Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

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which still seemed viable in Rammohun Roy’s day. After the commercial

crisis of 1848, when native elites lost a great deal of money to what they

perceived as European swindling, most withdrew their remaining capital

into the safety of landholding. As a result, large-scale business became an

increasingly British affair. The leading families, the Roys, the Tagores, the

Sens, and many others, had now been collabora ting with the British for

two or three generations, and yet felt, if anything, more uncertain about

their place. After Rammohun’s death, Brahmo Samaj fell into abeyance,

largely because of the indifference of his friend Dwarkanath Tagore, a

thoroughgoing secularist, who bec ame wealthy and traveled to Europe,

where he died in 1846. Thereafter, the organization was revived by his

son, Debendranath, who cultivated a more austere and contemplative

lifestyle.

Nevertheless, the Brahmo Samaj of the late 1840s and 1850s turned

into a far more modest undertaking than what Rammohun Roy had

originally envisaged. Gone was that bold reformer’s highly visible persona

of the 1820s, as his ambitious syncretic claims to having reconciled

Hinduism with the teachings of Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, and

Christ were allowed to lapse. The more pragmatic Tagore was content

to remain a practicing Brahman, continu ing most of the familiar Hindu

rituals and ceremonies but giving them a more rationalistic and mono-

theistic gloss. There were several good reasons for Debendranath’ s cau-

tion. In the ﬁrst place, the Christian missionaries were growing steadily

more ubiquitous and aggressive under the leadersh ip of the pugnacious

Presbyterian Alexander Duff. Although few scions of the Bengali Brahman

elite were likely to become Christians, a signiﬁcant number were becoming

radical secularists, or even atheists, under the inspiration of Henry Derozio

and David Hare. These de votees of “Young Bengal” seemed to be aping the

worst habits of Englishmen. Spouting Tom Paine and ﬂouting Brahman

customs, they turned to beefeating and indulged in strong drink. A

return to Hindu traditions was necessary, Debendranath concluded, if

Bengalis were to preserve their cultural identity and retain their self-

respect.

R. P. Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (Mysore, Kavyalaya, 1957);

Narendra Krishna Sinha, “Indian Business Enterprise: Its Failure in Calcutta,” in Rajat

Ray (ed.), Entrepreneurship and Industry in India (Oxford, 1984), 70–82; Amiya Bagchi,

Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge, 1972), 165–81. For the social history

of the bhadralok community, see John McGuire, The Making of a Colonial Mind: A

Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok of Calcutta, 1857–1885 (Canberra, 1985); J. H.

Broomﬁeld, Elite Conﬂict in a Plural Society (Berkeley, 1968), 1–41.

David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979),

especially 42–6; Amiya Kumar Sen , Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance

(Calcutta, 1979); Devendranath Tagore, Autobiography of Maharisi Devendranath Tagore

The Calcutta bhadralok and British racial ideology 265

It is in this context that we must assess the consequences of the increasing

racism of the Victorian Raj. In the age of Malcolm and Elphinstone, the

bhadralok had friends in high places, but this was no longer the case. Even

the most broad-minded and intellectually sophisticated policy-makers,

such as Campbell or Maine, had grown wary of the Bengali babus, since

the very existence of these cultural hybrids raised the disturbing prospect

that India might be able to modernize without British control. For the less

discriminating and more arrogant of the new sahibs, all Indians were

lumped together as inconsequential “niggers” who needed to be kept in

submissive obloquy. This put anglicized bhadralok like Debendranath in a

bind. To follow blindly along Macaulay’s path of anglicization was to risk

humiliation and rejection, and yet repudiation of the British connection

would be tantamount to squandering their economic position and denying

their own identity.

Matters came to a head in 1849, when Macaulay’s friend (and successor

as Law Member of Council) J. D. Bethune proposed a sweeping overhaul

of India’s judicial system that would extend the principle of legal race

equality from civil to criminal jurisdictions. To the surprise of liberals in

both countries, this proposal precipitated a shockwave of fury and vitu-

peration from the European community in Calcutta, which ﬁxated on

the prospect that white men (or, even worse, white women) might ﬁnd

themselves subject to the mercies of a native magistrate. When asked how

he could possibly justify the existence of a separate and unequal legal

system for each race, the leader of this agitation had the teme rity (and the

candor) to proclaim,

Considered politically, my sable friend, our right to be well-governed does not rest

on the same basis. You are one of a conquered race, who have no original and

strictly political right to be well-governed. You are at the mercy of your conquer-

ors. But I am one of a nation who have their right guaranteed by such things

as Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and a few other

conditions.

