This book has aimed to re-evaluate the political and social thought of Indian liberals, broadly defined, over the century and a half from 1800 to 1950. While largely an intellectual history, it has attempted to demonstrate the way in which ideas both informed and were also formed by social and political change. Two decades ago, the fields of intellectual, social and cultural history generally operated on different planes. That is no longer the case. Yet, while there will never be a consensus about how they should be put together, there is broad agreement that it is possible to analyse their mutual interaction in specific historical periods without reducing political thought to social or cultural history, or vice versa. This study has taken the view that powerful ideas persuade people to courses of action, but only in the context of their particular lived worlds and ‘prejudices’. Ideas also act as icons and badges of attachment, marshalling groups and associations in common pursuits. In this latter guise, they form genealogies that persist through time, creating a true ‘history of ideas’. So, by the end of colonial rule, for example, Indian liberals had created one such genealogy, which they traced back through the formulations of Naoroji, Banerjea and Mill to Rammohan Roy.

Yet Indian liberals have been variously described as ‘mendicants’ (by the Swadeshi radicals); office-seeking collaborators (by the Cambridge School of the 1960s and 1970s); self-seeking bourgeois individualists (by some Marxist historians of the same period); inauthentic ‘mimic men’; or elitists delivering a ‘derivative discourse’ (by some, though not all, of the ‘postcolonial’ historians of the 1980s and 1990s). It seems that not much could be done to rescue their reputations or to treat their ideas seriously. Yet I have argued that liberalism was a broad field on which Indians and other South Asians began not only to resist colonial rule but to engage in debates about the Good Life as would-be citizens of a global republic. Their ideas, even when rejected, or transformed out of recognition by their political successors and enemies, were formative of many of South Asia’s modern ideologies and institutions and contributed greatly to India’s Sonderweg: the country’s clinging to the values of representative government and, later, broad democratic values, in the face of colonial oppression, populist mass murder, endemic corruption, the restrictive implications of caste ‘reservations’ and gross economic inequality.