This volume addresses the power of ideas in the making of Indian political modernity. As an intermediate history of connections between South Asia and the global arena the volume raises new issues in intellectual history. It reviews the period from the emergence of constitutional liberalism in the1830s through the swadeshi era to the writings of Tilak Azad and Gandhi in the twentieth century. While several contributions reflect on the ideologies of nationalism the volume seeks to rescue intellectual history from being simply a narration of the nation-state. It does not seek to create a 'canon' of political thought so much as to show how Indian concepts of state and society were redrawn in the context of emergent globalized debates about freedom the constitution of the self and the good society in the late colonial era. In so doing the contributions here resituate an Indian intellectual history that has long been eclipsed by social and political history. These essays were originally published in a Special issue of the journal Modern Intellectual History (CUP April 2007).

Preface and Acknowledgements; Articles; Anxieties of Distance: Codification in Early Colonial Bengal; Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in Inia 1800-30; Contesting Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas; Apologetic Modernity; Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: “Germanism” in Colonial Bengal; Striking a Just Balance: Maulana Azad as a Theorist of Transnational Jihad; Self Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism 1890-1920; The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity: A Meditation on Aurobindo’s Thought; Geographies of Subjectivity Pan-Islam and Muslim Separatism: Muhammad Iqbal and Selfhood; Afterword; List of Contributors