Protest without End

In the aftermath of crushed political revolution, forms of protest become curiously circular and conflicted. Drawing on literary and visual representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this essay analyzes new circuits of demands that break with the project of successful revolutionary ends and demonstrate an investment in the satisfying interminability of protest that cannot be suppressed or punished. It brings into view a range of protesting figures engaged in an ongoing alteration of the colonial relation to argue that the eccentric gaps between process and purpose are useful for thinking through the satisfactions of anticolonialism.

S/words versus S/words: A Bidirectional Reading of the Post/colonial Fictions

The article explicates the polemical schema of the novels produced by the British and the Indian writers apropos the historical event of the anticolonial rebellion/ revolution (1857). Grounded in the idea of creating a dialogue between the colonial and counter discursive texts, the research invokes Richard Lane’s bidirectional approach to explain how conflictual political visions trigger the skewed versions of the great defiance. The novelists of both nations have produced prolific fictional yields to represent the epic event. However, keeping in mind the scope of the study, the researchers have delimited their focus upon two of the representative novels, one for each nation: Louis Tracy’s The Red Year: A Story of the Indian Mutiny (1907) for the English version and Basavaraj Naikar’s The Sun behind the Cloud (2001) for the Indian one. Each of the novels voices the sloganized rhetoric of the respective nation while narrating the colossal clash, that is, Tracy portrays the mutiny as nefarious recalcitrance of the Indian rebels to disrupt the civilizational program and Naikar presents it as an auspicious act of defiance against the exploitative encroachment of the usurpers. A comparison has been drawn between the ideology-ridden discursive patterns of both the belligerent narratives and an intriguing concatenation of the diametric contrasts has been identified. The essential argument of the article is entrenched in the postcolonial and the new historicist notions vis-à-vis the chequered nature of the textual narratives and politicized parlance of the discursive records of the historical happenings.

Evangelicalism and empire: Rudyard Kipling on the Roman cult of Mithras and Christianization

Among the works of Rudyard Kipling, there are several short stories set in the Roman World that feature characters who are members of the cult of Mithras. These stories also involve Christian characters, but while the Mithraic initiates are loyal servants of the Roman Empire, the Christians create and attract disorder. The aim of this article is to explore why Kipling chose to make the heroic characters of these stories Mithraic initiates, and present the Christians in a less positive light. It will be argued that Kipling was attacking Christian evangelicals, who he disliked due to his experiences at the hands of one as a child, and also because of the difficult relationship between Christian missionaries and British imperial administrators, especially in the aftermath of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. In contrast, Kipling’s Mithras cult acknowledges that there are ‘many ways to the light’, and, moreover, by inferring that there are many similarities between the cult of Mithras and Christianity, Kipling hoped to urge evangelical Christians to moderate their behaviour and use his depiction of the Mithras cult as an example of how to better approach religious diversity within the Empire.

Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c.1900–1920

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlier The Indian War of Independence (1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment of The Indian War of Independence and situates it within the political and intellectual context of fin de siècle western India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

Postcolonial Proportionality

In Johar, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalized same-sex relations. The idea of transformative constitutionalism figured centrally, as did a piece of the global template of rights-protection—proportionality. In Johar, the Indian Constitution was envisioned as a transformative document, in two senses: anti-colonial and cosmopolitan. It gave birth to a radically new constitutional order that conferred citizenship and political power on the previously disenfranchised living under the yoke of British imperial rule. The Indian Constitution was also a cosmopolitan constitution in its fidelity to the universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. These two conceptions of transformative constitutionalism define the scope of admissible reasons for proportionality analysis. Section 377 of the Indian Penal was unconstitutional on the cosmopolitan ground that mere social morality was an insufficient reason to limit the right to engage in harmless, constitutionally protected activity, the basis on which courts around the world have struck down parallel provisions. I argue that Section 377 was also unconstitutional for the anti-colonial reason that it was an element of the Imperial constitutional order in British India in the period after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 of indirect colonial rule.