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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2017
Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.
I would like to thank the participants in the 2017 University of Michigan–Thyssen Foundation workshop on Global Cultural Encounters, hosted by Kira Thurman and Stefan Hübner, who, along with the blind reviewers for Modern Intellectual History, helped me to substantially reframe and improve the argument of this essay. I would also like to thank Thom Dancer, Daniel Elam, Caroline Levine, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Aileen Robinson for sharing their own research, commenting on mine, or just generally offering words of enthusiastic encouragement. Finally, I owe particular thanks to the staff of the Forbes Gujarati Sabha in Mumbai, for providing access to rare materials, as well as to Yurou Zhong, who read several drafts of this article and patiently listened to me as I thought through several others.
1 For examples of the rich recent historiography see Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Glenda and Rouse, Timothy, eds., forum on “Global Liberalisms,” Modern Intellectual History 12/3 (2015), 523–626CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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4 It did not, however, therefore always further the aims of empire. See Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley, 2014)Google Scholar.
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6 Mulji, Karsandas, Iṅglaṇḍmāṃ Pravās (Travels in England), ed. Patel, Bholabhai (Gandhinagar, 2001Google Scholar; first published 1866). In this article, citations from Travels in England refer to the 2001 edition. All translations are mine, with the exception of chapter titles, which Mulji gives in both Gujarati and English.
7 Dave, Jayantkrishna Harikrishna, Gujarātī Sāhitya kā Itihās (Lucknow, 1963), 129–36Google Scholar; Joshi, Umashankar, Raval, Anantray, and Shukla, Yashvant, Gujaratī Sāhityano Itihās, vol. 3 (Ahmedabad, 1978), 166–8Google Scholar.
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9 In this article, I use the word “ethics” in a broadly Foucauldian sense to refer to embodied practices for the cultivation of the self and its habitual dispositions. Compare the definition in Pandian, Anand and Ali, Daud, eds., Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington, 2010), 2Google Scholar.
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35 Ibid., 122.
36 Ibid., 115.
37 Ibid, 106–13.
38 Ibid., 112–13.
39 Ibid., 77.
40 Ibid., 71.
41 Ibid., 10.
42 Ibid., 170–72.
43 Ibid., 33–4.
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93 Quoted in Kucklick, Savage Within, 7.
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115 Ibid., 205–6.
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