ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with recent political theorists and intellectual historians with specific interest in India who have rethought epistemic frameworks and questioned the processes by which conceptual vocabularies (and political idioms) are created and employed. It examines scholars’ disagreements about the proper definition and analysis of the ‘political’ ideas and ideals of modern India, and the role of liberalism in India’s history. It suggests that the significance of liberalism in India and Indian politics has been widely misunderstood, simultaneously underestimated and overestimated, and attempts to sketch contours of an approach for de-alienating the study of liberalism in India’s history. The essay considers failed Indian liberals such as Bipin Chandra Pal and Motilal Nehru, compares Indian and Western forms of political association c. 1880–1930 and shows how liberal sociability developed along similar lines during the period in India and the liberal ‘homelands’.
