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To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics
To Raise a Fallen People brings to light pioneering writing on international politics from nineteenth-century India. Drawing on extensive archival research, it unearths essays, speeches, and pamphlets that address fundamental questions about India’s place in the world.
In these texts, prominent public figures urge their compatriots to learn English and travel abroad to study, debate whether to boycott foreign goods, differ over British imperialism in Afghanistan and China, demand that foreign policy toward the Middle East and South Africa account for religious and ethnic bonds, and query whether to adopt Western values or champion their own civilizational ethos.
Rahul Sagar’s detailed introduction contextualizes these documents and shows how they fostered competing visions of the role that India ought to play on the world stage. This landmark book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the sources of Indian conduct in international politics.
In these texts, prominent public figures urge their compatriots to learn English and travel abroad to study, debate whether to boycott foreign goods, differ over British imperialism in Afghanistan and China, demand that foreign policy toward the Middle East and South Africa account for religious and ethnic bonds, and query whether to adopt Western values or champion their own civilizational ethos.
Rahul Sagar’s detailed introduction contextualizes these documents and shows how they fostered competing visions of the role that India ought to play on the world stage. This landmark book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the sources of Indian conduct in international politics.
312 pages, Paperback
Published July 5, 2022
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About the author
Rahul Sagar
8 books8 followersRAHUL SAGAR is Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of Secrets and Leaks, published by Princeton University Press.
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November 7, 2023
What is the first thing that comes to one’s mind when one thinks of Indian foreign policy? Chances are one’s train of thought will likely start with Nehru’s policy of non-alignment, and after several winding detours, shudder to a halt close to the current moment. Or, and this is equally likely, the question might trigger a trip down memory lane, all the way to Kautilya’s Arthashastra. But what happened in the centuries preceding independence? And how does one reconcile the ruthlessness of the Mauryan worldview with the pragmatism of non-alignment and strategic autonomy?
It is this question that academic Rahul Sagar chooses to tackle in To Raise A Fallen People, and this interesting premise is what led me to pick this book. Sagar’s central conjecture is this: that when you ask why a particular contemporary foreign policy decision was thought to be a good idea, ‘the trail of answers is likely to lead to an idea originating in 19th century India’.
However, it’s not an easy trail to follow. With official records on ‘grand strategy’ out of bounds on account of them being classified, Sagar had to trawl through periodicals of 19th century India, a task made all the more difficult by ‘wide dispersal of these periodicals’.
Moreover, the nineteenth century was a momentous time. It was the ‘Age of the Page’ when far-flung people began to see themselves as part of one political entity, sparking ‘broader national conversations on international politics’. As a result, Sagar had to pore through hundreds of articles to draw out the key debates that animated the discourse then.
The result of his painstaking efforts is a remarkable anthology that unearths a varied array of articles written by personages as distinguished as Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi as well as by the likes of Pandita Ramabai and Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar who ought to be more well-known.
These essays are divided into thematic sections that shed new light on Indians’ engagement with burning issues of the time such as English education, the Great Game, the Eastern Question, free trade, crossing the seas, opium trade and the abysmal treatment of indentured workers.
These deliberations and polemics reveal that far from being passive colonial subjects, Indians were active participants who held strong views on what they thought best suited the interests of a nation-in-the-making. In fact, it is one such essay (1846) that gives the anthology its title, with the writer T Madhava Rao advocating English education as necessary ‘to raise a fallen people high in the scale of nations’.
What consistently shines through these essays is the pragmatism of India’s metropolitan elite, whether it is regarding English education, crossing the seas or the desirability of opium trade. They also reveal that Indian commentators didn’t shy away from taking strong positions on geopolitical questions. For instance, when Russians captured the Afghan town of Pandjeh in 1885, a pamphlet titled ‘Why Do Indians Prefer British Rule Over Russian Rule’ was circulated in Presidency towns by prominent associations.
