ghose maintained, from the narrow secularism constraining their view (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 101–58. For a detailed examination of Ghose’s political philosophy (which I follow in places here), see Vishwanath Prasad Varma, The Political Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1960). 70. For a few treatments of religiosity in the extremists’ nationalisms, see Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123–64; Hay, Sources, 128–72 (see note 13 above); and Goswami, Producing India, 242–76 (see note 14 above). For the imbrications of religion and political theory in colonial In- dia, see Kapila, Intellectual History, vi (see note 3 above). 71. “Ourselves,” in Karmayogin, June 19, 1909, at at https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org /sriaurobindo/writings.php; all citations to Karmayogin are available through this website. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. “Asiatic Democracy,” in Bande Mataram, March 16, 1908, at https://www.sriaurobin doashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php; all citations to Bande Mataram are available through this website. Inder S. Marwah | 000 of social and political progress; the developmental logic sustaining British imperi- alism reflected its singularity, parochialism, and moral emaciation. For Ghose, anti-imperial nationalism was not primarily political, but rather comprised India’s wider spiritual transformation.75 The nationalist movement’s political significance was epiphenomenal, ancillary to its spiritual/moral one, neither of which could be separated from the other. The secular nationalism framing European developmen- talism limited its moral and political imagination to a particularly slender ideational universe. Faced with a civilization predating its own by millennia, the European “shouts ‘Mysticism, mysticism!’ and thinks he has conquered. To him there is or- der, development, progress, evolution, [and] enlightenment in the history of Eu- rope.”76 These secular pretentions were still further misplaced, given that “the Eu- ropean has not succeeded in getting rid of religion from his life. It is coming back in socialism, in the Anarchism of Bakunin and Tolstoy, in many other isms.”77 Beyond universalizing a thin, avaricious, and spiritually bankrupt politics, European secu- larism also labored under the conceit of insulating politics from religious life. In reality, it was re-emergent in a wide range of political theologies—anarchism, pos- itivism, socialism, and revolutionary nationalism—set against the liberalism that claimed to have dispensed with it. Indian nationalism had no such ambition. Politics could not be isolated from its spiritual foundations, and India’s political evolution was inconceivable in strictly secular terms. Properly understood, anti-colonial nationalism “is not mechanical but moral and spiritual. We aim not at the alteration of a form of government, but at the building up of a nation. Of that task politics is a part, but only a part.”78 India’s political development fell under a “higher synthesis”79 of its social, polit- ical and moral elements transcending the materialism and narrow rights and lib- erties constituting (and stifling) the sphere of European politics. Anti-colonial na- tionalism, in this wider view, encompassed not only India’s regeneration, but 75. Leela Gandhi situates the intersection of religiosity and politics in Ghose’s thought in the wider context of the late Victorian era’s mysticism (most evident in the theosophical move- ment). While she provides an illuminating account of Ghose’s post-1910 retreat from politics into pure spiritualism, I focus here on Ghose’s explicitly political work, in the period 1905– 10. See Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 115–26. For a nuanced analysis of Ghose’s religiosity in relation to his political thought, see Bose, “Ethical Polity,” 125– 32 (see note 5 above). 76. “A Task Unaccomplished,” in Karmayogin, July 3, 1909 (see note 71 above). 77. “Ourselves,” in Karmayogin, June 19, 1909 (see note 71 above). 78. “The Ideal of the Karmayogin,” in Karmayogin, June 19, 1909 (see note 71 above). 79. “The Highest Synthesis,” in Karmayogin, July 3, 1909 (see note 71 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress the fuller evolution of the human race. In a pervasively Hegelian tone, Ghose por- trayed nationalism as both India’s awakening and as a pivot in humanity’s world- historical development beyond the constraints of modern European socio- political forms.80 “The peoples of Europe have carried material life to its farthest expression, the science of bodily existence has been perfected, but they are suffer- ing from diseases which their science is powerless to cure,” Ghose maintained; it “is at this juncture that Asia has awakened because the world needed her. Asia is the custodian of the world’s peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which Europe generates.”81 In Ghose’s reformulated developmentalism, India’s national advancement was framed not against the limited time-scale of modern European history—the history of rationalization, secularization, and democratization typically marshaled in developmentalist arguments—but rather in relation to the broader arc of human evolution. Beyond its immediate aims in the subcontinent, anti-colonial national- ism represented a transitional phase in human progress, from bounded European life forms to a higher stage of social evolution integrating scientific knowledge, democratic politics, cosmopolitan moralism, and human spiritualism—in Ghose’s articulation, “the synthesis of Vedanta.”82 Cast in this time-scale, on this evolution- ary map, European systems of political organization—including imperialism— comprised a brief waystation in the advancement of the human species. The ratio- nalism, secularism, and materialism taken by Europeans as the end of history