Rahul Sagar on the Birth of Indian Nationalism

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, where we examine the academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I am a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Today my guest is once again Rahul Sagar, who is a Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. 

We talked about his new book The Birth of Indian Liberalism, the recovery of the forgotten nineteenth-century thinker Mama Parmanand, why his Letters to an Indian Raja counts as the first work of Indian political theory, how Indian liberals had to justify building a state out of chaos rather than restraining one that already existed, their fight against the social tyranny of caste, clergy, and family, the case for binding the ruler and educating the citizenry before extending the vote, the divergence between British India and the princely states, religion as a moral resource, the roots of Hindu nationalism, and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Rahul. Welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on again.

RAHUL SAGAR: Thanks so much for having me, Shruti. Absolute joy.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. I feel like you introduced me to the men that I call my 19th-century soulmates, all these classical liberal gentlemen who believe in rule of law and binding the hands of the monarch or the ruler. They’re against arbitrariness. They like good fiscal policy and public finance. I feel like you introduced me to these soulmates I didn’t even know I had. 

The latest one is in this book. It’s called The Birth of Indian Liberalism. The latest protagonist you’ve introduced me to is Narayan Mahadev Parmanand, or Mama Parmanand, as he’s known. In this instance, it is letters that he’s written to the Gaekwad of Baroda. The letters are extraordinary. Your very detailed introduction, placing these letters in context and really telling us why these are not just letters but the birth of Indian liberalism, but also India’s own endogenous or indigenous political theory, is really remarkable. So, one, thank you for being here, and two, thank you for the book. It’s been a joy to read it.

SAGAR: Thank you so much, Shruti. Writers dream of readers like you.

A Complete Unknown

RAJAGOPALAN: [chuckles] I have lots of questions on why you call this The Birth of Indian Liberalism and also why you call this the “first work of political theory” as opposed to just ideas or ideology or letters or just discourse.

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: But before we get to that, most people have not heard of Mama Parmanand, so maybe it would be good if you started with who he is, how you found him, and what made you put together this book.

SAGAR: Thanks. Yes. He is a bit of a mystery figure. Almost no one in India or really anywhere in the world will have heard of him. His book has not been cited at all. In all these years of academic work and research, the text has been cited once by Chris Bayly on his famous book on Indian liberalism, but he didn’t actually look at the book. It was seen to be just by some random figure. It’s not attributed to Parmanand. It’s written with a pseudonym.

And so, he’s a complete unknown. Really, the only two hints that he even existed to most Indians—one is there’s a road named after him in Mumbai, and there’s a scholarship named after him in the University of Bombay, and that’s it. Most people will see that, and it’ll be one of those things that they drive past or look over, and they just assume, “Must have been someone.” It turns out Parmanand was actually probably one of the most important intellectuals, not just because he wrote this book, or this work of political theory, but he was just one of the most important Indian intellectuals of the 19th century.

He made it a point to be always in the shadows. He never wanted to attract attention. There’s a whole story behind that. That’s the reason why it’s a deliberate choice on his part to step away. Most people would not have heard of him, and it’s not a surprise. It was his intention, which I’ve somewhat destroyed now by making his life incredibly public. [laughter] 

He’s born in 1838 to a middle-caste trading family in Sawantwadi, a small principality. It’s in the midst of turmoil. There’s chaos. There’s confusion. His father passes away in the midst of all these stresses, when he’s two, and his mother decides to send him off to Bombay, where his sister is. His sister’s married to a shopkeeper, and so she thinks maybe he can study a little bit. He seems to be bright, but there’s not yet any—he’s only eight years old. There isn’t clarity about his abilities. But the moment he turns up in Bombay and he starts going to a local teacher, it becomes clear that this is a child with unique intellectual abilities.

He, like other figures that I’ve introduced you to, like Madhava Rao and like “English” Subha Rao, who’s another one of these characters, he is in Bombay at just the right moment. He’s at Bombay at the moment where Elphinstone College really goes from being a teacher training college to actually being a college, proper college, and is about to become the University of Bombay. He’s one of the very first admits. He’s one of the first seven graduates. He has a stellar— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Along with people like Ranade, who we have heard of and who’s enormously celebrated. So he’s very much a— 

SAGAR: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: —cohort we know of, we just don’t know about him.

SAGAR: We know every single person around him. Imagine this constellation. You know all the seven stars, and there’s an eighth you can’t see. His best friends are M.G. Ranade in college, K.T. Telang, the chief justice. Just a whole series. I could just keep listing all these names of all the people around him.

RAJAGOPALAN: Bhandarkar, I think, also?

SAGAR: Yes, absolutely. Actually, one of his very first friends in Mumbai is Bhandarkar. They’re both in this school for talented young boys. Bhandarkar becomes both his best friend and, eventually, at the end of their lives, the person who gives the eulogy at his funeral. It’s a very complete friendship and a very complete set of relationships that last through life. He finishes at Elphinstone, has a quick burst of being a teacher both in Bombay and in Sindh and then is tapped on the shoulder to take over Ranade’s position as the editor of the first bilingual Indian newspaper, the Indu-Prakash, in Marathi and English. He runs the English section. When his abilities in English become clear, he gets tapped to be—and this is what most people need to know, first of all, about him—he becomes the first Indian editor of the first Indian-owned paper.

It’s called Native Opinion, comes out of Bombay. Parmanand’s name never appears on the masthead. Again, I’ll explain later why. Most people think the paper is edited by or published by other people, but actually, it’s him. It’s while he’s there—and he starts writing about matters of public dispute, controversy, public policy, matters of jurisprudence—he starts to formulate a view. In 1868, this view gets expression. The viceroy writes a set of letters comparing English and native rule. Parmanand gets to write a reply, again anonymously, which makes him famous.

Most people are not aware that they’re reading a reply written by Parmanand, but they know it’s a native. The book is called English and Native Rule in India. It makes him famous. It brings him to jobs in the native states. Then he returns disappointed with the native states, returns to Bombay, and spends the next 20 years working in actually the British Bombay civil service, and at the end of that process, having gained all this experience, starts to revisit his earlier convictions—that maybe there is something, in fact, in the native states that is worth developing and bringing out.

He is just about to start engaging more actively with the native states when he realizes he has Parkinson’s. Huddled up in bed, unable to really speak, unable to move, he whispers out a manuscript which explains what he thinks the Indian principalities need to do to both catch up with and overtake British India. That whispered-out manuscript, by, as the language went at the time, by an invalid, rendered to his bed, becomes Letters to an Indian Raja. It’s published in a serialized form in The Indian Spectator, draws immense attention. Then it’s published as a book with a foreword by William Wilson Hunter, W.W. Hunter, in 1891.

