“The Present Misery of the Hindoo”: Indian Empire in the Thought of Bourgeois Radicals from Diderot to Marx

In South Asian history writing, the collapse of Marxism was signalled by the seemingly irrefutable claim that Marx was, if not an orientalist, a Eurocentric thinker. With this, Enlightenment radicalism too suffered the same fate and, while there has been an attempt in recent years to write the history of Indian liberalism, the very enterprise stripped Indian liberalism of its own self-professed internationalism When postcolonialists made their charge of Eurocentrism Enlightenment radicals’ and Marx’s defenders shared enough of their critics’ assumptions that ultimately the charge stuck. Now historians have jettisoned much of the area-division of their subject that prevailed in the 1980s (under the influence, in part, of neo-nationalist left intellectual currents). They have done so in favor of a new global history, but the question that haunts this study, most acutely with reference to South Asia, is how does this project relate to the older liberal and Marxist project of world history? How does nationalism inform, even determine, the character of the new global history? This paper seeks to illuminate these questions in a modest way, by undertaking to recover Marx’s controversial writings on India, interpreting them against the background of nearly a century-long liberal tradition of opposition to the East India Company. This paper will take up the category of “imperialism” to ask some uncomfortable questions about it, such as, How stable of a category is it even within the so-called “British” period of South Asian history? What were the critical aspirations of the anti-imperialism of the liberals and of Marx and how do they differ from, and how obscured, the anti-imperialism of later periods? What, if anything, remains of them today?