was, in this longer temporal expanse, a fleeting moment in humanity’s fuller realization. “When the restless spirit of Europe has added a new phase of discovery to the evo- lution of the science of material life, has regulated politics, rebased society, remod- elled law, rediscovered science,” Ghose holds that the spirit of Asia, calm, contemplative, self-possessed, takes possession of Europe’s discovery and corrects its exaggerations, its aberrations by the in- tuition, the spiritual light she alone can turn upon the world. . . . It is there- fore the office of Asia to take up the work of human evolution when Europe comes to a standstill and loses itself in a clash of vain speculations, barren 80. Ghose’s world-historical orientation is far from derivative of Hegel; Hindu revivalism blurred the lines between science, religion, and politics in entirely original ways. For Hegelian- ism in Ghose (and in Hindu revivalist nationalisms more generally), see Prakash, Another Rea- son, 8–9 (see note 48 above); Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 38 (see note 7 above); and Varma, Po- litical Philosophy, 194–200 (see note 69 above). 81. “The Asiatic Role,” in Bande Mataram, April 9, 1908 (see note 74 above). 82. “The Highest Synthesis,” in Karmayogin, July 3, 1909 (see note 71 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 experiments and helpless struggles to escape from the consequences of her own mistakes. Such a time has now come in the world’s history.83 Ghose rejected neither developmental thinking nor stage-based accounts of social progress, but by vastly extending their time-scale, he effectively provincialized Eu- ropean developmentalism relative to alternative developmental schemas, temporal reaches, and historicist frames. The “curse of capitalism, the curse of Imperialism which afflicts modern nations,”84 in his recapitulation, was symptomatic of Eu- rope’s social, political, and moral nonage; nationalism comprised “the first or for- mative stage”85 in humanity’s progressive emergence from it; and India’s revital- ization led a global moral cosmopolitanism transcending the cramped parameters of Western modernization. Rejecting “the claims of aliens to force upon us a civ- ilization inferior to our own . . . on the untenable grounds of a superior fitness,”86 Ghose inverted the Eurocentric narrative by treating decolonization as “disestab- lish[ing] that which denies the law of progress”87 manifested in and through the efflorescence of India’s endogenous practices, institutions, and norms. In this broader time scale, colonial government was recast as a short-lived and transitory expedient propelling India’s—and humanity’s—evolution, undermin- ing the infantilizing logic portraying Indians as immature. Asia remained young in relation to a febrile and senescent Europe, Ghose maintained, but only because of the vastly greater temporal expanse covered by Asian civilizations. India’s ad- olescence encompassed the totality of Europe’s lifespan: Asia is long-lived, Europe brief and ephemeral. Asia is in everything hugely mapped, immense and grandiose in its motions, and its life-periods are mea- sured accordingly. Europe lives by centuries, Asia by millenniums. Europe is parcelled out in nations, Asia in civilizations. . . . In the place which is left vacant by the decline of the European nations, Asia young, strong and vig- orous . . . is preparing to step forward and possess the future.88 From this vantage point, India’s domination by European powers represented “no decay or decline . . . [but] rather the disturbance, the temporary arrest . . . which 83. “The Asiatic Role,” in Bande Mataram, April 9, 1908 (see note 74 above). 84. “The Doctrine of Sacrifice,” in Karmayogin, July 24, 1909 (see note 71 above). 85. Ibid. 86. “An Open Letter to My Countrymen,” in Karmayogin, July 31, 1909 (see note 71 above). 87. Ibid. 88. “Europe and Asia,” in Bande Mataram, July 3, 1907 (see note 74 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress marks the transition from boyhood to manhood.”89 In the wider arc of Asia’s de- velopment, British colonialism was reconfigured from civilizing force to a growing pain nudging India toward the fuller realization of its autochthonous ideals and practices. Not unrelatedly, Ghose also reformulated the moderates’ providential- ism: where Banerjea treated colonialism as spreading the light of liberal principles, for Ghose, it pushed past internal blockages inhibiting the realization of Indian na- tional spirit. British imperialism did contribute to India’s advancement—but only unwittingly, by shepherding the flowering of Aryan civilization. “A painful but nec- essary work had to be done,” Ghose reckoned, and because the English nation were the fittest instrument for His purpose, God led them all over those thousands of miles of alien ocean, gave strength to their hearts and subtlety to their brains, and set them up in India to do His work, which they have been doing faithfully, if blindly, ever since and are do- ing at the present moment. The spirit and ideals of India had come to be con- fined in a mold which, however beautiful, was too narrow and slender to bear the mighty burden of our future. When that happens, the mold has to be bro- ken and even the ideal lost for a while, in order to be recovered free of con- straint and limitation. We have to recover the Aryan spirit and ideal and keep it intact but enshrined in new forms and more expansive institutions.90 Providentialism doesn’t disappear here, but is rather redirected: Indian evolu- tion moved through British colonialism, as a motive force clearing impasses in domestic practices. Far from drawing Indians into the light of European reason, British colonialism unconsciously advanced India’s own maturation and self- development. This imperialist myopia, ultimately, was epistemological. The central deficit in Western thinking, for Ghose, lay not in its substance—in the bodies of technical, scientific, or political knowledge generated by Western figures—but rather in the unrelenting instrumentalism and materialism motivating, directing, and framing it. He resisted neither the advancement of technical expertise nor of democratic/ popular rule, but rather took aim at the narrow utilitarianism orienting them in Western contexts, and in their Indian uptake. Like Gandhi, Ghose lamented “the persistence of a servile imitation of English ideas, English methods, English ma- chinery and production”91 pervading Indian social, political, and industrial life; 89. Ibid. 90. “The Past and the Future,” in Karmayogin, September 25, 1909 (see note 71 above). 