Parmanand passes away shortly after. Most people are unaware that he’s had any of these roles. They’re unaware that he’s the author of this book. And because he makes it a point to ask his friends not to reveal the secret, no one really realizes until the 1920s that he was the author, by which point, it’s so far gone, and India has changed so substantially, and the native states are basically on their deathbed, his work gets lost. So, that’s Parmanand’s life in a nutshell.

The Historical Context of Emerging Indian Liberalism

RAJAGOPALAN: In a nutshell, yes. There’s a lot more detail in the book about his life, and I’m sure it’ll keep coming up. But in your recent writing, say, the last few books that I’ve read: To Raise a Fallen People, the book on Krishna Kumari, Madhava Rao, this particular one on Parmanand—you are almost recovering or reviving a form of Indian liberalism that sought to protect individuals—not just against the state, the way we think of in terms of Enlightenment values, which is there’s the leviathan and there’s the individual and the individual needs protection—but it’s more about how the individual is situated in a particular social structure that is actually extremely coercive.

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s a fight against a kind of social tyranny, which could be family and polygamy, it could be caste, panchayat, the Indian clergy, and then, of course, the Indian state, which is the maharajas. The way both Madhava Rao and, to a very large extent, Parmanand set up the stage for this is they’re writing often to the maharaja as the person who can break this tyranny, right? But that is not the Enlightenment view. It is not democratic. It is not rooted in the individual.

Is this because in India democratic politics itself is a form of social tyranny, the way it came about after 1919 and we got the vote? Or is this just—it’s opportunistic, the maharaja is the person who has some kind of power, however it was received or bestowed, and so that’s the appropriate way? Or is it because the maharaja is incidentally Indian, so if you’re going to make an appeal, it’s better to do it for someone who’s one of your own rather than the British India agents and vice versa? What is a good way to place this kind of thought?

SAGAR: Yes, that’s a big question and I fear going off on too many tangents and on for too long.

RAJAGOPALAN: Please go off on as many tangents as you would like for as long as you want.

SAGAR: Thanks, Shruti. Always too kind. I think all of the things you’ve said are each correct. There’s some opportunism—not in the moral sense, but there's a moment, there’s an opening. So, you have to take advantage of this opportunity. There’s some of that, but a large part of it is a very worked-out account. It’s only become clear to me as the works have accumulated in these different texts, Krishna Kumari and “English” Subha Rao in the 1820s, Madhava Rao in the 1860s and ’70s, Parmanand in the 1890s. It’s taken a while, but I’ve now understood the larger picture.

I think there are two things that I can say first, in terms of setting the context. Even when I discovered Parmanand’s work and started circulating it and talking to people about it like our dear friend and mentor, Pratap Mehta, and others, there’s this pause, right? Is this person really a liberal? Because they don’t match exactly what we take to be the quintessential liberal, which is this Enlightenment figure that’s often defending the individual against the state.

The point I’m trying to make in this book—and it’s a belated realization even for me—it’s taken me some time to get here—is Indian liberals face two very different challenges from what the challenges in Europe are. That’s why the title of the book, The Birth of Indian Liberalism. There is something distinctive about liberalism in India. 

The first is when liberals in the West arise and begin to make themselves felt, particularly from the mid-1650s till the early 1800s, in that 150-year period—when we think of everyone from even a bit earlier, from a Hobbes all the way through till a Mill, the state already exists. They’re responding to a powerful state, whereas Indian liberals have to worry about there actually being no state.

They’ve come out of a world in which, in 1818, in 1820, when the Third Anglo–Maratha War ends, there is just chaos. For someone like—as I was giving you this account of Parmanand’s life—when he’s young, and he’s in Sawantwadi state, there are mercenaries, there’s brigandage. There are old erstwhile royal families engaging in sporadic mutinies. The British have troops they can’t quite control who run amok and run rampant. There are roving bands of general criminals, extortionists, right?

There’s a sense that, “Gosh, I have to first understand what the justification and what the construction of a state involves because I can’t take this for granted in the way that liberals in Europe could.”

So, a large part of—whether it’s Madhava Rao or Parmanand, or indeed, even the other figure, “English” Subha Rao, who helps build Travancore up before Madhava Rao gets there, who—I describe “English” Subha Rao as the “beginning of Indian modernity,” unlike, say, someone like Parmanand, who’s “the beginning of Indian liberalism.” Their first question is, “How do I get a state going? What are the justifications I give to an individual for why a state is to be created?”

For a person like Hobbes or a person like Locke or a person like Mill, this is just a hypothetical exercise as to why or whom. “Why would I have agreed to a state that now I already see in front of me that’s demanding me to serve in the war or wanting to take taxes from me?” But here, you have to actually build a tax system to begin with. Forget justifying it. First, you have to say, “What are the justifications for having a tax system?” Then are the justifications for why I ought to pay taxes. 

The first contextual thing is that you just have to provide a state, and you have to explain why states need a reason to be. Then once you’ve provided that, you quickly start to realize, “Hang on a second, even if I create the state, the state will be assaulted by pressures from society, where different groups”—as you were rightly pointing out—“different groups will start to demand things. They’ll want the state to protect polygamy, or they’ll want the state to protect . . .. ” 

This was something that worried, for instance, “English” Subha Rao in his time—this is 30 or 40 years earlier—witch swinging. You would swing a woman, someone accused of being a witch, and you’d swing her from a tree to see if she survives the torture. You’d have all these obscure, bizarre ritual superstitions, which were exactly what had happened in Europe, but hundreds of years earlier. 

You have to confront groups that have these ideas, beliefs, faiths, convictions, and demands of all kinds. “My family served in the military, therefore the military should be based on hereditary principles rather than modern conscription and promotion based on merit.” This person will fight you when you try and take away their hereditary profession.

You have to combat all these what we would call “vested interests” on the economic side and deeply held communal beliefs on the social side, and that requires a breaker. It requires, as we would often say, the maker of the state. These are figures that are lost in the mists of time for a modern figure in Europe, but for someone that is looking at the Gaekwad in Baroda or looking at the Wadiyars in Mysore, you’re looking at the people you’re expecting to break these things and build new modern states. That’s why the ruler ends up playing such an important role, because they can both build modern states and also insulate the state against what are seen as regressive or destructive or debilitating social and economic practices.

