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C. A. Bayly and the Question of Indian Political Thought*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2017

ANDREW SARTORI*
Affiliation:
New York University, United States of America Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This article reflects on C. A. Bayly's legacy, with particular attention to his late turn to the history of Indian political thought. It highlights the force of his attempt to approach South Asian history with a keen eye to its specificity without correlatively compromising his attention to questions of comparability. It also highlights some of the conceptual and methodological dilemmas with which his final work confronts us.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Norbert Peabody for inviting me to write this reflection, and to David Ludden and Guy Ortolano for comments. All opinions and errors are mine alone.

References

1 This was a kinship that Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook sought to underline in their article, ‘After Orientalism: culture, politics and criticism in the Third World’, and that Gyan Prakash sought to repudiate in his reply, ‘Can the “subaltern” ride: a reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34, no. 1, 1992, pp. 141–67 and 168–84, respectively. The first volume of Subaltern Studies appeared in 1982. Similar preoccupations had characterized the historiography of China since the 1970s: see Cohen, P. A., Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, Chapter 4Google Scholar.

2 Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012 Google Scholar.

3 He had made similar arguments about nationalism and communalism in Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.

4 See for example Bell, D., Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2016, Chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hadley, E., Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 From Bayly's response in ‘Roundtable: Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, Britain and the World, vol. 5, no. 2, 2012, pp. 310–11Google Scholar.

6 Isabella, M., Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Bayly, Recovering Liberties, p. 1.

8 Ibid., p. 347.

9 Ibid., p. 347.