91. Ibid. Inder S. Marwah | 000 and like Gandhi, he treated swaraj as recovering Indian practices and as a divesti- ture of Western materialism. “In traffic with the West,” Ghose averred, “we seek only to import the scientific knowledge, the mechanical apparatus of war and com- munication and the method of efficient organization in Government which have made it so eminently formidable, but we wish to bar out, if may be, all that disease of the intellectual & social constitution born of individualistic materialism which makes it so eminently miserable.”92 Without this reorientation, “there is no reason in Nature why we should not remain for ever the subjects and servants of European races.”93 Progress beyond colonial domination could not advance through European thinking and education, of whose stultifying effects Ghose was persistently crit- ical, but only by recovering a civilizational ethos devoid of its inborn instrumen- talism.94 Swadeshi, then, was “not merely against foreign goods, but against for- eign habits, foreign dress and manners, foreign education”; it sought “to bring the people back to their own civilization . . . stripping from ourselves every rag of bor- rowed European thought and habits and becoming intensely, uncompromisingly Indian. . . . The return to ourselves is the cardinal feature of the national move- ment.”95 Without this ethical and epistemological turn, India would become “an intellectual province of Europe,” an outcome “neither for the good of India, nor for the good of Europe”—nor, for that matter, for the good of humanity, given the “moral disease . . . eating into the vitals of European society.”96 Still further, under the longer arc of his developmentalism, Ghose drew out an autogenous Indian democratic tradition and the British empire’s role in its gen- esis and fruition.97 “India in her ancient polity,” he maintained, “possessed this spirit of democracy,” but “the growth of large States in India was fatal to the con- tinuance of the democratic element,”98 leading to its eclipse by “a centralised 92. Aurobindo Ghose, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches, 1890–1908 (Pondi- cherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2002), 93. 93. Ibid. 94. Sanjay Seth argues that even radical nationalists such as Har Dayal and Lala Lajpat Rai advocated a synthesis of Western knowledge with “some quality of Indianness”; see Seth, Sub- ject Lessons, 169 (see note 1 above). This argument misses the depth of Ghose’s critique of the implicitly corrosive effects of Western education and knowledge. 95. “Indian Resurgence and Europe,” in Bande Mataram, April 14, 1908 (see note 74 above). 96. Ibid. 97. Bayly traces similar appeals to India’s indigenous democratic traditions backward (to Pherozeshah Mehta in the 1860s) and forward (to Benoy Kumar Sarkar in the 1920s and con- stitutional debates in the 1940s); see Bayly, Recovering Liberties, 164, 347 (see note 7 above). For the political effectiveness of such a “classicization of tradition,” see Chatterjee, Fragments, 73 (see note 5 above). 98. “The Early Indian Polity,” in Bande Mataram, March 20, 1908 (see note 74 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress bureaucratic monarchy.”99 As with ancient Greeks and Romans, India’s demo- cratic impulses had lapsed with the consolidation of power required to govern expanding states and empires. Colonialism, Ghose argued, broke those aristo- cratic habits and practices, instilled by centuries of autocracy deviating from Aryan civilization’s democratic core as a matter of historical necessity. Britain was “chosen,” then, for the unrivalled efficiency and skill with which she has organised an indi- vidualistic and materialistic democracy. We had to come to close quarters with that democratic organisation, draw it into ourselves and absorb the democratic spirit and methods so that we might rise beyond them. Our half-aristocratic half-theocratic feudalism had to be broken, in order that the democratic spirit of the Vedanta might be released. . . . We have to learn and use the democratic principle and methods of Europe, in order that here- after we may build up something more suited to our past and to the future of humanity.100 Again, providentialism is not abandoned, but rather recast within a wider devel- opmental trajectory. From this standpoint, colonialism’s progressive function lay not in rationalizing supposedly pre-political subjects, but in releasing India’s en- demic democratic spirit from its aristocratic shell. Indian democracy thus not only predated Europe’s, but also superseded the limitations of its bridled modern form. Far from reproducing its Western instan- tiation, “when Asia takes back democracy into herself, she will first transmute it in her own temperament and make it once more Asiatic.”101 The individualistic rights taken as democracy’s natural corollaries, Ghose observed, were in fact con- textual and historically particular. Modern, European democratic thinking devel- oped alongside—and internalized—Enlightenment-era natural rights, Protestantism, and the ascent of capitalism, generating a radically individualistic, materialistic, and morally bowdlerized politics whose institutional form and normative orienta- tion Europeans mistook as implicit in democracy itself. In this context, democracy took as its motive the rights of man, and not the dharma of humanity; it appealed to the selfishness of the lower classes against the pride of the upper; 99. “Aliens in Ancient India,” in Karmayogin, February 12, 1910 (see note 71 above). 