Features of Parmanand’s Liberal Project

RAJAGOPALAN: To me, you said that it’s not clear, and when you first showed Pratap this work, he was like, “Is this really liberalism?” To me, what seems to jump out as the liberal connective tissue is it’s very clear that the ask is that the maharajas bind their own hands. Right? That is just step one of liberalism. They’re not just trying to create a modern state. They’re immediately saying, “Hey, your palace intrigue and all your Gaddi politics, all of that is fine. All the drama you’re having with the British, first the [East India] Company and then the Crown, we totally understand those guys are not the greatest and nor are they liberal, but you still need to follow your role and responsibility and bind your own hands.” 

The second part of that is how to think about administration, which as you pointed out, whether it’s Madhava Rao, whether it’s Parmanand, it has to be modern. It has to follow modern principles, which they mostly root in education. You need to have a trained bureaucracy. You can’t just appoint your cousin or even the British agent that first the Company and Crown send. He talks about how that person needs to be trained in the administration of that particular principality. 

Then the third part, which is really interesting, is they need to educate themselves and the citizenry. That’s another very clean liberal connective tissue, which Adam Smith talks about, how you need to educate the citizenry. Everyone, John Stuart Mill, Bentham—this is a really important part of [those] liberal/Enlightenment values.

Finally, how to think about developing a civil society that’ll actually check the maharaja as opposed to looking to God or the British or to their first cousin to check their power, right? To me, these four parts, which are very clearly coming out of Parmanand’s letters—there’s more stuff in there, but these four things very clearly jumped out to me as, “This is what makes his project a liberal project.”

SAGAR: Absolutely. You’ve said it better than I could. Those are exactly the four points that really matter to him. What I just see in terms of putting it historically or contextualizing it—these are the figures that are reading a book or reading Tocqueville or reading Montesquieu and agreeing deeply, or reading the Federalist Papers, as most of them did, and agreeing deeply that before you talk about individual rights, you need to get the political and social story correct.

That’s actually what made them so ambivalent about democracy. They felt that if you emphasize the individual too quickly—if you emphasize, as in, “Let me give individuals rights, let me give them the right to vote, the right to speak,” they wouldn't actually exercise those rights in their own interests; they’d exercise those rights in the interests of their communal practice or group or their communal interest. Let’s put it that way. It’s not that communal—

RAJAGOPALAN: And I would love to say that that fear was unfounded, [chuckles] but unfortunately, it’s—

SAGAR: Exactly, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: These are not people that are against—this is a crucial thing, is they’re deeply socially minded. Parmanand spend his whole—he hides his own personality. What could be more self-effacing, right? These are not people that are either drunk on individualism and think that society or community are bad. In fact, they think community is deeply important.

RAJAGOPALAN: Deeply.

SAGAR: But they’re fundamentally reformers. They’re very realistic about what reform involves and reform doesn’t involve, as we say, handing the keys to someone that hasn’t gone through some basic lessons in driving or operating complicated machinery, as constitutions often describe. You first figure out, “These are the roles, these are what the ethics of this role, this is what the duties of this office are, these are what the powers of this position ought to be.” 

And so, exactly as you said, for them, getting a working civil society, getting a working legal system, and combating arbitrariness. That’s the thing they worry about the most: arbitrariness. If you can combat that, then you have got a place in which the individual can begin to think for themselves. Then we’ll turn to rights much further down the road. 

That sort of gradualist, very careful, slow process runs against a lot of contemporary liberal democratic thinking. We sometimes call this the sequencing argument, and it’s very unpopular with people that are deeply enthusiastic about democracy that, “No, there should be no such thing as sequencing. Everyone is ready to exercise rights and ready to exercise their reason the moment you hand them that opportunity.” But that’s not how Parmanand and his generation see it.

The reason for that is very similar to what we call the “early classical liberal,” sometimes as they describe like a Montesquieu, that what matters is moderation; what matters is order, not with a capital O, where it’s rigid, but that there’s some predictability, that there is process, that there’s decency, and so on. It’s these other values, and not rights, that motivate the project.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s almost a public reason project, where, again, just as the maharaja must bind his own hands, the maharaja must lead the way and become one with his people to get educated and actually lead the public reason project. At least that’s how I read one of those letters, right? [chuckles]

SAGAR: No, that’s exactly right. Public reason is central to this, but it’s public reason in the sense that we think of in the 19th century, in the European sense of reasonable arguments, justification based on evidence and facts. Not public reason in the Rawlsian sense, as we think about it today, where things are so hyper—“Put yourself in these shoes,” or “Think hypothetically.” It’s a very rooted—that’s why I was using Montesquieu—it is a very late 18th-century, early 19th-century style of argumentation, which is rooted in a social, economic, and political context.

They’re trying to tell you, “Here’s what’s right and wrong about your context. There are many right things, some things that are not so right.” But it’s not at all a float-away argument, that is—which is again, another way in which it’s very different from contemporary liberalism; it is not analytic philosophy. It is not removed or decontextualized. It’s heavily contextual.

The Princely States vs. British India

RAJAGOPALAN: Now, I’m going to ask you a slightly complicated, longer historical question. Everything you’re describing is happening in the late 19th century. Now, we have a period of time, but we also have British India and Indian India, which is the princely states. Now, what is happening in British India is the exact reverse of what Parmanand wants, especially after the 1919 Act and 1935 Act, and once you have politics, which actually relies on getting votes.

The version of what at least the Indian National Congress and those intellectuals call Indian liberalism was not about empowering the individual beyond being able to cast a vote if they qualify, but it was more representation based on group identity. This is very much there in separate electorates, religion, caste. It also continues after independence. By the mid ’50s, we have an issue with language.

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: The Indian version of liberalism and democratic politics, if we can call it that, gets led by the version in British India, whereas what’s happening in the princely states—and again, we have more than 560 of them, and they’re all different shapes and sizes, so it’s hard to compare—but what’s happening in the princely states is this more rooted project of, “We need to empower the individual before thinking about just borrowing these practices from what we see in global newspapers and things like that.”

I also see that strand in a recent book by Ornit Shani and Rohit De, where they actually find and curate all the constitutional documents that—they did this in a paper, the constitutional documents that were actually being prepared by the princely states, and then in their new book, Assembling India’s Constitution, it’s how many different people across India, both in British India and in India India, are writing these extraordinary documents about their rights, their interests, what their expectations are from the state, and so on and so forth. 

Sorry for this long setup, but what is the reason for the sharp divergence between what’s happening in Indian India and what’s happening in British India and the politics of the Indian National Congress at that time?

