India in the Shadows of Empire

This book explores the concepts of justice as equity and of the imperial monarch as the arbiter of justice and their implications for the colonial state, anti-colonial politics, and the construction of the postcolonial Indian polity. This book is an exploration into the historical process through which justice as equity, rather than freedom, not only provided an ideological framework for the British Empire in India, but also became the ground for anti-colonial representational politics under the Indian National Congress. Ultimately justice as equity became incorporated as the sovereign category in the Constitution of independent India. The book focuses on a largely neglected area of research in modern Indian history-the role of judicial institutions and juridical categories in the formation of both the British Empire and of the movement against colonial rule. It studies the British engagement in India for over two centuries through an analysis of two competing yet collaborative discourses, that of the 'colonial' and the 'imperial' and the forces that they were driven by. The author contends that the discourse of justice as equity helped launch the Congress politics of anti-colonialism, but also emerged as its ultimate limit, in that it was unable to envision complete national independence outside the empire or to articulate a discourse of freedom. The Gandhian demand for complete independence and mode of resistance through mass movements represented a political breakthrough. However, after independence the Congress, perceiving that the legacy of democratic mass movements could challenge and even threaten the dominance of the imperial legacy embodied in itself, immediately restored its original discourse of imperial justice. It is in the light of this imperial legacy, the author argues that one can understand why the discourse of justice as equity has determined the political formation in post-independence India.