For Indian libera ls, it was a shock to be told in such blunt and unequiv-

ocal language that the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights did not apply

(Calcutta, 1909); David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The

Dynamics of Indian Mo dernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, 1969), 215–94; M. K. Haldar,

“In troduction,” in Haldar (ed. and trans.), Renaissance and Reaction in Nineteenth Century

Bengal (Calcutta, 1977), 1–145, especially 6–23, 54–72, 79–82; E. W. Madge, Henry

Derozio, the Eurasian Poet and Reformer [1904] (Calcutta, 1982).

Nemai Sudhan Bose, Racism, Struggle for Equality, and Indian Nationalism (Calcutta,

1981); Haldar, “Introduction,” 53. See also Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian

Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,

1968), 1–130.

Bose, Racism, Struggle,1–129, quote on 101.

266 Indian liberals and Greater Britain

to people like themselves. When the government withdrew Bethune’s

bill, when even Macaulay remained silent about this repudiation of

his principles, Young Bengal (now aging) had to face the prospect that

anglicization might be a dangerous and untenable ruse. The problem

was not that British liberals had completely disappeared from India,

for there were still a minority, like Macaulay’s nephew G. O. Trevelyan,

who protested the racist belittlement of “niggers,” who denounced

planter exploitation of peasants, and who exposed British atrocities in

the repre ssion of mutiny. Yet Trevelyan’s writings also reveal the subtle

inﬂuence of the new evo lutionary thinking, in a manner that led him to

caricature the anglicized native in whom his uncle had placed high hopes.

The Bengali babu was not “like the north American Indian, a barbarian”

or “like the European of the middle ages, the member of a community

rude ... but replete with germs of vigorous civilization .” He was a man

whose evolutionary development had been arrested, whose “fundamental

characteristic is want of stamina,” and who “is perfectly contented to

glisten and bask in the sun for days and weeks. ” Trevelyan might well

endorse such a man’s legal rights, but could never regard him as an equal.

If nature, not discrimination, had exclude d such men from attaining the

Bill of Rights or the Magna Carta, there was nothing the English liberal

could do. Such attitudes help to explain why the members of Brahmo (and

the bhadralok in general) felt impelled to embrace their “oriental” differ-

ence, and to hope that they might ﬁnd a metropolitan interlocutor who

could authorize their efforts to turn it from a disability into an advantage,

underwriting an alternative evolutionary path into consequential history.

Although British orientalism was effectively dead by the 1840s and

1850s, its death paradoxically opened the way for Indians to take possession

of it, and for such an interlocutor to appear. For the center of indological

studies had passed during this period to Germany and France, where it

acquired a more detached ideological character that was no longer

implicated in the daily management of the British Empire. Thus when a

young German philologist named Friedrich Max Müller made his way to

Oxford in 1848, key members of the English intelligentsia were intrigued.

Somewhat embarrassed by the breakthroughs of their European compet-

itors in setting comparative philology on a scientiﬁcfooting,theywere

prepared to support the young German to stay among them. Encouraged

by these supporters (including his future brother-in-law, Froude), Max

Müller gained a reputation as a dynamic and engaging lecturer. Great

advances, he explained to his audiences, had been made since the days

G. O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah [1864] (New Delhi, 1992), quotes on 141–2.

The Calcutta bhadralok and British racial ideology 267

of Sir William Jones. The connection between Sanskrit and classical

European languages that Jones had been the ﬁrst to point out was not

merely one of grammar, mythology, or culture. It had to represent a deeper

consanguinity of heredity and race. Müller invited his audiences “to imag-

ine that there was a time when the ancestors of the Celts, the Germans, the

Romans, the Slavs, the Greeks, and the Italians, and the Hindus were

living together beneath the same roof.” From this perspective, Britain’s

Indian Empire was itself a reunion of long-lost cousins, returning “to their

primordial soil, to accomplish the glorious work of civilization, which had

been left unﬁnished by their Aryan brethren.” To justify his many years of

preparing the ﬁrst truly accurate, scholarly edition of the Rig Veda,Müller

encouraged his listeners to read this ancient, seemingly alien document, in

which they might discover “the childhood of the Aryan mind.”