SAGAR: Yes. I think the philosophical element to this is how do you try and restrain power, because that’s the underlying concern here.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: You can try and restrain power on a democratic or on, as we today call it, liberal democratic account, by giving people rights of speech and criticism and assembly as individuals and then giving them votes so that they can cooperate with others and form, in this pluralist sense—represent their interests and push back against infringements on their interests.

That’s one very well worked-out and seemingly reasonable way to try and moderate power, but the very clear and precise concern that liberals had throughout the 19th century was in their actual, lived experience, this is not how it worked out. Parmanand becomes naib diwan of Kutch and goes to Kutch, and the first thing people say to him is, “You’re not Kutchi, so what are you doing here?” [laughter] “You’re not Brahmin, or you’re not a Nagar Brahmin, so why should you be diwan? The diwans of Kutch for the last 250 years have been Nagar Brahmins, and so they should be."

The same happens to any of the other figures that he’s working with. Ranade, who’s from Kolhapur, tries to become the chief justice of Kolhapur and quickly realizes he's just battling caste and class divisions left, right, and center and decides to go back to Bombay, where at least the legal process and procedure is something that matches his training. He’s not spending all of his time dealing with people knocking on his door and asking for favors on the side, as if the law has a formal and an informal process.

When these figures, when these liberals of the 19th century, encounter actual social and economic, political mobilizations, they quickly think, “Well, if we give these groups, these individuals, power, it’s not going to work out in the way I described earlier, in that account where they’re going to use their speech for the right reasons, present the best case, give the other side an equal hearing. None of these things are going to quite work out like that.”

The focus instead should be on two things, both of which you’ve put your hand on. The first is education. If you look at the princely states, and especially the more progressive ones, they just have this enormous focus on rolling out colleges and schools. I was recently working on one of the smaller princely states called Jamkhandi. They’re the second state to introduce compulsory education after Mysore, by the 1920s, long before British India. They’re spending 6 percent of their budget on primary education.

Newspapers are writing, “If only British India would do what little Jamkhandi is doing, how different things would be.” The focus is on trying to get individual capacities organized first. That’s preliminary, as they often describe it in the literature. The second is on trying to get the ruler, as we were talking about earlier, to behave in more orderly, channeled, reasonable ways, and that this is the other way to handle power: that you try and both lift up civil society made up of educated individuals, and you try and cap or restrain what the ruler does on their end.

Philosophically, it’s a different way—and that comes back to Montesquieu, as I was describing—of trying to moderate rather than perfect the management of power. The idea is that individuals, societies, groups are so irregular and can be so sharp-elbowed that the more important thing is to find ways to moderate their conduct rather than hoping you can devise a system in which everything will slot together perfectly. It isn’t so much like a jigsaw, but more like an impressionist painting. Not every piece is going to fit. Not everything’s going to have perfect delineations and boundaries, but the broader image is one of some sort of clarity of how power functions. It’s two different approaches.

In our world today, you can see that difference. I often use—again, with a lot of caution—an example of how Singapore has tried to gradually, for instance, try to get the legal side, get the constitutional side sorted out first, before really taking the franchise more and more seriously, and the electoral process more and more seriously. It’s that sort of approach that takes the philosophy of managing power, moderating power first, making the power holder responsible, and then opening it up to these other forms of management.

Religion and the Development of Indian Liberalism

RAJAGOPALAN: Another really important part of what’s going on is unlike— normally we think about liberalism as this one post-Enlightenment, one with scientific virtue, which doesn’t see a role for God and religion. Then, even within the Enlightenment, there are people split on this. David Hume is famously atheist. 

There are folks like Hume on the one side. There are people who do think there is a role for God and religion on the other. Parmanand is one of them. That’s the first letter. First of all, it’s remarkable he starts with religion. There is this huge discussion about the divine and evolution, which I guess is the thing that they are struggling with at the time. This is a post-Darwin world where they need to really consider evolution.

That’s not at all a hot topic in India. Hindu thought and Hindu philosophy can very much have evolution going alongside the one God. Even that is a debate in Hindu philosophy. But for him, it’s more a debate between religious views and scientific temper as opposed to God and science. Is that a good way to characterize Parmanand? Also, what is he really trying to do in this letter?

Is it trying to use religion to obligate the king to live up to his divine responsibilities, which seems to be one thread? Is it that we don’t need to wholesale import other people’s science, but we do need to have some sense of science or reason? There are so many different threads going on, but I have no context on how to interpret this first letter. I spent a lot of time on that first letter. The others are just much easier to access. [chuckles]

SAGAR: Yes, yes. No, same here. When I first came across this work and read this, the longest letter of all the letters is on religion. I was scratching my head for what exactly is going on here? This is an old-fashioned technique. That you’re in a very, as you were saying, post-Darwinian world to try and use God to get a ruler to behave themselves [chuckles] is a big ask. Good luck to you. Almost made me want to stop reading and just think, “No, this is, you know . . .”. Because you sometimes find these.

There are some versions of this even within the princely states. I’ve seen texts, both in Sanskrit or in the regional languages, where there’s an attempt to try and convince the rulers that The Vedas say this, or the shastras, especially versions like the Arthashastras say such and such. Of course, these rulers have stopped practicing any of the very deep ritualistic things. This would be like making a Confucian argument in the late Qing period, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: These rituals are fading under the pressures of modern life, science, economy, trade, society, etc. My initial reaction was like yours, like, “Hang on, what are you even doing?” It took quite a bit of unpacking and understanding the context to figure out what’s going on.

So, there are really, I’d say, three objectives. The first, he touches on and then very quickly moves on from, saying, “Look, how would you want to be remembered? What would you want your life to be like? Think about your ancestors. All the ones that are gloried are the ones that did good things.”

There’s this attempt to appeal to glory, glory in the eyes of God, glory in the eyes of your fellow beings. He very quickly moves on because he’s far too realistic. Having been 20 years in the British civil service will leave you fairly pragmatic. [laughter] And dealing with—he was the revenue superintendent of all of Bombay presidency. He saw plenty of corruption, as we say, gapla. I think that will quickly make you aware of the inglorious aspects of human nature, so he moves on from that very quickly.

The second one is this claim or this concern about religion and science, as you raised. He goes through it a little bit quickly. So, it’s the context, the Prarthana Samaj that he helped set up, which is the major western Indian branch of the Brahmo Samaj, which actually overtakes the Brahmo Samaj both in terms of subscriptions, but also in terms of just how dynamic it is.

What this group is trying to answer is—so, the Brahmo Samaj is pre-Darwinian and pre this big anxiety, because once Darwin’s work is published, all of the questions that start being asked are, “Is there really any point even thinking about things like one God, deism, unitarism, any of these kinds of things?”