100. “The Past and the Future,” in Karmayogin, September 25, 1909 (see note 71 above). 101. “Asiatic Democracy,” in Bande Mataram, March 16, 1908 (see note 74 above). For an account of Ghose’s fuller critique of European—or “individualistic”—democracy, see Varma, Political Philosophy, 304–20 (see note 69 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 it made hatred and internecine war the permanent allies of Christian ideals and wrought an inextricable confusion which is the modern malady of Eu- rope.”102 In its return “to Asia, its cradle and home,” Ghose held, democracy would “point back humanity to the true source of human liberty, human equality, human brotherhood.”103 The “Asiatic reading of democracy,”104 then, transcended the at- omism and instrumentalism reducing democratic principles to questions of indi- vidual entitlement. “Dharma is the Indian conception in which rights and duties lose the artificial antagonism created by a view of the world which makes selfish- ness the root of action, and regain their deep and eternal unity.”105 As such, it “is the basis of democracy which Asia must recognise, for in this lies the distinction between the soul of Asia and the soul of Europe. Through Dharma the Asiatic evolution fulfils itself; this is her secret.”106 Shyamji Krishnavarma and the Sociological Foundations of Empire Shyamji Krishnavarma was a radical political propagandist, agitator, and leader of the early Indian independence movement who straddled Eastern and Western worlds in his upbringing, intellectual development, and life’s trajectory, shaping his distinctive understanding of, and resistance to, British imperialism. Born in 1857 in Mandvi, a town in the state of Kutch, Krishnvarma’s primary and second- ary school education was English-language, but he also concurrently attended a pathsala, a traditional Sanskrit school, through which he developed a profound knowledge of Sanskrit and of seminal texts in the Hindu tradition. He was thus the beneficiary of “parallel education systems”107—the English focusing on the humanities, the Hindu on Brahminical study. In 1875 he came into contact with Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj (a Hindu reformist orga- nization), and was profoundly taken with Saraswati’s vision, taking up employment 102. “Asiatic Democracy,” in Bande Mataram, March 16, 1908 (see note 74 above). Dharma is a multifaceted concept that carries different meanings across Indian religious and cultural traditions. Ghose’s appeal here conveys its basic Hindu sense as the moral law or moral order governing one’s conduct, and according to which one’s moral duties are set. He criticizes the dis- connection between the rights animating western democracy and their corollary moral obliga- tions (leading to the litany of ailments catalogued above), which Indian democracy, governed by dharma, conjoins. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, 7 (see note 9 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress with Bombay’s Arya Samaj in 1876. Even thirty years later, Krishnavarma remained steadfast in acknowledging the depth of Saraswati’s influence, describing his later studies in England as “a collateral culture . . . our original training having been purely Oriental, under the guidance of the late Svami Dayananda.”108 Alongside his engagements with the Arya Samaj, Krishnavarma continued to “ma[k]e use of the ‘Western knowledge’ he had acquired”109 to integrate himself into the colonial mi- lieu, through which he met Monier Williams, a professor of Sanskrit, who drew him to Oxford in 1879. Under Williams’s tutelage, he further developed both his oriental and Western studies and—most significantly—was introduced to Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. Spencer was the second pillar of his intellectual formation; Krishnavarma would describe him as “the great philosopher, my master . . . the man whom I admired and esteemed most in the world, and of whom I consider myself an humble disciple.”110 Krishnavarma’s unusually heterodox intellectual development thus synthesized a broad range of philosophical influences, Eastern and Western, enabling him to draw on what Harald Fischer-Tiné describes as “two different cultures of knowl- edge”111 to develop an incisive critique of British imperialism.112 While clearly aligned with the extremists’ political aims and methods, his anti-imperialism diverged from theirs in being “guided in its policy by the fundamental truths of Social Science . . . as expounded by the founder of that new and profound science”113—Spencer—rather 108. “The London ‘Times’ and Ourselves,” in the Indian Sociologist, March 1909. All citations to this source come from archival research at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Gyan Prakash situates Saraswati’s drive to “rationalize” Hinduism within a broader late nineteenth- century push to integrate science and religious practices, in Another Reason, 80 (see note 49 above); see also Seth, Subject Lesson, 163 (see note 1 above). 109. Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, 16 (see note 9 above). 110. “A Leading French Newspaper on India: Interview with the Editor of the ‘Indian So- ciologist,’” in the Indian Sociologist, January 1909 (see note 108 above). 111. Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, 25 (see note 9 above). 