As they followed Max Müller’s work from the distance of Calcutta,

the bhadr alok intelligentsia were delighted to ﬁnd a metropolitan inter-

locutor who would publicly articulate a respect for their history.

Not

directly implicated in the machinery of government, and something of

an alien himself, Max Müller gave hope of a new kind of bordering, in

which educated Indians might ﬁnd their own unique road to modern

accomplishment through a reinterpretation of their ancient history. It

might be that Indians had no Bill of Rights and no Magna Carta, but

they had documents that were much older, profounder, and therefore

closer to the moral foundations of humanity. The western Aryans (culmi-

nating with the British) had indeed evolved sophisticated forms of political

organization that combined representative government with geo-political

power. However, the eastern Aryans had perfected those spiritual resour-

ces, whose germ could be detected in the three-thousand-year-old Veda,

but which the occident had abandoned in its quest for worldly might.

Like the English imperialists, then, the Bengali bhadralok could regard

itself as a people of world-his torical signiﬁcance. No longer need they

remain pathetic supplicants at the hands of the foreign maste r. From the

Nirad Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max

Müller P.C. (London, 1974), 311–16, who tends to be too forgiving of Max Müller’s many

sins. See also Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, 1997), 172–83 and

passim, for a full discussion of the relationship between Aryanism as a philological category

and as a racial concept, as well as Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the

British Empire (London, 2002), 38–55, 169–87.

“What a sublime spectacle,” proclaimed Krishna Bihari Sen (Keshub’s brother). “The

Hindu and Englishman are brothers! ...Do not jealousies, struggles and bloodshed appear

contemptible where every brother man is learning to recognize in the face of his fellow-

creature the image of his ﬁrst forefathers?” Quoted in Joan Leopold, “British Applications

of the Aryan Theory of Race to India,” English Historical Review, 89.352 (July, 1974),

578–603.

268 Indian liberals and Greater Britain

spiritual and historiographical riches at their disposal, they might craft

an alternative “moral” road to modernization, providing – from their

oriental vantage – a lesson of hope and faith for all humanity. During

the 1820s, of course, Rammohun had tried to forge such a synthesis, but

the times had been unpropitious, and his message proved premature.

Now, however, in the 1850s, his Brahmo descendants looked for another

spokesman who might repackage spiritual syncretism into a form that

would be appropriate for the Victorian age. Debendranath could no t

provide the requisite charismatic leadership, but when he found these

skills in a younger disciple, Keshub Chandra Sen, he was happy to raise

the youn g man up.

2 Keshub Chandra Sen and the quest for spiritual history

Like the Roys and the Tagores, the Sens were an old Bengali zamindar

family that had gained wealth and powe r from collaboration with the

British over many years. However, unlike his counterparts in the other

leading families, Ram Camul Sen (Keshub’s grandfather) remained

faithful to the most traditional Hindu religious practice s, even as he

participated in Calcutta’s modern capitalist economy. The result was a

contradiction between the tenor of commercialism in the ofﬁce and the

traditionalism that reigned at home. Like Rammohun two generations

earlier, the young Keshub interpreted this cognitive dissonance as a

mark of hypocrisy. Turning to Debendranath as an alternative mentor,

Keshub disdained what he regarded as his uncles’ empty agnatic rituals,

removed his child bride from his aunts’ zenana, and educated her in the

principles of rational religion. Finding a family substitute in Brahmo

Samaj, Keshub got swept up in its associational activities, taking a

leadership role in outreach efforts to the younger (his own) generation.

With a powerful voice and a theatrical manner, he quickly developed a

reputation as a dynamic, inspirational speaker. “Those who desire to

reform their country must ﬁrst reform themselves,” he admonished the

devotees of Young Benga l. “I am extremely happy to learn that you

have recently abandoned those skeptical notio ns which you hitherto so

obstinately cherished.” Although skepticism had weaned them from

idolatry and superstition, it offered only “a spurious liberalism” in

their place.

Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century

Bengal (Oxford, 2002); Indira Chowdhuri, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and

the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 1998), 40–65.

BKCS, 1–16; MLS, 44–59, 60–72.

Keshub Chandra Sen and the quest for spiritual history 269

Keshub sympathized completely with his compatriots’ desire to become

modern, but he insisted that for Indians, modernization had to take the

form of new and experimental modes of spirituality. Boldly taking a leaf

from the Christian proselytizers, he opened a Brahmo school, established

a newspaper, and created a Brahmo missionary agency that sent evange-

lists out to Madras, Bombay, and the Bengali countryside. As new recruits

streamed into the Calcutta Samaj, membership rose to over 6,000.

Somewhat astonished at Keshub’s accomplishment, Debendranath

acknowledged him as co-leader of the congregation. Yet amid all this

bustle of fresh activity, many of the older Brahmos began to murmur

complaints: Keshub was moving too fast and trying too much. In partic-

ular, he was pushing radical ideas about gender and the family that

threatened to strike at the very heart of Hindu patriarchy. Indeed, to

Keshub, it simply followed from the logic of Brahmo rationa lism that

men and women of every caste ought to be encouraged to participate

equally in the same religious fellowship. Caste differences should be

ignored, caste intermarriage and widow re-marriage should be encour-

aged, child marriage should be abolished, and wives should have inde-

pendent legal rights.

To the conservative faction, with which Debendranath was increasingly

sympathetic, such radical innovations were tantamount to a social revo-

lution. They would represent a humiliating concession to alien British

customs and a complete betrayal of all Hindu tradition. Somewhat reluc-

tant to fall back to the stance of absolute Hindu traditionalism, the

Brahmo conservatives sought to justify their resistance to Keshub by

wrapping it in the mantle of cultural-nationalist history. “ Under present

conditions,” warned Debendranath’s son Dwijendranath, “an adoption

of European habits would be like wearing a badge of slavery.”

With our present inferiority and inﬁrmities we are little better than the Christian

Negro of North America, who speaks English, dresses himself with the jacket and

pantaloon, and whose habits of life and fact are mostly borrowed from the

European settlers there. And why so? Simply because his civilization is nothing

more than an image of European manners and habits ... By means of mere

imitation we can be just so much like the Europeans as slaves are like their

masters.

The Tagores recognized, as well as anyone, that if Indian men were to

escape from their “slavery,” they would have to become masters of mod-

ern technology and political organization. However, such modernization

BKCS, 1–46; MLS, 73–109. See also Sen’s “Autobiography,” reprinted in MLS, 325–56.

Quoted in Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 183.

270 Indian liberals and Greater Britain

would only lead to further dependence and disaster if it were achieved at

the expense of India’s long, honorable tradition of spiritual superiori ty.

Contra Macaulay, they insisted that modernization had to be translated

into a Hindu idiom and sync hronized with the rhythms of Indian history.

“Each nation holds a distinct nationality,” Dwijendranath argued, “and

for so holding it, is entitled to the appellation of a civilized nation.” The

trouble with Indians was that they “rush madly to their own degradation

by acting under the supposition that to imitate English civilization ... is

synonymous with making progress ... instead of making national institu-

tions the basis of all progress.”

To Keshub and his followers, these arguments were unpersuasive, not

because they were content to become second-rate English imitators, but

because they believed that Brahmo Samaj – while certainly modeled on

British prototypes – represent ed a considerable advance over the British

in creating genuinely cosmopolitan spiritual and organizational forms.

If the Hindu bhadralok was willing to give up his retrograde caste and

patriarchal privileges, according to Keshub, he would be able to access

Rammohun Roy’s syncretist principles, around which Brahmoism had

originally crystallized. Only if Brahmo Samaj detached itself from its

objectionable entanglements, and accessed the deeper channe ls of its

indigenous traditions, could it hope to play a catalytic role in forging the

nineteenth century’s new chap ter in universal history. The bhadralok had

the chance to create a new spiritualized progress narrative, if it avoided the

errors of dogmatic anglicization and dogmatic Brahmanism alike. By

returning to the purity of his original pre-caste religion, the “effeminate

Bengali” so despised by English racists could re-make himself into the

agent of a future human fraternity.