The whole point is the category, “God,” comes into question because clearly these are natural processes. It’s in the midst of that whole crumbling edifice that these guys are confronted with—“Look at these friends. We had these allies or these people we were working with in this great cosmopolitan project. We were all deists, unitarians, particularly in the U.S. at this point. We will work along with them to come up with this idea of a cosmopolitan God.” And suddenly these guys just all collapse.

They all start becoming either sentimentalists—like the famous poems at the time, “I believe in what I cannot see.And I just believe.” Pure belief or faith. This is completely unsatisfactory to someone who believes in reason, but then if you turn to reason, whether people are what they’re studying in school or college or when they’re reading Darwin, they think reasoning involves moving away from God. It’s this attempt which is almost like a Francis Baconian attempt to try and again reconcile religion and science.

It’s because they’re worried that the rulers—so, here’s the answer: the rulers are reading the texts that—they’re reading Spencer, they’re reading Mill, they’re reading Darwin, and they’re reading contemporary accounts of what this all means. And they’re worried that rulers will think that God really does not exist at all, that the world around us is purely this scientific creation and they have to bring them back to some account of thinking, “Let’s not be too sure there’s no divinity in this world at all.”

The second goal—one, glory in the eyes of God and doing the things God wants of you, quickly move on from that—but the second one, don’t be too sure. Just because science explains the material world, it doesn’t explain the immaterial world—why we exist, why there is a seed. We can understand why a seed grows the way it does, but why do seeds exist? Why do humans exist? These questions require some explanation that goes beyond the material, and so it’s this attempt to try and transcend the material world.

But it’s the third one that’s really the focus of the whole piece, why it’s so long, and it links to this broader ambition. What are the Prarthana Samaj or the Brahmo Samaj remnants, what are they trying to do? Their view is that if you are going to modernize Indian society, by which I mean make the individual free. Again, I want to emphasize, because so many people, when they read either Raja Ram Mohan Roy or they read the Prarthana Samaj or they are aware of any of these things, they tend to see them as acolytes of the British or somehow acolytes of Christian missionaries.

I’ve just tried to explain, missionaries are dropping like flies at this point because in a post-Darwinian world, no one is even listening to these figures in England. They’re seen as outcasts in their home country. To project any of these figures as doing the work of missionaries or as being opposed to Hinduism or something gets the story completely wrong. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: These figures are— 

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s the opposite.

SAGAR: It’s the opposite! [chuckles]

RAJAGOPALAN: They are trying to preserve Hinduism.

SAGAR: Yes, they’re trying to say, “Look, there’s still a point of religion and God in this world, post modern science.” That is not at all the case. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to say to an individual—it is almost like something like a Protestant reformation sort of moment, where they’re trying to say, “We want to preserve religion for the individual, but we want the individual to question what aspects of their religion are relevant or not.”

A lonely individual cannot do it. That’s why this chapter is to a maharaja. A lonely individual cannot challenge society, challenge religious authority, challenge their parents, challenge their siblings on matters of social and religious practice. When they say, “I will eat with anyone I want to eat with or marry anyone I want to marry or travel to any country I want to travel,” they’re outcasts, or they’re cast away.

The individual will not be able to do this without the support of a whole set of institutions: schools that inculcate these ideas more broadly and reduce resistance;  a modern economy, which produces jobs where people are not reliant on caste-based professions, where they can have heterodox views and yet have a job.

Legal processes where the panchayat can’t tell you, “This is what your caste duty is,” but instead a legal process that operates on the basis of, as we were discussing earlier, predictable individual liberties.

This is not the right to free speech where you can open a newspaper or say blasphemous things, but rather where you are allowed to at least do something that your caste previously disallowed. It’s a much smaller, much more humble right, but in that world, it means everything.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s huge.

SAGAR: It means you can leave Sawantwadi, you can stop being a trader, you can become the editor of Native Opinion, you can be the naib diwan of Kutch, you can come back and work as a superintendent. You can do all of these things. This mobility, in a sense, which is so central to the modern individual—mobility of person, place, time, language, context. They’re trying to provide that.

Only a maharaja can set all those little pieces together: the judiciary, schools, industrial sector, all of these kinds of things. That’s why there’s this large section of religion where a maharaja is being told, like English monarchs in the past, “Only you that belongs to this faith, that identifies with these people, that looks and sounds and practices their faith, can put in place this revolution, this religious revolution that will free individuals and allow them to have a more personalistic relationship with their faith rather than a communitarian relationship with their faith.”

Neither Scientific Nor Divine

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s this one passage that really struck me, which is also about his dislike and distaste for middlemen and priests.

SAGAR: Yes. [chuckles]

RAJAGOPALAN: You know, people who are just laundering all kinds of religious ideas that serve their own interests. They are neither scientific nor divine.

SAGAR: Exactly. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Here he says: 

For religion has been brought into discredit far less by the advance of scientific knowledge than by its own practical surrender to its spiritual functions, replacing them by dead and senseless ceremonials conducted mechanically and performed by priests more ignorant and less advanced than many of the laity, and thus rendered capable of imparting to them little or no moral strength and no intelligent and elevating support amidst their sufferings or trials in their struggle with the world.’

That is pretty damning. [chuckles]

SAGAR: Yes. And you can see, this would be to anyone that believes in a set of structures or figures, whether it’s mathas or shankaracharyas or any of these conglomerations. This seems like an absolutely scandalous assault.

Karsandas Mulji, for instance, is one of Parmanand’s best friends. He’s writing this at the time when Mulji is taking on important religious establishments in Bombay. The idea is—again, it’s not this sweeping—in his own world—I don’t at all mean you’re suggesting this—but in his world, he’s being seen as this sweeping reformer. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: Too bold. Too damning. Too . . . But nothing in Parmanand’s life or in his conduct suggests anything like wanting to rip these things down or demolish them or undo, but to really force them to be more transparent, more honest in their functioning. “Rituals,” for instance—that line about these dead rituals where maharajas are undertaking these rituals, giving money to priests, who then . . .

Madhava Rao has this famous story where he conducts an audit of some jewelry that the maharani of Baroda had bought. It turns out she donated it to the priest, so he asked the priest, “Where is it?” The priest said, “Oh, it’s been melted down and consumed by cows because we mixed it with the feed in order to . . .” and Madhava Rao—this wry aside—he’s like, “My sense is that jewelry—fortunately for that jewelry, it had a much more prosaic afterlife. It wasn’t quite consumed by cows, [laughter] but probably by humans and by their bank accounts.”