Equally remarkable was how emotive the Eastern Question and the endangered position of the Caliph was for sections of Indian Muslims, decades before the Khilafat movement. Sagar writes that mosques in India ‘publicly cursed’ Russia after the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877.
The last section of the book is devoted to the central faultline that divided India’s intellectual elite in this period: whether India should endeavour to learn from the West, or whether it is the West that should imbibe Indian values. While thinkers in the early to mid 19th century were enamoured by the many-splendored gifts of English education and civilization, the Opium War marked the beginning of their disillusionment. The callous treatment meted out by the British to the Chinese changed Indians’ disposition towards their purported benevolence. “Self-interest is all in all to you, and to secure it you would do anything,” wrote Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkhadkar bitterly.
However, by the 1870s a chasm between the educated and the uneducated emerged. As Chandarnath Basu put it, English education had produced ‘a schism in Hindu society, a schism in the Hindu family, a schism in the Hindu heart’, and we saw thinkers over next two decades expressing scepticism regarding the capability of English rule to radically change deep-rooted Hindu mores.
It was only towards the end of the 19th century that revivalists used the work of Orientalists to ‘balm their compatriots' wounded pride’ over the material superiority of Europe. Theosophists like Annie Besant proclaimed that India’s mission in the world was to become ‘the teacher of the world in spiritual truth'. Keshub Chandra Sen, the Brahmo leader, advocated ‘Unity in Variety’ as the answer to world peace, holding that what Asia had done ‘intuitively’, Europe would have to do ‘reflexively’. The German scholar Max Mueller's essay 'India - What Can It Teach Us?' held that India was unparalleled in its study of the 'inward and intellectual world', thus cementing its spiritual preeminence.
This sense of cultural nationalism was later given coherent shape by Gandhi who projected non-violence as a core civilizational value of India, and by Nehru and Tagore who heralded peaceful coexistence as the foundation of a harmonious world order, thus constituting the recognizable roots of present-day Indian exceptionalism.
In its central conjecture of tracing current attitudes to the 19th century, Sagar does a fantastic job. He traces the impulse of protectionism to its traumatic experience with one-sided British trade policies that led them to think of international trade as ‘predatory’. Similarly, the encounter with entrenched racist policies in countries like South Africa was a precursor to the energetic leadership India later provided to ‘antiracism movements across the colonial world’.
Many distinguished scholars and policymakers have held that India lacks a ‘strategic culture’ and history of thinking systematically about the world. Sagar’s formidable scholarship, to some extent, puts paid to such notions by revealing the varied ways in which Indians critically engaged with the world. In his comprehensive introductory essay to the book, Sagar neatly ties together all the threads and presents a compelling overview of his thesis.
The author’s writing style is detached and scholarly, but endowed with a clarity that makes it accessible to a lay audience. However, considering that the author’s introduction only comprises one-fourth of the book, a comment on the writing quality of the constituent essays is also merited. On this front, the book does remarkably well. The ease and felicity with language displayed by the original writers is enviable. In fact, the eloquence of T Madhava Rao’s essay on “Native Education” (1846) caused such a sensation in its times that the school was forced to issue a clarification regarding its genuineness by submitting that it had indeed been written by a “Native youth”. The striking cover featuring Raja Ravi Varma’s Visnu’s Varaha avatar holding up Bhudevi only makes the volume more attractive to potential readers.
However, its aesthetic qualities aside, this book is also groundbreaking in that it delves into the recesses of Indian discourse in the 19th century and mines out relevant material on the ‘domestic sources of international conduct’. It astounds one to think that this topic has been untouched by Indian academia so far. This only highlights the importance of digitizing archives and the potential of mining them with the aid of machine learning. The emerging field of digital humanities is well-placed to tackle this challenge.