112. Krishnavarma’s political thought was indelibly shaped by what Leela Gandhi describes as a “politics of friendship,” the “multiple, secret, unacknowledged friendships and collabora- tions between anticolonial South Asians and marginalized anti-imperial ‘Westerners’ enmeshed within the various subcultures of late Victorian radicalism”; see Gandhi, Affective Communities, 10 (see note 75 above). For close treatments of his extensive, globe-spanning associations with anarchists, positivists, socialists, and utopian anti-imperialists, see Ramnath, Decolonizing An- archism, 56–66 (see note 13 above); Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, 90–93 (see note 9 above); and Inder S. Marwah, “Rethinking Resistance: Spencer, Krishnavarma, and The Indian Sociologist,” in Co- lonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized, ed. Burke A. Hendrix and Deborah Baumgold (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2017), 43–72, at 55–57. That chapter, more generally, expands on the exposition of Krishnavarma’s nationalism pre- sented here. 113. “Ourselves,” in the Indian Sociologist, January 1905 (see note 108 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 than neo-Vedantic spiritualism.114 Where Ghose’s rejection of Western norms and values led him to treat swaraj in spiritualist terms, Krishnavarma’s advocacy for Home Rule—no less stringent in its demand for India’s unqualified political auton- omy—was framed in relation to Mazzini’s revolutionary nationalism and John Robert Seeley’s “great sociological truth” that subjection “to a foreign yoke is one of the most potent causes of national deterioration.”115 He thus advanced a peculiar developmentalism that framed the colonial condition, and India’s evolution to- ward political independence, in a manner equally distinctive from the moderates’ liberalism and from the extremists’ spiritualism.116 The resulting anti-imperialism was self-consciously social-scientific and political, seeking out the “absolute free- dom of my country without any restrictions, and the establishment of an Indian National Government.”117 The novelty of Krishnavarma’s developmentalism stems from its incorporation of Spencer’s sociological account of empire.118 For Spencer, imperialism was not a political form akin to others, and its injustices were not the failings of an otherwise functional political state; it was, rather, a given sociological condition with its own features and deficits. Rather than taking aim at any specific imperial power (though fiercely censorious of the one he inhabited), Spencer’s critique centered on “the general truth that militancy and Imperialism are closely allied—are, in fact, differ- ent manifestations of the same social condition.”119 Empires were particular socio- logical systems with endemic and recurring shortcomings: unbridled (and unwar- ranted) taxation, the decline of originality, individuality, and liberty, and “these 114. Krishnavarma’s turn away from the extremists’ Hindu revivalism intentionally avoided its nativism, which deeply alienated India’s Muslim populism. For the Swadeshi movement’s exclusionary dimensions, see Goswami, Producing India, 257–69 (see note 14 above); Zachariah, Nehru, 19–20 (see note 14 above); and Fischer-Tiné, Sanskrit, 64 (see note 9 above). For a fuller elaboration of Krishnavarma’s non-parochial alternative, see Marwah, “Rethinking Resistance,” 54–57 (see note 112 above). 115. “The Deportation of Lala Lajpatrai: Political Progress Under Repression,” in the Indian Sociologist, June 1907 (see note 108 above). 116. For Krishnavarma’s place in the early nationalist movement, see Shruti Kapila, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890–1920,” Modern In- tellectual History 4 (2007): 109–27; and Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar, “Gandhi’s Gita and Politics as Such,” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2010): 335–53. 117. “Another Leading French Newspaper on India: An Interview with the Editor of this Journal,” in the Indian Sociologist, May 1909 (see note 108 above). 118. For a fuller account of Krishnavarma’s intellectual debts to Spencer, see Marwah, “Re- thinking Resistance,” 57–65 (see note 112 above). The following is a condensed version of that discussion; I focus here, however, on Krishnavarma’s developmentalism (narrowly) rather than on his political philosophy (more broadly). 119. Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1902), 159. 000 | Provincializing Progress deeds of blood and rapine, for which European nations in general have to blush, [which] are mainly due to the carrying on of colonization”120—all pathologies im- plicit “in that concentration of power which is the concomitant of Imperialism.”121 Spencer thus regarded imperialism not as a political state distorted by bad circum- stances, but as a distinctive sociological state whose vices were inbuilt. A clear- sighted understanding of it should, then, be predicated on “those sociological truths which have nothing to do with particular nations or particular races.”122 Understood at this level—as an object of generalized sociological analysis—the imperial order was, Spencer held, characterized by the widespread diffusion of a particular set of affects and sentiments: loyalty, servility, and obedience. This was rooted in a larger developmentalist-evolutionist framework that treated social ad- vancement as shaped by the adaptation between a people’s sentimental attributes and its sociological conditions. Spencer argued that all societies’ affective states, broadly understood, were initially molded by their sociological circumstances. Primitive societies adopted sentiments of deference and obedience—a general will- ingness to submit to authority—to preserve themselves against the insecurities of their condition. These sentiments were, then, formed by and responsive to their so- ciological context. Over time and through evolutionary adaptation, both circum- stances (sociological and institutional) and mental states shifted, without which so- cial progress would be impossible. Sentimental and sociological evolution, however, did not progress in unison. While societies