• The Birth of Indian Liberalism
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The Birth of Indian Liberalism

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The first work of political theory published in modern India, Letters to an Indian Raja (1891) counseled Maharajas to foster liberal values and adopt constitutional government, as this would make I...
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  • 14 July 2026
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The first work of political theory published in modern India, Letters to an Indian Raja (1891) counseled Maharajas to foster liberal values and adopt constitutional government. Such reform would, it argued, make Indians freer and happier than they were under colonial rule, and thus allow the Native States to genuinely challenge the British. Accompanied by an extensive introductory essay by Rahul Sagar, a leading scholar of nineteenth century India, this carefully restored edition challenges the notion that Indian liberals merely borrowed their ideas from Britain and were eager to collaborate with the British Raj. On the contrary, it shows that India’s pioneering liberals sought to make the Native States less vulnerable to both domineering Britons and despotic Maharajas.
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Price: £85.00
Pages: 328
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 14 July 2026
ISBN: 9781526190758
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

HISTORY / Asia / India & South Asia, Diaries, letters and journals, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Political science and theory
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‘Parmanand’s Letters, introduced with characteristic erudition by Rahul Sagar, open a fascinating new vista onto the vigour and creativity of modern Indian liberalism.’
– Cécile Laborde, University of Oxford

‘Rahul Sagar's The Birth of Indian Liberalism is a remarkable achievement. It recovers from near total oblivion a strikingly impressive life and a lengthy episode in the penetration of the idea of personal freedom into the often recalcitrant texture of the large proportion of the Indian subcontinent and its population which the British state chose not to govern directly. In doing so it restores agency and cognitive autonomy to a group of thinkers and political actors who have been scorned or forgotten but who identified the depth of the multicultural challenge to liberal aspirations and conceptions a century before they began to register in Canada or Britain and found their own way of confronting it. That challenge is as sharp and disconcerting in the Republics of India or Pakistan today as it was in the days of Sagar's hero.’
– John Dunn, University of Cambridge

‘In his edition of the first work of political theory published in India in the English language, Rahul Sagar revolutionises the history of South Asia’s political thinking. Just like liberals everywhere, liberals in India sought individual liberty; but Sagar shows that in India they did so against the community, allying with progressive monarchs with Indian states to do so. In restoring this forgotten argument, Sagar’s work transforms the categories of Indian political history and will inaugurate a rich historiography that pays attention to the multiple sites available to nineteenth-century Indians for reimagining domination and freedom.’
– Jon Wilson, Nanyang Technological University

Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at NYU Abu Dhabi

Introduction: The birth of Indian liberalism

A note on the text

Letters to an Indian Raja

Appendices
I. English and Native Rule in India (1868)
II. Introduction to the first edition (1891)
III. Preface to the second edition (1919)
IV. Obituary in the Indian Spectator (1893)

Index