Another element that enlivens the book is its consistency in throwing up surprising facts and perspectives. For instance, one discovers that the post of Protector of Emigrants in the Ministry of External Affairs has its roots in the indenture system. One discovers that the superiority of England was often explained by religious factors, with authors like Nagendra Nath Ghose arguing that Christianity gave its adherents a sense of duty that was wholly absent in India.
However, like most books, this one too has its share of drawbacks. While the introductory essay serves as a great backgrounder, additional commentary in each section with context on the life and times of the authors would have enriched the book. In the absence of such commentary, the latter half of the book can be a dry read for non-academics. Also, while Sagar sets out to explain India’s ambivalence regarding pursuing great power ambitions, he doesn’t wholly succeed in connecting the dots to the present moment.
Perhaps, it would be an overstretch to claim that all contemporary foreign policy postures can have a logical precedent or explanation in the past. As the world and India have evolved beyond recognition in the past century, so have India’s positions, whether it be its embrace of liberalization or its adoption of nuclear weapons.
However, these quibbles aside, To Raise A Fallen People is a worthwhile read for academics, diplomats, and any layperson interested in either history or foreign policy. It’s a revealing window into the past, and one eagerly awaits Sagar’s next volume on foreign policy thinking in the first half of the twentieth century that’s currently in the works.
It is this question that academic Rahul Sagar chooses to tackle in To Raise A Fallen People, and this interesting premise is what led me to pick this book. Sagar’s central conjecture is this: that when you ask why a particular contemporary foreign policy decision was thought to be a good idea, ‘the trail of answers is likely to lead to an idea originating in 19th century India’.
However, it’s not an easy trail to follow. With official records on ‘grand strategy’ out of bounds on account of them being classified, Sagar had to trawl through periodicals of 19th century India, a task made all the more difficult by ‘wide dispersal of these periodicals’.
Moreover, the nineteenth century was a momentous time. It was the ‘Age of the Page’ when far-flung people began to see themselves as part of one political entity, sparking ‘broader national conversations on international politics’. As a result, Sagar had to pore through hundreds of articles to draw out the key debates that animated the discourse then.
The result of his painstaking efforts is a remarkable anthology that unearths a varied array of articles written by personages as distinguished as Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi as well as by the likes of Pandita Ramabai and Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar who ought to be more well-known.
These essays are divided into thematic sections that shed new light on Indians’ engagement with burning issues of the time such as English education, the Great Game, the Eastern Question, free trade, crossing the seas, opium trade and the abysmal treatment of indentured workers.
These deliberations and polemics reveal that far from being passive colonial subjects, Indians were active participants who held strong views on what they thought best suited the interests of a nation-in-the-making. In fact, it is one such essay (1846) that gives the anthology its title, with the writer T Madhava Rao advocating English education as necessary ‘to raise a fallen people high in the scale of nations’.
What consistently shines through these essays is the pragmatism of India’s metropolitan elite, whether it is regarding English education, crossing the seas or the desirability of opium trade. They also reveal that Indian commentators didn’t shy away from taking strong positions on geopolitical questions. For instance, when Russians captured the Afghan town of Pandjeh in 1885, a pamphlet titled ‘Why Do Indians Prefer British Rule Over Russian Rule’ was circulated in Presidency towns by prominent associations.
Equally remarkable was how emotive the Eastern Question and the endangered position of the Caliph was for sections of Indian Muslims, decades before the Khilafat movement. Sagar writes that mosques in India ‘publicly cursed’ Russia after the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877.
The last section of the book is devoted to the central faultline that divided India’s intellectual elite in this period: whether India should endeavour to learn from the West, or whether it is the West that should imbibe Indian values. While thinkers in the early to mid 19th century were enamoured by the many-splendored gifts of English education and civilization, the Opium War marked the beginning of their disillusionment. The callous treatment meted out by the British to the Chinese changed Indians’ disposition towards their purported benevolence. “Self-interest is all in all to you, and to secure it you would do anything,” wrote Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkhadkar bitterly.