became stabilized in due course, developing the political conditions enabling greater individuation and liberty, their populations’ affective states lagged behind, generating a disjuncture between governing institutions and social senti- ments. The ensuing mal-adaptations, Spencer saw, seeded a great many of hu- manity’s lapses into political violence. “The tyrannies of rulers, the oppressions of class, the persecution of sect and party, the multiform embodiments of selfish- ness in unjust laws, barbarous customs, dishonest dealings, exclusive manners and the like,” he argued, “are simply instances of the disastrous working of this original and once needful constitution, now that mankind have grown into conditions for which it is not fitted.”123 At an earlier developmental stage, the egoism and violence fueling political domination were directed outward, preserving still-precarious 120. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Spec- ified, and the First of Them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1860), 368. 121. Spencer, Facts and Comments, 167 (see note 119 above). 122. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873), 205. 123. Spencer, Social Statics, 413 (see note 120 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 societies against external threats. But as social and political structures steadied, these tendencies ceased to fulfill their function. “As there arises a perception that these subjugations and tyrannies are not right,” Spencer held, “as soon as the sen- timent to which they are repugnant becomes sufficiently powerful to suppress them, it is time for them to cease.”124 In fledgling civilizations, “whilst the injustice of conquests and enslavings is not perceived, they are on the whole beneficial; but as soon as they are felt to be at variance with the moral law, the continuance of them retards adaptation.”125 Enthralled by sentiments of obedience and deference, un- derdeveloped societies failed to register the inequities of political domination; how- ever, with the degradation of the “loyalty-producing faculty,”126 populations came to sense its harms. At this point, when citizens began contesting authority and re- sisting repression—in short, as the anti-authoritarian spirit of liberty spread—that originary political violence became retrogressive. The steady decline of blind fidel- ity and submissiveness and the concomitant rise of critical thinking and individu- alism was, for Spencer, the driving force of development. This sociological-sentimentalist framework shaped both Krishnavarma’s cri- tique of India’s colonial subjugation and his conceptualization of its movement toward political independence. Ultimately, his nationalism aimed to enact this precise affective shift—from loyalty to liberty—in India’s citizenry. From an an- alytical standpoint, he drew on Spencer’s Social Statics to “remind the contempo- rary reader that there is an intimate relation between loyalty and barbarism. . . . [Autocracy] has ever been the repressor of knowledge, of free thought, of true prog- ress . . . [and] organs of public opinion in India . . . are addicted to slavish tenden- cies.”127 India’s political subjection turned on its population’s docility, deepened and extended by “an oppressive and tyrannical rule” that “makes them servile.”128 And yet, the edges of that affective regime were beginning to fray. India sat at the juncture of sentimental maladaptation that Spencer pinpointed: still bound by the deference sustaining imperial domination, but on the verge of feeling its moral odiousness. “When the flagitiousness of these gross forms of injustice begins to be recognised,” Spencer held, “the times give proof that the old regime is no lon- ger fit. Further progress cannot be made until the newly-felt wrong has been done 124. Ibid., 417–18. 125. Ibid., 419. 126. Ibid., 422. 127. “Slavish Tendencies of an Indian Newspaper: Relation Between Barbarism and Loy- alty,” in the Indian Sociologist, June 1906 (see note 108 above). 128. “British Rule and Calculating Kindness: Are Gratitude and Justice Possible Without Sympathy?” in the Indian Sociologist, February 1907 (see note 108 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress away or diminished.”129 This was the razor’s edge on which colonial India teetered, between longstanding obedience born of subservience and the nascent sense—the “newly-felt wrong”—of its intolerability. The “old regime,” Krishnavarma saw, was decaying; the sentimental dispositions of “an advanced social state” were rising and being “constantly repressed,” “kept down on a level with the old arrangements.”130 Nowhere were those feelings of independence more strongly felt or clearly ar- ticulated than in the nationalist movement. In the arc of Krishnavarma’s devel- opmentalism, nationalism was the manifestation of a new sentimental order. Home Rule gave voice to Indians’ emerging self-consciousness as free and self- governing agents, to their burgeoning critical spirit and aspirations for liberty. And Krishnavarma was quite deliberately at the forefront of the effort to propagate these sentiments. “What India requires,” he asserted, “is education of the heart more than that of the head. People must learn to feel and not simply to think that slavery or the loss of political freedom is ‘the worst of all evils.’”131 Every facet of his prolific political activism—from the Indian Sociologist’s decades-spanning propa- ganda, to creating “Indian Travelling Fellowships” drawing Indians to study in Britain to “see for themselves what political freedom and free institutions in general have done toward raising the people of these islands,”132 to funding lectures in Brit- ain and India advancing the nationalist cause, to establishing the Indian Home Rule Society and India House in London—aimed to sharpen the nationalist senti- ment pushing India’s sociological—and hence political—development. He went so far as to establish and fund a “Society of Political Missionaries” “to create in the people of India a real desire for emancipation,” recognizing that “in order to make their desire effective, we must enlist the sympathies.”133 The nationalist movement, Krishnavarma saw, was accentuating the mismatch between governing institutions and affective states, and he took every opportunity to lean on their disjuncture. He even embraced moments of productive friction be- tween Indians and their rulers, as colonial violence would only enliven their con- sciousness of, and resistance to, their political circumstances. “Every act of tyranny and oppression perpetrated by [India’s] foreign masters,” he argued, would accel- erate the movement toward independence, “since what is absolutely necessary for 129. Spencer, Social Statics, 418 (see note 120 above). 