Debates on citizenship in colonial South Asia and global political thought (c.1880–1950)

In colonial India, liberal ideas featured prominently in the language and discourses of both the coloniser and the colonised. Despite providing imperialism with a moral justification, liberalism became significant in Indian discourses of political and civil rights given its abstract universal terminology. This chapter examines some of the liberal-underpinned debates on national visions and citizenship that animated the period under analysis and that remain meaningful today. Although such debates are better appreciated if they are inserted into a wider transnational frame, they also contribute to our understanding of Indian democracy and political trajectories as shaped by various, and often divergent, bodies of knowledge.