However, by the 1870s a chasm between the educated and the uneducated emerged. As Chandarnath Basu put it, English education had produced ‘a schism in Hindu society, a schism in the Hindu family, a schism in the Hindu heart’, and we saw thinkers over next two decades expressing scepticism regarding the capability of English rule to radically change deep-rooted Hindu mores.
It was only towards the end of the 19th century that revivalists used the work of Orientalists to ‘balm their compatriots' wounded pride’ over the material superiority of Europe. Theosophists like Annie Besant proclaimed that India’s mission in the world was to become ‘the teacher of the world in spiritual truth'. Keshub Chandra Sen, the Brahmo leader, advocated ‘Unity in Variety’ as the answer to world peace, holding that what Asia had done ‘intuitively’, Europe would have to do ‘reflexively’. The German scholar Max Mueller's essay 'India - What Can It Teach Us?' held that India was unparalleled in its study of the 'inward and intellectual world', thus cementing its spiritual preeminence.
This sense of cultural nationalism was later given coherent shape by Gandhi who projected non-violence as a core civilizational value of India, and by Nehru and Tagore who heralded peaceful coexistence as the foundation of a harmonious world order, thus constituting the recognizable roots of present-day Indian exceptionalism.
In its central conjecture of tracing current attitudes to the 19th century, Sagar does a fantastic job. He traces the impulse of protectionism to its traumatic experience with one-sided British trade policies that led them to think of international trade as ‘predatory’. Similarly, the encounter with entrenched racist policies in countries like South Africa was a precursor to the energetic leadership India later provided to ‘antiracism movements across the colonial world’.
Many distinguished scholars and policymakers have held that India lacks a ‘strategic culture’ and history of thinking systematically about the world. Sagar’s formidable scholarship, to some extent, puts paid to such notions by revealing the varied ways in which Indians critically engaged with the world. In his comprehensive introductory essay to the book, Sagar neatly ties together all the threads and presents a compelling overview of his thesis.
The author’s writing style is detached and scholarly, but endowed with a clarity that makes it accessible to a lay audience. However, considering that the author’s introduction only comprises one-fourth of the book, a comment on the writing quality of the constituent essays is also merited. On this front, the book does remarkably well. The ease and felicity with language displayed by the original writers is enviable. In fact, the eloquence of T Madhava Rao’s essay on “Native Education” (1846) caused such a sensation in its times that the school was forced to issue a clarification regarding its genuineness by submitting that it had indeed been written by a “Native youth”. The striking cover featuring Raja Ravi Varma’s Visnu’s Varaha avatar holding up Bhudevi only makes the volume more attractive to potential readers.
However, its aesthetic qualities aside, this book is also groundbreaking in that it delves into the recesses of Indian discourse in the 19th century and mines out relevant material on the ‘domestic sources of international conduct’. It astounds one to think that this topic has been untouched by Indian academia so far. This only highlights the importance of digitizing archives and the potential of mining them with the aid of machine learning. The emerging field of digital humanities is well-placed to tackle this challenge.
Another element that enlivens the book is its consistency in throwing up surprising facts and perspectives. For instance, one discovers that the post of Protector of Emigrants in the Ministry of External Affairs has its roots in the indenture system. One discovers that the superiority of England was often explained by religious factors, with authors like Nagendra Nath Ghose arguing that Christianity gave its adherents a sense of duty that was wholly absent in India.
However, like most books, this one too has its share of drawbacks. While the introductory essay serves as a great backgrounder, additional commentary in each section with context on the life and times of the authors would have enriched the book. In the absence of such commentary, the latter half of the book can be a dry read for non-academics. Also, while Sagar sets out to explain India’s ambivalence regarding pursuing great power ambitions, he doesn’t wholly succeed in connecting the dots to the present moment.
Perhaps, it would be an overstretch to claim that all contemporary foreign policy postures can have a logical precedent or explanation in the past. As the world and India have evolved beyond recognition in the past century, so have India’s positions, whether it be its embrace of liberalization or its adoption of nuclear weapons.
