REVIEW: India in The Shadows of Empire

REVIEW
India in The Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History (1774-1950)
Mithi Mukherjee
OUP
Rs. 750
Pp 316
ISBN: 0198062508
Hardcover

Blurb
"The pioneering research offers a sweeping new interpretation of the complex and seemingly contradictory nature of Indian democracy and polity. In contrast to much of existing scholarship, it joins the colonial and postcolonial periods in Indian history into a seamless narrative.

The book explains the postcolonial Indian polity by presenting an alternative historical narrative of the British Empire in India and India's struggle for independence. It pursues this narrative along two major trajectories.

On the one hand, it focuses on the role of imperial judicial institutions and practices in the making of both the British Empire an the Anti-Colonial Movement under the Congress, with the lawyer as political leader. On the other hand, it offers a novel interpretation of Gandhi's Non-Violent Resistance Movement as being different from the Congress. It shows that the Gandhian Movement, as the most powerful force largely responsible for India's independence, was anchored not in western discourses of political and legislative freedom but rather in Indic Traditions of renunciative freedom, with the renouncer as leader.

This volume offers a comprehensive new reinterpretation of the Indian Constitution in the light of this historical narrative. The book contends that the British Colonial idea of justice and the Gandhian ethos of resistance have been the two competing and conflicting driving forces the have determined the nature and evolution of the Indian polity after independence.

Ambitious, original, and thought-provoking, this book will be indispensable for students and scholars of Indian history, the British Empire, legal-constitutional history, political science and sociology. It will also interest anybody seeking a broad understanding of the mainsprings of modern Indian history and politics."

Review
Revenue wrongs Hindu
At around the same time as the conflict between the British Parliament and American colonies was heating up, another affair in another corner of the world was beginning to occupy the attention of the English people, writes Mithi Mukherjee in the opening chapter of ‘India in the Shadows of Empire: A legal and political history 1774-1950’ (www.oup.com). “This involved the increasing financial and political influence in Parliament of the East India Company, a mercantile body that, on the basis of its trade monopoly in the East, derived from a charter from the British Parliament, had amassed enormous fortunes from India…”

Registered with the London Stock Exchange, this trading company that had also become the government in India was effectively directed by a group of jobbers and brokers, who for all practical purposes had become legislators for India, determining policies for the Company’s government on behalf of the shareholders of the company, the author narrates.