3 Brahmo Samaj and the evolution of spirituality

To understand the logic of Keshub’s position it is necessary to grasp the

dangerously exposed situation in which the bhadralok community

found itself after the 1857 Revolt. Rejected by the rebels as an alien

excrescence, the bhadralok were yet dismissed by the British as ineffectual

prattlers, openly compliant, but secretly disloyal. Caught in the maws of

this double rejection, the more perspicacious among them saw that

they could afford neither to blindly imitate the British nor to reject the

urban anglocentric culture from which they themselves came. Here

again, Max Müller, now well ensconced in Oxford, appeared as the rare

Quoted in Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 183; Haldar, “Introduction,” 84–9.

Kopf, Brahmo Samaj,3–156; MLS, 73–133; BKCS, 38–65.

Brahmo Samaj and the evolution of spirituality 271

metropolitan interlocutor who both appreciated their predicament and

served as a catalyst in their search for a solution. Müller’s own reaction to

the Mutiny was to blame it on EIC ofﬁcials’ ignorance of Indian languages

and cultures, which blinded the Raj to such symptoms of impending

disaster as any competent ruler ought to have perceived. The British

were ﬁxated on the loyalty of traditional elites and the passivity of the

peasants, forgetting that they “must please and conciliate the educated

classes of the native community,” so that these Indian opinion-makers

might be “charmed out of their prejudices or the errors of their precon-

ceived opinions.” Two years later, in 1859, he published A History of

Ancient Sanskrit Literature, in which he indicated some of the ways in

which his type of scholarship might provid e a ground on which educated

Britons and Indians could meet.

The ﬁrst gift of Sanskrit scholarship to the Indians was the evidence it

provided of their racial quality. “What authority,” he asks, “would have

been strong enough to persuade ... the English soldier that the same

blood was running in his veins and in the veins of the dark Bengalese?”

“There is not,” he concludes, “an English jury now a days, which after

examining the hoary documents of language, would reject the claim of

a common descent ... between Hindu, Greek and Teuton.” Late in life,

Müller became persuaded of the toxicity of “race” as a category in histor-

ical science. With some annoyance, he complained that “to speak of an

Aryan race, would be akin to speaking of a dolichocephalic grammar.”

The “confusion in the popular mind,” he insisted in a letter to E. A.

Freeman, “arises chieﬂy from a confusion of terminology which was

meant for linguistic purposes” being applied inappropriately as a measure

of consanguinity. “Let people classify blood as much as they like,” he

concluded, “only let them use their own bottles for that.” The problem

was that Müller himself often used his own “linguistic bottles” to make

claims about racial kinship in his published writings, so determined was he

to convince Britons that “there was a time when the ancestors of the Celts,

the Germans, the Slavonians, the Greeks, and the Italians, Persians, and

Hindus were living together within the same fence s.”

Of course, the western and eastern Aryans had eventually separated,

and their divergent experiences underwrote two different evolutionary

histories that shaped them on their way to modernity. Where the western

John Rosselli, “The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in

Nineteenth Century Bengal,” Past and Present, 86 (1980), 121–48; Friedrich Max Müller,

A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (London, 1859).

Müller, Sanskrit Literature, 13; Georgina Max Müller, The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon.

Friedrich Max Müller (London, 1902), I: 396; Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary, quote

on 312.

272 Indian liberals and Greater Britain

Aryans had to ﬁght their way th rough a Darwinian provin g ground of

struggling peoples, all contending for a limited European space, the east-

ern Aryans endured only a brief initial contest against primitive indigenes

before they settled down to a contemplative life in the “rich plains and

beautiful groves” of their fertile new country.

Greece and India are, indeed, the two opposite poles in the historical development

of the Aryan man. To the Greek, existence is full of life and reality ... The Hindu

enters this world as a stranger; all his thoughts are directed to another world ...

The highest object of their religion was to restore the bond by which their own self

(âtman) was linked to the eternal Self (paramâtman); to recover that unity which

had been clouded and obscured by the magical illusions of reality.