However, these quibbles aside, To Raise A Fallen People is a worthwhile read for academics, diplomats, and any layperson interested in either history or foreign policy. It’s a revealing window into the past, and one eagerly awaits Sagar’s next volume on foreign policy thinking in the first half of the twentieth century that’s currently in the works.
July 4, 2022
A fascinating collection of essays by Indians at the turn of the 20th century when still under the evil British yoke but still the will and gusto to see themselves as the saviour of the world.
August 29, 2024
Professor Sagar has gathered together several Indian writings on national and international affairs from the late 19th century and he has chosen to frame the book as "Indians were not morons and had thoughts about the rest of the world in the 19th century that can tell us about Indian foreign policy today", but this editorial frame adds nothing to the book. The book is good because the selections are interesting and worth reading, not because it sheds any light on current Indian foreign policy.
One sees what various Indian thinkers thought about their own position in the world in the late 19th century, when the mutiny had been crushed and British rule in India had stabilized and seemed almost permanent. The writers range from famous authors and politicians such as Bankim Chatterjee, Mohandas Gandhi, Annie Besant and Salar Jung, but the one i found most interesting was a letter from Anandibai Joshi (first Indian woman to go to the USA for medical studies) explaining her decision to go to America. The "prohibition" against foreign travel is discussed (and vehemently rejected). The wonders of Great Britain are described, but so are her crimes. There are interesting pieces from some Muslim thinkers, all of whom regard the Hindu majority as basically irrelevant and are focused on the "clash" they think is going on between islamdom and Western powers (with complaints against Russians as oppressors of Ottoman Turkey and invaders of central Asia, but also against the British for raking up Armenian massacres; Muslim writers feel the British empire is also a Muslim empire (since more Muslims were subjects of Victoria than of any Muslim sovereign) and wish Britain would heed their concerns about the caliphate, etc). In short, a great window into late 19th century colonial India and its intellectuals. Ignore the foreign policy hook that the author has used to set up the book and just enjoy the excerpts.
One sees what various Indian thinkers thought about their own position in the world in the late 19th century, when the mutiny had been crushed and British rule in India had stabilized and seemed almost permanent. The writers range from famous authors and politicians such as Bankim Chatterjee, Mohandas Gandhi, Annie Besant and Salar Jung, but the one i found most interesting was a letter from Anandibai Joshi (first Indian woman to go to the USA for medical studies) explaining her decision to go to America. The "prohibition" against foreign travel is discussed (and vehemently rejected). The wonders of Great Britain are described, but so are her crimes. There are interesting pieces from some Muslim thinkers, all of whom regard the Hindu majority as basically irrelevant and are focused on the "clash" they think is going on between islamdom and Western powers (with complaints against Russians as oppressors of Ottoman Turkey and invaders of central Asia, but also against the British for raking up Armenian massacres; Muslim writers feel the British empire is also a Muslim empire (since more Muslims were subjects of Victoria than of any Muslim sovereign) and wish Britain would heed their concerns about the caliphate, etc). In short, a great window into late 19th century colonial India and its intellectuals. Ignore the foreign policy hook that the author has used to set up the book and just enjoy the excerpts.
May 22, 2022
Wish the selection of issues covered was a little broader. This felt limited. But a very interesting read nonetheless.
May 11, 2023
It is a fascinating collection of short writings and essays form Indians in the nineteenth century who all discuss the connection between India and its position in the world. All with various notions and ideas, this book offers a fascinating selection. I would have easily given it 5 stars, but the introduction lacks a certain rigid methodology or explanation on the specifics of these essays, how they were selected, and why the author decided so in this way. This is a bit regretful, given that there are bound to be more essays, but the exact reasons or methodology behind the selection of these essays is not entirely clear, which is a pity.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews