The Influence of Liberalism in the Definition of the Idea of the Nation in India

This essay wants to show how educated Indians appropriated and reshaped the liberal ideology of their colonisers, the British, during the nineteenth century. Liberal ideas were adapted to a situation utterly different from the European one and creatively combined with indigenous ideas. This was part of a wider process of re-working European ideas in the light of Indian traditions in order to formulate an autonomous model of modernity. Against some current critiques of liberalism which see it as the ideological ‘cover’ for inequality and imperialism, this essay attempts to show that, in the colonial context, Indian liberalism offered a powerful critique of colonialism and emphasised collective identity and equality more than British liberalism did. The example of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, leader of the Indian National Congress, is dealt with to explain how certain Western ideas provided the foundation to elaborate an idea of the nation in the modern meaning of the term.