It’s this account. The cynical use of religion hurts religion much more. If you make religion philosophical rather than making it in this methodical, mechanical way, then we’ll actually preserve it better.

RAJAGOPALAN: This I see some of even in your more contemporary writing. In a recent column, you have what can be almost a striking claim in modern times, that Hindu nationalism is not the challenge to Indian liberalism. It’s, in fact, the opposite,  that Indian liberalism didn’t take the views of religion and religious philosophy and religious practice seriously, that has actually set the stage for Hindu nationalism.

It very nicely aligns with what Madhava Rao or Parmanand or their contemporaries are saying and doing, which is, this is what the people believe and they want, and there’s a lot of good in religion. It is a force that can elevate the moral order, that can elevate conduct, that can elevate reason if we allow it. But if you just throw the baby out with the bathwater, you’re going to lose your people. Then you’re going to be one of these maharajas that the British trained and just imposed on their own people. It seems like we’ve done some version of that in our own liberal politics. First, am I characterizing your view correctly? Two, how do you see that playing out today?

SAGAR: Yes. First, on their view, which is really quite close to my own view, I guess, and that’s partly what has drawn me to these figures and made me elaborate their point of view. It wasn’t instrumental. It was slightly coincidental or slightly lucky, but their view is certainly that it’s—never underestimate the importance of religion, convention. Again, again, you’ll see the Montesquieu in me. These are the figures that I care deeply about—Toqueville writing about religion in America. Never underestimate, both as a practical matter or as an empirical matter, the hold that religion has on individuals, but more importantly, as a moral matter, the great capacities of religion to draw the individual out.

The great concern in liberalism is if you justify things on the basis of individual rights, how do you get individuals to live up to their duties? The explanation has always been—well, an enlightened reason, they will see that they need to serve in the military. They will see they need to pay their taxes honestly. They will see that they need to not unfairly favor their friends and family. They will see that they need to obey the law even when the judge or the policeman’s not looking. 

There’s this work that needs to be done by the individual that’s often left to something else. Sometimes we’ll call it virtue. Sometimes we’ll say, “More schooling.” Sometimes we’ll say, “If only teachers did a better job.” Then sometimes we’ll say, “If only the family does a better job.”

Well, yes, all of those are important social institutions that help bring the individual back to society, as they would say in the 18th and 19th century, remind you of your place in this larger order, but we tend to underestimate how important a role religion plays in that, that it doesn’t require unthinking superstition. We will assign religion this ghastly role—that it’s regressive or patriarchal or that it’s superstitious or that it’s backwards or any of these awful terms. But in its highest moments, religion asks the individual to think of their place both in the cosmos, but also just in terms of their sheer existence. Not just who created the world around you, but just why do you even exist?

All these figures in the 18th and particularly in the 19th century in Victorian England, or these figures like Parmanand and his circle in India, took this very seriously as a resource, as a moral resource. They were not cynical about it. It wasn’t just instrumental. 

Parmanand quotes Voltaire: “If God didn’t exist, we’d have a reason to invent him.” They can see that, but they also genuinely in their own life, they’re building temples, serving, undertaking charitable works. Parmanand helps set up night schools. He helps set up homes and communities for widows, helps them get remarried.

There’s this real attempt constantly to think about reforming religion, because you can see that religion has this capacity to make individuals more than themselves, to think about others, to think about their duties and their responsibilities to their children, to their family, to their neighbors, to their state, to their society, and to the broader universe. All of these figures are cosmopolitan in that sense. Never do they think that duties end with your narrow national boundaries. They see religion as having this motivational function.

I think my own views also come in that direction—that I’m deeply, again, influenced by someone like Bankim on this point, which is religion and religious nationalism play a deeply important—or rather I should say, religion is very closely linked often to nationalism, not because clearly nations have religions and there’s all this— enormously—we could debate for hours about what’s constructed, what’s artificial, what’s deliberately engineered, etc. But the broader idea is that Bankim has exactly the same conversation. Why should an individual be willing to kill and die in battle?

The answer is that all the things that you value in your life around you are dependent on the existence of a state, and your religion tells you, explains to you why this state and why these other people around you are worth sacrificing yourself for. Religion plays this motivating—or has this glue aspect to it—which just makes it deeply important purely, without having questions or discussions about theology, without having discussions about science, just as a purely moral category. Religion motivates individuals to think beyond themselves.

That whole arc across the 19th century at the end with Bankim really sets us up for Hindu nationalism, this broad realization that these modern structures we are creating, which are asking individuals to make all kinds of sacrifices: “Fight the British. Fight for independence. Fight for liberty.” Well, the question is going to be, “Why should I fight?” and the answer is going to be, “Because the preservation of your religion and your way of life depend on it. It’s not because your individual right depends on it, but everything.”

RAJAGOPALAN: Everything depends on it. When I read the 19th-century liberals talk about religion, to me it seems like there’s a logistical purpose to our lives, right? Like be a good king, be a good parent, educate your children, don’t do sati, that kind of thing.

But here’s also a spiritual purpose to your life. I think they are very focused, whether it’s the Brahmo, whether it’s the Prarthana Samaj. They’re very focused on what is the spiritual purpose of life. In one sense, Hinduism lends itself well to that, right? Because Hinduism even has place for atheists and gnostics in Hindu philosophy, where their spiritual purpose of life may just be to question everything, and that is acceptable. In fact, it’s not just acceptable, it is encouraged almost.

To me, nationalism seems a little bit more on the logistical purpose of life, consequentialist to preserve community, to preserve religion, to preserve kith and kin, and make sure we carry on. But they are also saying this in peace times, right?

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is the spiritual purpose. 

What Constitutes a Work of Political Theory?

RAJAGOPALAN: The book has a little blurb right here on top which says “modern India’s first work of political theory.” I was very disturbed by this because until now, my other soulmate that you introduced me to was T. Madhava Rao, who was born maybe about 10 years before Parmanand. What differentiates this as the first work in political theory? I would have thought that’s very much Madhava Rao, right? He comes up with a system of administration. I think he goes beyond political theory, also political economy, but he writes a draft constitution. To me, he seemed to be the obvious person, but I’m willing to have more than one 19th-century hero. [laughter]

SAGAR: I hope so. I’ve got more coming up for you. I want you to be capacious in your catalog of heroes. I worried about saying that. I spent a lot of time agonizing over it. I think it is something that reviewers will challenge me on or criticize me for, and I’m willing to take it, and here’s why. I think Madhava Rao, I would categorize him as the person who writes the first work of statecraft or administrative expertise. His Hints on the Art and Science of Government, very much as the title suggests, is really about governing. How to govern, how to run a modern system, why it should respect individuals. There are elements absolutely of political philosophy, particularly consequentialism. Concern for markets, individual rights, and individual choice.