130. Ibid. 131. “Education not Necessary for Self-Government,” in the Indian Sociologist, September 1906 (see note 108 above). 132. “Why Indians Should Visit England,” in the Indian Sociologist, May 1905 (see note 108 above). 133. “The Indian Home Rule Society,” in the Indian Sociologist, March 1907 (see note 108 above). Inder S. Marwah | 000 the emancipation of that country is to make the Indian people feel that they are ill-treated and oppressed under an alien yoke.”134 The political loyalty sustaining British imperialism, so commonly attributed to Indians’ supposed inborn timo- rousness, was in fact sociologically conditioned, and “the rapid growth of Home Rule sentiment [was] bound to destroy any such feeling.”135 Home Rule marked an epochal transition in India’s developmental trajectory, a tectonic shift from one stage of sentimental-political progress to the next. As with Ghose and Banerjea, then, Krishnavarma redirected developmental thinking toward anti-imperial ends, rather than abandoning it altogether. In his re- formulation, Home Rule represented the rise of an affective order rendering colo- nial power unsustainable by pushing the maladaption between Indian sentiment and colonial government to its breaking point. Krishnavarma’s activism aimed to precipitate the collapse of the imperial order by undercutting its sentimental foundations. More broadly, his agitations illuminate a distinctive and novel mode of political resistance generated by developmentalist arguments at the intersection of Eastern and Western worlds, and the syncretic political imaginary on which it drew: Pericles, Ibsen, Washington, Montesquieu, Aesop, Patanjali, Afzal Khan, Krishna, and innumerable others were marshaled in Krishnavarma’s rabidly anti- colonial political philosophy. That philosophy was not only analytical and reflec- tive but also activist, shaped less by ideological purity than by what Ranajit Guha describes as the “impact of living contradictions,”136 the engaged struggle for polit- ical autonomy and non-domination. Neither liberal nor Vedantic, moderate nor extremist, Krishnavarma’s sentimentalist developmentalism draws out the ideo- logical and intellectual complexities woven into India’s independence movement. Conclusion What, then, are we to glean from Banerjea’s, Ghose’s, and Krishnavarma’s anti- imperialist developmentalisms? From the disciplinary standpoint, they reveal a certain one-sidedness in much of the critical and political theory grappling with the problem of developmentalism— and more generally, as comparative political theorists have illustrated, with the po- litical imaginaries of peoples and thinkers historically outside of (and marginalized 134. “Deportation,” in the Indian Sociologist, June 1907 (see note 108 above). 135. “A Sociological Truth and its Bearing on India,” in the Indian Sociologist, August 1907 (see note 108 above). 136. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1988), 37–44, at 41. 000 | Provincializing Progress by) those traditions.137 As Singh observes, it is a singular irony that much of the theory treating the legacies of empire and colonialism remains steadfastly commit- ted to the philosophical resources that upheld those instances of domination in the first place. It remains in important ways blinkered by the conviction that justice can be wrested from appropriately updated and sanitized Western frameworks— liberal, Marxist, critical, or other—rather than by engaging bodies of thought be- yond them. This is all the more remarkable in the case of a self-consciously global critical theory, such as McCarthy’s, that aims to address historical injustices from within critical theory’s parameters alone. While theorists such as Mehta, Chakra- barty, and Nandy reach well beyond these constraints, their critiques of devel- opmentalism remain, although for good reasons, fixed on its Western iterations alone. Developmentalism remains an obdurate problem for McCarthy and Allen— and an insoluble one for Nandy, Mehta, and others—precisely because they linger within the problem-space in which it is figured as nothing but a problem whose solution, if one is to be had at all, must also lie in the same ideational universe. But neither problem nor solution exhausts, or even really captures, the concept’s potentialities. Sanjay Seth observes that the Western social imagination’s hege- mony turns on “presumptions that it takes to be axiomatic and universal [which] are not in fact so, and were not so in India,”138 a truth that remains germane today. McCarthy’s commitment to critical theory courts the exclusionary tendencies he criticizes by closing itself to the logics mobilized by, in this case, Indian anti- imperialists. The emancipatory tenors of those developmentalisms vanish, along with interlocutors beyond the tradition’s line of sight. His critical theory of devel- opment’s normative vision is similarly constrained: given the inescapable “facts”139 of modernity, we avoid developmentalism’s trappings only by drawing the ex- cluded into “our” modernity, “for only Western modernization,” he reminds us, “was endogenous.”140 To be sure, he remains keenly sensitive to that modernization’s profound and enduring pathologies; but, for better or worse, McCarthy tells us, this is the moder- nity we have come to inhabit. Neither problem nor solution ever leaves the closed circuit of Western modernity, or the philosophical conceits descended from it. As 137. Brooke Ackerly and Rochana Bajpai, “Comparative Political Thought,” in Methods in Analytical Political Theory, ed. Adrian Blau (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 270–96. 