What would an 'Intellectual history for India' involve? The answer is that it would trace the evolution of concepts- Begriffsgeschichte- in Religion, Law, Administration, Technology and Economic arrangements. This in turn would explain historical developments and help identify both mimetic effects as well as the trajectory of resistance to them across a particular terrain. In the case of India, this type of 'conceptual history' would clarify changes within endogamous jatis/biradaris and in the relative status and geographical dispersal or shrinkage of those jatis across the sub-continent. It would relate to new religious, commercial and political constellations or coalitions and their respective waxing and waning. In other words, it is pretty much what our Acharyas do in our vernacular languages. Perhaps this is clearer among the Jains who, in keeping with their tradition, trace the evolution of particular practices and institutions from the golden age down to that of Einstein and IBM. However, many Hindu sects have something similar. At least, that was the case back in my grand-parents day when our Shankaracharya instructed ordinary people in the vernacular in such matters. There would be little point in doing so now. The average Tamil is far better informed and so religious leaders concentrate on expounding their own specialist knowledge.
Sadly, C.U.P's 'Intellectual history for India' offers no exposition of any knowledge whatsoever. Why? The people who contributed to it are not intellectuals. They are stupid pedants variegating their own pathetic regurgitations for a careerist purpose. Since they are writing about India, Cambridge University Press doesn't give a shit if the book they have published isn't simply the warmed up sick of cretins like Ayesha Jalal, Facile Devji, Sugata Bose and of course, Captain Cretin, Shruti Kapila herself who writes in the introduction-
Since Kapila is serving up warmed up vomit, she is obliged to argue that 'intellectual history' is distinct from the sort of historiography her authors had previously vomited. Why? It has been warmed up. This warming up has liberated that vomit from 'modularity' and 'presentism' and 'instrumentalism'. It is now super-special vomit because....urm....well, she says so and...urm...why would she lie?
Sadly, the only reason she is lying (apart from the crass material reason that she and her fellow authors want to get paid for recycling their warmed up sick) is because she does not get that Koselleck was colossal kretin. His 4 theses were ignorant shite.
Liberalism was about curbing the power of the King and the Archbishop so laissez faire might prevail. It wasn't about 'absence of coercion'. There was a Night-watchman State which did nothing save coerce the robbers or invaders into not robbing or invading. All this was known in 1820 and 1830 and every decade going forward. Isaiah Berlin may have written a silly essay about 'negative liberty' but only because the guy was ignorant of Hohfeldian incidents which are positive, not negative at all. Bayly, poor chap, realized that the vast numbers of Pakis milling around in the inner Cities would, sooner or later, want one or two of their more idiotic kids to get worthless degrees at Cambridge. Thus his job was to pat them on the head and make out that some darky from a previous century had been a little less cretinous than the rest of their ancestors. Sadly, this meant that some stupid Whites- like Sartori- would learn a bit of Bengali or other such jibber jabber and write shite about the ambiguity of the empirico-historical genesis of the self-constituting 'culture' of those monkeys. Since Aurobindo had written a silly article pretending the Indians were the 'Greeks' who would civilize the 'Roman' Brits, and since as Victor Hugo said 'India went and turned out to be Germany', Sartori's screed writes itself. Except it doesn't because Sartori has shit for brains. As for Kapila's essay on Spencer- it is utterly mad. The guy was known to be against higher taxes and more regulation. He was a fucking Reaganite avant la lettre. Kipling has a poem about how any Government intervention in the labor market to provide unemployment insurance or to limit hours of work was nothing but Teutonic serfdom. On the other hand, Spencer had no problem with the type of Colonialism he saw in Canada or Australia. Kill the natives- that's survival of the fittest- and populate their land. If you can't do that, then let your people carve out their own kingdoms among the Blacks and Asiatics. Don't have an Imperial Army because it might return to English shores and subjugate the native population. Chesterton's 'The Flying Inn' is an extended nightmare of that sort. The fucking Methodists and Welsh Prohibitionists bring in Muslim troops to suppress the grand old English pub. Fuck you Imperialism! Fuck you very much!
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