“It might,” Müller acknowledged, “be justly said that India has no place

in the political history of the worl d,” but “it certainly has a right to claim

its place in the intellectual hist ory of mankind. ”

When Keshub and his Brahmo associates read these words, they

took them as an invitation to offer thei r own vision of a modern Greater

British imperial union, which would neither make unwanted demands

for political inclusion nor compr omise their sense of inn er integrity. The

union that Keshub now proposed was built on the notion of a reciprocal

division of labor, in which Britain would provide the political infrastru-

cture and administration for Empire, while India (i.e. Keshub) would

provide the spiritual resources necessary to infuse these structures with

moral vitality. Fired with a new-found sense of conﬁdence, Keshub

strove to pick up Rammohun’s syncretism where that prophet had left

it off. Having freed Brahmoism from the fetters of caste and male priv-

ilege, he re-established lines of communication with a new generation of

British and American Unitarians with a view to creating a worldwide

federation of rational theism, in which Indians would be equals or even

take the spiritual lead. In correspondence with James Martineau, Frances

Power Cobbe, Mary Carpenter, and S. D. Collet, he came to see the

striking parallels between the associational culture long practiced by

Nonconformist liberals in Britain and the program of social reform and

rational religion that he was determined to inject into the Indian scen e.

From this perspective, the historical vicissitudes that had linked Britain

and India together appeared to be providential. In the past the relationship

might have been predatory and unequal. With the triumph of nineteenth-

century liberalism, however, this was no longer the case. Now Britain

and India were able to work together. They could help one another in a

Müller, Sanskrit Literature, 18, 19, 25, 31–2.

Brahmo Samaj and the evolution of spirituality 273

manner that was no longer exploitative, because their union presaged a

global future of universal harmony.

Of course, Keshub’s reluctance to characterize the nineteenth-century

Anglo-Indian relationship as exploitative ﬂew in the face of the obvious

power imbalance between them. Where Britons claimed the big beneﬁts

of political power and representative government, what could Indians

throw into the scales to assert their equality? Keshub found his answer

in 1866 while reading J. R. Seeley’s recently published Ecce Homo.This

English academic backhandedly acknowledged what Rammo hun had

proven ﬁfty years earlier: Jesus was no divinity, but an inspired human

prophet who stood in a long line of moral reformers stretching from

Moses to the nineteenth century. But if Jesus had been a human prophet,

what kind of person had he been? Again picking up an idea that Roy had

thrown out in passing, Keshub pointed out that “Jesus was an Asiatic.”

“Christianity,” he now claimed, “was founded by Asiatics in Asia ... In

Christ we see not only the exaltedness of humanity, but also the grandeur

of which the Asiatic nature is capable.” Here was yet more proof that the

eastern races (including the Semites in this case) had a special vocation

for spirituality that the occidental races lacked. For two millennia, European

Christians had lost sight of the fundamental message of Jesus, degrading it

into arid theological dogmas, which diminished Christ to a pallid occidental

like themselves. Since the time of the Vedas, Asia in general, and India

in particular, had been the incubating ground of human spirituality.

Christ had been but one episode in a line of prophetic succession that had

stretched through Moses, Buddha, and Mohammed, ﬁnally returning to

the Indian subcontinent in the modern epoch. Whenever north Europeans

had transported Asian spiritual goods into their frigid climate, they had

spoiled the merchandise by turning its message of universal communion

into bloodcurdling battle-cries of warring creeds.

Willing to grant the superiority of British goods in government, tech-

nology, trade, and administration, Keshub proposed that India exe rcise

its comparative advantage by exporting its natural resources of “Asiatic”

spirituality. Brahmos like himself would be essential in this operation,

since they alone could reﬁne India’s indigenous spiritualism, ridding

it of its retrograde idolatrous accretions, rendering it compatible with

modern social organization, and honing its competitive advantage over

Kopf, Brahmo Samaj,4–41; MLS, 73–133; BKCS, 38–65.

Kopf, Brahmo Samaj,18–21, 112–18, 177–9, 268–9, quote on 113; BKCS, 66–73.

Keshub’s biographer, P. C. Mazoomdar, elaborated on these ideas of his master in his

book The Oriental Christ (Boston, 1883). For a sophisticated analysis of the development

of these tropes – eastern (spiritual) contra western (political) Aryans – see Raychaudhuri,

Europe Reconsidered.

274 Indian liberals and Greater Britain