Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 5 - Pardons and Scaffolds

  • Alastair McClure, The University of Hong Kong
  • Book:
    Trials of Sovereignty
    Published online:
    20 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024, pp 185-232

  • Summary

    Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.