ABSTRACT
Ideologies of the British Raj in India, as Thomas Metcalf has shown, sustained tensions between the universal claims of political liberalism and essentialist notions of societal difference.1 On the one hand, late Victorian scholar administrators such as Henry Maine envisioned India’s gradual entry into a universal history of civilization and progress. Commitments to the rule of law, free trade, individual rights and private property rights were gateways into that history. On the other hand, the salience of caste hierarchies, the “village community,” despotism and religion impeded Indian progress. Such features not only distinguished Indian from European society, but also distinguished British from princely-ruled India. The British, therefore, legitimated their rule, according to Metcalf, by playing two roles. They were “at once agents of ‘progress,’ charged with setting India on the road to modernity, and at the same time custodians of an enduring India formed forever in antiquity.”2