138. Seth, Subject Lessons, 8 (see note 1 above). 139. McCarthy, Race, 155 (see note 21 above). 140. Ibid., 149. Inder S. Marwah | 000 “a mode of philosophic investigation that presupposes the basic sufficiency of its own moral-intellectual resources,”141 David Scott recognizes, it steadfastly resists the “labor of learning how to read from within another tradition.”142 Scott observes that the problem-space to which postcolonialism responds shifts over time, and en- joins scholars to shift their focus with it.143 It seems to me that the same holds true on the spatial axis. By resetting the problem-space within which to interrogate the concept of developmentalism beyond Western political theory’s lens, we open our- selves to a very different view of its relationship to imperialism and political dom- ination. “South Asian intellectual history,” Shruti Kapila observes, “compels schol- ars to take cognizance of a wider range of methods, texts and actors than any established canon of Western political thought would permit.”144 From an historical standpoint, we also deepen our understanding of the ideol- ogies of resistance surrounding imperial contexts. Duncan Bell has recently argued that the “tyranny of the canon”145 shaping the scholarship on liberalism and impe- rialism has distorted our understanding of both; a rather different picture emerges when we broaden our perspective to include the lesser-known figures that gave form to the nineteenth century’s wider imperial imaginary. The same holds true, perhaps even more so, for those on the other side of the colonial divide—those sub- jects confronting, contesting, and reshaping imperial politics through subversive acts and ideas. Just as the empire was justified across a range of theoretical posi- tions, so too did anti-imperialists develop diverse conceptual vocabularies—liberal, spiritualist, sociological, and more—to capture the nature and harms of colonial domination, and to push for independence. This article has aimed to recover a sliver of that diversity of languages, and to flesh out their articulations by influential, provocative, and original political think- ers who substantively furthered India’s movement toward independence. Banerjea, Ghose, and Krishnavarma carefully engaged questions relating to the colonial con- dition, to its prospects, to its value or deficits, and to the the relationship between East and West. They also advanced widely disparate responses to them: a providen- tial blessing spreading the light of political liberalism; a blip in the wider evolution of Aryan—and still more broadly, human—civilization; or a peculiar sociological state on the brink of revolutionary transformation. Each provides a window not 141. Scott, “Traditions,” 2 (see note 2 above). 142. Ibid., 7. 143. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Dur- ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 2–6. 144. Kapila, Intellectual History, vii (see note 3 above). 145. Bell, Reordering, 48 (see note 6 above). 000 | Provincializing Progress only onto distinctive ideologies of resistance, but onto the ways that colonial sub- jects integrated Eastern and Western bodies of thought to develop complex cri- tiques of imperialism. By attending to them, we better perceive the porousness of colonial intellectual contexts, as well as the political horizons opened by their efforts to challenge and, as James Tully puts it, “civicize”146 the relations of power in which they were entangled. Finally, from a conceptual standpoint, Banerjea, Ghose, and Krishnavarma re- veal the great plasticity of developmental thinking: developmentalism recurs across their anti-imperialisms in different ways, to different ends, along different tempo- ral scales, yielding altogether different politics. While the problems associated with developmental thought have for good reason garnered significant attention in po- litical theory, it is worth noting its implication in anti-imperialisms as well. Pro- gressivist, providentialist, and even stage-based accounts of social evolution are perhaps more adaptable than we might have recognized, drawn here into diverse politics of resistance. This neither denies nor minimizes their imperial/colonial en- tailments, both historically and in the present, but rather attests to the open- endedness of languages of domination. As Tully observes, languages of power, like all languages, are bound up in language games; they retain an inescapable sus- ceptibility to subversion, manipulation, and appropriation. In this case, Banerjea, Ghose, and Krishnavarma do more than widen our view of imperialism; they also widen our view of the conceptual languages framing it, and of the spaces of resis- tance carved out of them. Inder S. Marwah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His work focuses on the his- tory of political thought, comparative political theory, and the intersections of race, imperialism, and political theory. He is the author of Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill and the Government of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His current project centers on Darwinism and evolutionism in anti- imperialist (and non-Western) political thought. He can be reached at marwahi@ mcmaster.ca. 146. James Tully, On Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue (London: Bloomsbury Ac- ademic, 2014), 75.