Evolutionary Theory and Victorian Culture

Fahey, David M.; Fichman, Martin

doi:10.2307/1555611

Cited by 2 publications

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“…1. For treatments of social Darwinism more generally, see Burrow 1966;Crook 2007;Dickens 2000;Sober 1984;Rogers 1972;Fichman 2002;Bowler 1983. 8 For a specifically eugenist argument, see Bengalee 1907b.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Marwah¹

2023

Perspect. polit.

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This article examines how Indian anticolonialists drew on Darwinism and evolutionary theory to resist British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from The Bengalee (and beyond), I show how Indian nationalists marshaled evolutionist schemas to contest stage-based accounts of social advancement rationalizing despotic rule in India. I argue that Darwinian evolutionism enabled anticolonialists to respond to a particular decolonial dilemma—that of developmentalism, the unilinear notion of historical time justifying India’s political subjection. While Darwinism’s social application is commonly understood to sustain imperialism, I demonstrate that it served, in the colonial context, to deconstruct historicist tropes portraying India as politically immature. Drawing on evolutionism, nationalists contested the presumptions of imperialist discourse and reconceptualized progress in novel, anticolonial terms. Darwin’s travel to India thus exposes a distinctive decolonial quandary, the syncretic Indian anticolonial response to it, and the intractability of the contradictions facing decolonizing movements globally.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Marwah¹

2023

Perspect. polit.

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“…A richer scholarship in the history of biology tracks Darwinism's social and political lives. For just a few in an expansive literature, see Bowler (1983;, Burrow (1966), Crook (2007), Dickens (2000), Fichman (2002), Kohn (1985), Rogers (1972), andSober (1984).…”

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confidence: 99%

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

Marwah

2023

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Darwinism and evolutionary theory have a bad track record in political theory, given their entanglements with fin-de-siècle militarist imperialisms, racialized hierarchies, and eugenic reformism. In colonial contexts, however, Darwinism had an entirely different afterlife as anticolonialists marshaled evolutionist frameworks to contest the parameters of colonial rule. This article exhumes just such an evolutionary anticolonialism in the political thought of Aurobindo Ghose, radical firebrand of the early Indian independence movement. I argue that Ghose drew on a nuanced reform Darwinism to criticize British imperialism and advance an alternative grounded in the Indian polity’s mutualism. Evolutionism formed a conceptual ecosystem framing his understanding of progress—national, civilizational, and spiritual—and reformulating the temporal and conceptual coordinates of the liberal empire he resisted. The article thus exposes the constructiveness of anticolonial politics, the hybridity of South Asian intellectual history, and the surprising critical potential of Darwinism in colonial settings.

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Evolutionary Theory and Victorian Culture

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

The View from the Future: Aurobindo Ghose’s Anticolonial Darwinism

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