The previous two chapters considered India’s ‘moment’ of constitutional liberalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the years from about 1800 to 1830, Indian public men fashioned from international, colonial and indigenous sources a series of political and social concepts that they deemed appropriate to the subcontinent’s aspirations. These ideas were to persist, though much modified, through the colonial period and after. They included the idea of a unified India, the representative constitution, the Indian juror, the panchayat and the ‘drain of wealth’ from India. Above all, they envisioned an Indian ‘public’ supported by a free press, which would release Indians from an existential, if not always actual, position of slavery. These ideas emerged against the background of a series of reformations in religion in which Vedantic Hinduism and (on the Muslim side) rationalist Islam were proposed as appropriate complements and inspirations for the new public sphere and a morally purged private realm, which were increasingly distinguished from each other.

The combination of these various ideas brought about a true conceptual revolution in India, which was even more profound than that which affected eighteenth-century Europe and America. It represented both an independently generated force and an extension of that Euro-American revolution. The conceptual and physical violence which accompanied the triumph of the European Enlightenment was rendered in South Asia much starker by the humiliation and oppression of colonial conquest, reflected even in the statements of liberal moderates such as Rammohan Roy.