There are all those elements there. He does write separately a constitution. It’s short, but it’s clear in its account of what a political system ought to look like. But I wouldn't call it a work of political theory. This is possibly where I will disagree with other even political theorists: What is this field, and how do you distinguish your political theory from political philosophy, from statecraft?

Now, I would put Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Dharmatattva as a work of political philosophy. That’s a work that basically is asking a question of value.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: Why nationalism, or why religious nationalism? That’s what Dharmatattva is about. I think it’s the most important work of political philosophy in that century. But it’s not really at all interested in institutions. How should a court work? What’s the point of civil society? How should schools and colleges function? For Dharmatattva, those are minuscule, irrelevant questions. The big questions: Why do we exist? Why are we here? What are our duties? Why does the nation demand anything of me? It’s a work of political philosophy, ask questions about value and justification, legitimacy, and so on.

On the other side, as I was describing, Madhava Rao, much more the nuts and bolts of administration. A work of political theory, as I take it—and this is as I’ve taught in class over the years, and hopefully not misled students as I’ve done this—is that it both asks normative questions, “Why should things be this way?” But ultimately, what it’s trying to do, what makes it political—it’s not just theory, but what makes it political, is that it tries to recognize that there are going to be conflicts. There is no one normative answer that everyone agrees upon. It tries to come up with frameworks in which conflicts can be resolved. It’s not trying to just write a theory.

You don’t write Dharmatattva justification of nationalism and then say, “Actually, there are people who completely disagree with nationalism, and so I’ll give you that account as well.” No, but a work of political theory has to recognize that there just are these incommensurable values, people disagree in these fundamental ways. You will have distributive conflicts. You will have ideological conflicts. You will have religious conflicts. And you will need to create institutions that manage them. A work of political theory is one that both recognizes some large overarching values and tries to use them to put together a set of institutions.

In our conversation, it was power, that there is power around us and that power can be used for human good, for individual well-being, but it requires its management and its channelization and its containment. The same thing for religious and social power. These can be both good and they can also be misused or misappropriated. You have to channel them and build institutions.

What makes it the first work of political theory is that it tries to provide an entire institutional account: religion, schools, law systems, administration, bureaucracy, taxation, diplomacy. It does all of those, unlike all the works that are appearing in British India, almost all of which are critiques of colonialism, because that’s when—they’re confronted by colonial states. They’re not proposing, “Here’s who should govern British India and here’s how they should do . . .” because that would be ridiculous. You are confronted with this gigantic power, and you say, “You’re doing A, B, and C wrong. Please change it. Introduce D, E, and F.” That’s fine, but it’s not really political theory. It’s criticism, and it’s an attempt to try and reform a system that you disagree with but you can’t fundamentally hope to change.

But a work of political theory is an account of what a new system, what a completely reformed, completely renovated system would look like. You can only really envision that in the princely, in the native states. That’s the opening, as you were saying earlier, the opportunism. That’s the opportunity that Parmanand spies and takes full advantage of.

The Ethics of Parmanand’s Anonymity

RAJAGOPALAN: Another thing about him—this is, of course, why he got lost other than the road and the scholarship, which incidentally his classmates put together. Normally, the scholarship is set up much later or posthumously or something, right?

SAGAR: Yes. 

RAJAGOPALAN: One thing that struck me about Parmanand, which you also talked about, is he’s lost because he is anonymous. He chooses to remain anonymous. He thinks that this is not about him, but the broader purpose of speech and challenging these systems. Especially, the letters are signed as a political recluse.

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: And only later, we find out who he is. Now there is—and you should tell me if I’m connecting too many different threads from your work—but your earliest work was on secrecy. You’ve written on and off about secrets and leaks and anonymity. Especially, even in contemporary times, whether it’s Wikipedia, and should these people be anonymous and have this much control, even if it’s completely decentralized and checking power about Twitter and modern AI systems.

Have you become more skeptical of anonymity? How do you feel when someone like Parmanand writes anonymously, given how you feel about it in contemporary times and all your other work on Secrets and Leaks and so on?

SAGAR: Yes, great question. It would look like there’s a contradiction, but I want to say I have a way of resolving the contradiction. [laughter]

In Secrets and Leaks, the view was—and it continues even in the work on Wikipedia—and there’s more work coming on AI as well that will be coming in the next few months—is that anonymity is dangerous when it involves questions of interest. When you are taking a position on an existing matter of policy, then I, as a consumer, as an observer, as a reader, have the right to understand, and you have a responsibility to provide me with an account of your interest in this situation. If you’re a disgruntled employee, I deserve to know that. It doesn’t mean you can’t speak. You’re not to be denied the right to speak, but I need to know that I have the right to know these contextual details when it’s a matter that involves interests.

Why I would say Parmanand’s account of anonymity doesn’t trouble me—and I’ll explain why he even does it in the first place—is because it’s an account of what an ideal regime would look like. It’s not one that says, “Make me the ruler.” It’s not an account of, “I, this undeclared person, should really be the one running this policy,” or that he in some way stands to benefit from it. He writes it, as I was explaining to you, when he has Parkinson’s, bedridden, and he’s writing it for a generation to come.

Anonymity becomes far more acceptable when the work itself—because it’s anonymous, you don’t know who the person is—but when the work itself takes no position of interest. It doesn’t ask you to back this or that particular agenda. It makes a general set of arguments that can rise or fall on their own. But if it says, “I was in such and such place, and I saw person A do thing B, and you have to trust me, and that’s why person A is a terrible person,” well, that’s a whole other story, because now you are making both accusations, you’re making claims about fact, action, intention. These are not general principles about institutions and in the abstract.

That’s the first basic distinction where I’m comfortable with anonymity—where I’m comfortable with it and where I’m not. In Parmanand’s particular case, it’s because of these two figures that really influence him through his life. He doesn’t start out this way. He's always an introspective, quiet, slightly shy personality, even as a child. But he meets this incredible professor, J.P. Hughlings, who I’m going to write about in a few weeks, write a little bit more about his life. Remarkable figure, the first professor of English at Elphinstone, and really the maker of Elphinstone College and then the University of Bombay.

