This article explores the nature of British imperial power in nineteenth century India through an analysis of an exceptional clause introduced by legislator J.F. Stephen in the Indian Evidence Act of 1872. The clause, it contends, was specifically crafted to place exceptional power in the hands of civilian district judges as the most visible instruments of empire during a period marked by increasing resistance to British authority following the 1857 rebellion. This article thereby sheds light on the broader historical dynamics of how judicial figures, legal procedures and practices were strategically deployed to uphold British dominance in India.

The escalation in violence in popular movements worldwide, whether in opposition to oppressive state systems or in their support, has inspired much scholarly interest in nonviolent methods of resistance lately. As leader of the largest nonviolent anti-colonial mass movement for national independence in the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi’s life and philosophy offer a particularly rich archive to scholars seeking to understand both the nature of nonviolent mass resistance and the reasons for its success. The enduring relevance of Gandhian methods is evident in the inspiration they have provided over time to widely disparate anti-authoritarian democratic movements worldwide, from the civil rights movement in the United States to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa to numerous peace movements in different parts of the world. David Hardiman’s excellent book The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905–19 is the first volume in a two-volume historical study of nonviolent resistance movements led by Gandhi...

This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked a fundamental discursive rupture in the history of empire and paved the way for mass anticolonial movements under the leadership of Gandhi.

This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule, was given the title “Mahatma” (“Great Soul”) by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore for introducing the world to the power of nonviolent political resistance. The Gandhian movement was the first and most important mass movement for freedom in the twentieth century that was based entirely on the discourse and practice of nonviolent resistance. What sets Gandhi apart from the founders of major modern polities and gives his life and thought enduring relevance not only as an Indian but also as a world leader was his single‐minded commitment to nonviolence. His unique form of nonviolent politics, which sought to resist all forms of oppression while at the same time transcending the divisions, conflicts, and violence inherent in a politics of identity based on race, nation, and community, has provided inspiration to many antiauthoritarian movements all over the world.

Burton’s essay introduces the forum on Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire, setting out the terms of the debate and mapping the entanglements of an anti-exceptionalist argument with narratives of rise-and-fall that have predominated until recently in British imperial history.

Righteous Republic is centrally concerned with exploring the construction of the self in the works of five important thinkers of modern India—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ambedkar. The category “swaraj,” commonly translated as self-rule, came to be at the very heart of political discourse in modern India as the anticolonial movement against British rule developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Isolating the category of “swa” or “self” from that of “raj” or “rule,” Ananya Vajpeyi states that since the question of sovereignty or political “rule” had already been sufficiently explored in existing scholarship, she chose to focus on the question of the “self,” a much-neglected topic in the historiography of modern India. This book seeks to build on a relatively recent trend in the scholarship of modern India that has focused on the critical role played by Indian intellectual traditions and their categories in the works of important thinkers. Vajpeyi contends that the modern Indian “self” that came into being in the twentieth century was not simply derived from Western intellectual and cultural categories, as is commonly assumed, but rather emerged through a deep and critical engagement with premodern Sanskrit and other intellectual and aesthetic traditions, texts, categories, and monuments. Each of the five chapters is focused on one thinker, whose works are organized around a central category from the Sanskrit intellectual tradition: ahimsa (nonviolence) for Gandhi, viraha (longing) for Rabindranath Tagore, samvega (shock) for Abanindranath Tagore, dharma (norm) and artha (purpose) for Nehru, and duhkha (suffering) for Ambedkar. Vajpeyi contends that it was in and through their engagement with classical texts and traditions that these thinkers constructed “a solid plinth of moral selfhood and ethical sovereignty” that constitutes modern India's “distinct historical identity in the world” (p. 10).

In her response to Julian Go’s book Patterns of Empire, Mukherjee contends that the harder Go seeks to critique American exceptionalism, the more he has to insist on the liberal nature of the British Empire in India. By “liberal British rule,” Mukherjee writes, Go refers to certain imperial policies that seemed to offer the subject populations more representation, and therefore more participation in governance. He is not concerned with liberalism as a school of political philosophy. The notion of “liberal empire,” however, is untenable as a characterization of the British Empire in India, both discursively and historically. Even on the face of it, the notion of liberal empire is a contradiction in terms: the idea of liberty and the idea and institution of empire are mutually incompatible. After all, the very fact of empire as an exercise in political power over an alien population is predicated on the loss of political sovereignty of the subject population. Can an empire deprive a society and culture of its political sovereignty and independence and yet claim to be liberal?

The Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, summed up in October 1962 India’s approach to international affairs since its independence from British rule in 1947: ‘We were living in a world of illusion . . . we were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial world of our own creation. We have been shocked out of it.’ He spoke at the end of the Sino-Indian war, when, to his surprise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), after having rejected all of India’s overtures of friendship over the last fifteen years, had invaded Indian territory and routed the Indian Army. The central question that this article addresses is: what was this ‘world of illusion’, this ‘artificial world’ that Nehru was referring to? It contends that Nehru’s ‘illusory’ world was one grounded in the category of justice in opposition to the ‘real’ world of power politics. India’s foreign policy under Nehru, who was Foreign Minister as well as Prime Minister, was based on a juridical discursive framework that assumed that any dispute between two nations would be resolved by a neutral and impartial third party, the United Nations’ Security Council, thus conceptually excluding the possibility of war. This approach to foreign relations, shattered in the wake of the war with the PRC, was not grounded in the principle of Gandhian nonviolence. It was a legacy of empire. Contemporary Indian diplomats and politicians look back to the period after independence as a ‘golden age’ when India played a prominent role on the world stage, particularly at the United Nations, as the spokesman for non-violence and peace and as the leader of the non-aligned movement. Independent India made its first bid for leadership at the Asian Relations conference held in New Delhi in March 1947, followed, at Bandung in 1955, by working with President of EgyptGamelAbdul Nasser, President of Indonesia Sukarno, and Premier of China Chou En Lai to lay the foundations for African and Asian co-operation. In 1956, Nehru met with President of Yugoslavia Josip Tito and Nasser at Brione to plan the non-aligned movement formally launched at Belgrade in 1961. Paradoxically, despite India’s role at the United Nations in helping to arrange the armistice in Korea, chairing international commissions on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and promoting nuclear disarmament, the war with the PRC broke out within a year of the formal launching of the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement as the pivot of India’s foreign policy is attributed to the dynamism and brilliance of Nehru as a person whose commitment to both