TRANSLATED LIBERTIES: KARSANDAS MULJI'STRAVELS IN ENGLANDAND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE VICTORIAN SELF

Abstract

Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of anthropology in post-1850s India, when an amateur form of social science persisted alongside the emergence of the ethnographic state. As an amateur ethnologist, Mulji drew freely on source material from Henry Mayhew to Samuel Smiles to present England as a moral template for India. His turn to self-help or self-improvement literature, moreover, suggests the global scope of a mid-Victorian ethical culture that set the stage for the ethical concerns of anticolonial thinkers like M. K. Gandhi.

Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68

“…His work demonstrates that Bombay's Gujarati-speaking elites had acquired an assortment of technical skills that were integral features of nineteenth-century anthropological and philological research. They partly derived these methodologies from their association with the apparatus of the colonial-ethnographic state as embodied by administrators such as Mountstuart Elphinstone and James Tod (Scott 2017). This expertise furnished them with a modest degree of social mobility and the means to engage with global networks of intellectual exchange, albeit mainly as consumers and translators.…”