Hughlings is very much committed to the idea that it’s important to be a selfless servant of the public and public good. He is intended to teach orphans in England before he gets offered this job. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SAGAR: He goes off to India to teach, and he sacrifices himself completely. Works weekends, does all the sorts of things, and that includes writing anonymously on behalf of the interests of the natives.

Parmanand sees this, and the realization that he draws from this is a very 19th-century Victorian observation that when you place your name in the public sphere on arguments about principles, not about x did y at moment t or something, but when these are arguments about principles . . .. When someone criticizes you, you see it as an assault on your own status. “I defended rights. You question rights. That means my position in the public sphere has been demeaned. I have to fight back.”

Parmanand and these other figures, like I was saying, they were very attracted to, say, the American founders, or Publius, that sort of late 18th-, early 19th-century argumentation, which was almost always done pseudonymously.

RAJAGOPALAN: Pseudonymously.

SAGAR: Yes. The idea was that this allows for a reckoning of the arguments on their own merits without a personalization of the ad hominem, “I’ll attack you, the person, the position, the interest group, the community, rather than dealing with the argument fairly and squarely.” The idea was, “Anonymity both takes my ego out of it, but it also denies the other side the chance to escape or evade the argument.” That’s where he was coming from. Throughout his life, he wanted the arguments, as we sometimes say, “Let the argument speak for itself.” Easier said than done, but that was his motive. I’m willing to grant him that so long as you argue in this more abstract way about general principles. I think his use of anonymity in his newspapers and as an editor and in exposing people, I can see the justification for it. Like in Secrets and Leaks, I say there has to be a justification. The claim has to be provable. You have to have good reasons for remaining anonymous. You have to be willing to come out and reveal your identity if you’ve made a false claim. He, broadly speaking, I think, more or less lived up to those criteria.

There were instances where he accused British officers of malfeasance. Then inquiries were made, and Parmanand fessed up to being the person who had written the column and provided the evidence. That meets my standard. Of course, I don’t know every instance. Maybe there were cases where he used anonymity in ways he shouldn’t have, but at least for this book, I have enough evidence to feel comfortable with his use of anonymity.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, I don’t have any problem with it. It’s just also at a different time and place. I think now, the way the digital media and social media move, and also the geopolitics of right now, which is something they were quite protected from, right? For them, the big question was, is this a native writing about the powers or the establishment, or is this someone who’s part of the power structure writing about the powers and establishment? As you said, depending on the context, you would fess up if required.

Now, in the world of AI and the ability to do dupes and fakes and be at many places at many times and mask your interests, this has gotten a little bit more complicated. It wasn’t so much about whether I’m comfortable with Parmanand. It’s just more how are we to think about this in the modern age. In the modern age, I would be a lot more nervous about reading a pseudonymous account.

SAGAR: Yes, I think there can be this concern. I would still, I think, remain with that point that if you’re arguing at the level of general principles— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, principles are fine.

SAGAR: —if the principles are unpopular—I was thinking of the Mencius Moldbug—there was this version. I think there is a space for, no matter how unpopular, or in fact, precisely when arguments are unpopular or dangerous or controversial, there should be space to be able to make them pseudonymously. Publishers have shied away from wanting to do that anymore. But I think I would still want to draw this ethical distinction between anonymity in the sake of laying out a system as opposed to anonymity for the sake of exposing a particular policy or person. That’s much more dicey. On the former kind, even today, I would be willing to allow some degree of anonymity. In Parmanand’s time, you laugh, but when Parmanand wrote some of these things, people actually thought—the common accusation was Native Opinion was actually English critics dressed up as Brahmins. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Brahmins.

SAGAR: It’s the disgruntled Englishman who’s angry with the viceroy, pretending to use Native Opinion to criticize. You’d actually say, “Actually, this is a native who’s written this thing,” and then they’d be like, “A native wrote this? That’s even worse, because now that means that the natives are questioning us on [chuckles] matters of principle with this really sophisticated reasoning in English. Now I need to know even more who’s doing this.”

There was this funny catch-22 to using anonymity where you have to convince people, “I’m not actually English, even though I can write English this well,” but also not give away too much because you’re going to get in trouble for being this over-educated native who was causing trouble. 

This did happen to Parmanand when he wrote his first work, English and Native Rule in India. It was a direct criticism of the viceroy. He lost a job because of it. He didn’t mind. He said, “This is the way of the world.” He cites the Gita, and he says, “I did my duty, and I didn’t do it for a reward.” But there is a real cost to getting found out.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, for me, I agree with you. I absolutely think there should be a lot of space for anonymity and pseudonymous work and things like that. I’m not so much in favor of closing up those spaces. I’m more reluctant to take it seriously myself. 

SAGAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: To me, someone who actually reveals themselves and pays that cost, which sometimes is massive, would actually make me take that more seriously. So, I don’t know if that’s a very economist way of thinking about it where you must bear that cost to be taken seriously, but that’s usually how I view them. But he’s an absolute delight to read, no matter what.

SAGAR: Yes. No, no, no. I’m very much, as you said, I’m skeptical. I begin with being skeptical of anonymity, and I agree with you on the points you just made about there needing to be a willingness to bear a cost. I think the question is when those costs are astronomical. If you’re making an argument in a society where you’re crushed for—I want to be able to voice myself. I’m brave enough to put my name to the argument, but it’s not just people will criticize me or criticize the argument or mock me, but they will try and crush me.” As we say, cancel culture. The idea that you will lose your job, your family will be hunted, you’ll get— 

RAJAGOPALAN: Or your life sometimes.

SAGAR: Exactly. If you’re dealing with that degree of assault for arguing about principles, then I can see the space.

RAJAGOPALAN: Fair enough.

SAGAR: Almost done with you. Yes. It’s an attempt to try and really line out how much I agree with you and then carve out this one very particular set of circumstances where, as you’d expect, iconoclastic figures who are going to challenge prevailing opinion can really worry about outsize costs.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Again, thank you so much for, first of all, finding these people, then figuring out the manuscripts, going through them, modernizing them in the sense of corrections and references, and then writing the wonderful context that you give us to actually consume this work. It’s really remarkable how you’re able to do this over and over again, every couple of years, with a new unknown figure. Again, all my favorite gentlemen of the 19th century. Hopefully, some more women will make an appearance.

But thank you so much for doing this. The book is called The Birth of Indian Liberalism: Mama Parmanand’s Letters to an Indian Raja. I hope everyone reads it and gets a lot out of it. Thank you for doing this, Rahul.

SAGAR: Shruti, thank you for doing what you do, bringing these ideas to a wide audience and asking all these fabulous questions. Thank you so much.