Lynn Zastoupil

Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain

winter 2013 aspect of his life. Fisher provides important context for the Chancery proceedings, which, as they involved estates, generally were directed at men rather than women. it is almost too much for the reader to follow the details attending each of Dyce Sombre’s attempts to convince the Court to vacate the verdict of lunacy. One begins not to care which physician declared what and whose opinion might or might not have been bought by whose influence. Yet the reiteration makes clear the point that such legal entanglements resulted in neither swift justice nor relief to any of the parties. Fisher concludes this long and pathetic, if not tragic, story by claiming that he does not “seek to produce a definitive reading of Dyce Sombre’s strange life.” rather he has sought to show how Dyce Sombre “challenged culturally constructed categories wherever he went” (327). the materials here are so suggestive, especially in the first half of the book, and Fisher’s grasp of British imperial and legal history is so deep, that one wishes he had allowed himself just a bit more imaginative play. i put the volume down wondering what psychological patterns, what imaginative coherence, one might extract from these many particulars. i wished also that Fisher had been as lucky in his copy editors as i have been, as more shapely sentences would have made me feel yet more poignantly the unshapeliness of this compelling life. Fisher indeed presents a compelling story, one that will fascinate any scholar interested in Britain’s indian empire or its legal consequences. Mary Ellis Gibson University of North Carolina at Greensboro

J.S. Mill's Encounter with India

John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company in London for thirty-five years (1823-58), drafting many hundreds of dispatches for the guidance of British administrators in India. Historians have long been aware of Mills involvement in British Indian government. This comprehensive effort brings together different strands of scholarship on Mill to determine the character of his role based on analyses of his draft despatches and comparisons of their practical and theoretical concerns with the broad themes of Mills major writings on political philosophy and economics. The essays in this collection explore specific aspects of Mills approach to Indian issues, including religion, law, education, and security, and also place him within the broader currents of utilitarianism. The contributors present different perspectives on the ideology in Mills pragmatic work for the Company and his personal philosophy.

Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians

genders. The Indian reformer was presented to King William IV and seated among the foreign ambassadors at Williams coronation. He attended London plays in the company of nobility, was introduced to the House of Lords, and flirted with a popular actress with aristocratic male friends. Religious and political thinkers sought him out to engage in spirited discussions, and Dissenting and Anglican clergymen vied with each other for the honor of his presence at their services. Prominent middle-class reformers were constantly at his side, their daughters or unmarried sisters often especially attentive to him. And, while in Manchester, a crowd of factory workers followed Rammohun about on his tour, the men and women insisting on shaking his hand or embracing him. As a contemporary noted, Rammohun was clearly the lion of the season (Bentinck 658-59). Rammohuns celebrity owed much to his remarkable accomplishments. A noted reformer, he had campaigned in Bengal for religious reform, western education, and the diffusion of modern knowledge. Learned in several languages and conversant with the intellectual traditions of western Europe and South Asia, Rammohun was a prominent religious controversialist who used Sanskritic texts and the Bible to confound pandits and missionaries, respectively. The technologies of modernity were facile tools in his hands as well: a pioneer of Indian journalism, Rammohun used the power of the printing press to influence governments and public opinion in both Bengal and Britain. He was also a modernizer in politics, employing his command of English and the conventions of British political discourse to lead Bengali opposition to colonial policies and to craft brilliant memorials to the British authorities. With additional contributions to the development of Bengali prose and

Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible

The Unitarian movement was always a transnational phenomenon. In Reformation Europe, anti-Trinitarians could be found in Italian and Swiss territories, Spain, Poland, Transylvania, Holland, Britain, and elsewhere. Persecution, the printing press, and the circulation of people and texts aided the dispersal of heterodoxy. A case in point is Socinianism. The Inquisition drove dissident Italians north of the Alps. One refugee was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604),1 who resided in Lyon, Basel, and Transylvania before settling in Krakow. In each place Socinus associated with like-minded individuals, and in Poland he and local anti-Trinitarians forged the doctrines that bear his name. Socinianism flourished in seventeenth-century Poland until the Counter-Reformation silenced or dispersed adherents to Transylvania, Holland, and East Prussia. During its heyday in Rakow, the Polish movement attracted heterodox individuals from Germany and dispatched emissaries to other regions. They also printed a series of heterodox works, including the Racovian Catechism (1605), which was reissued in multiple translations in the ensuing decades.

Notorious and Convicted Mutilators: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible

This article links two famous individuals from different parts of the world who produced in the same year (1820) similar extracts of the four gospels. It argues that this was the result of globalizing processes that diffused unconventional views of the Bible to three continents and made international celebrities out of heterodox writers. The hitherto unconnected stories of Rammohun Roy and Thomas Jefferson are also used to shed light on a long, bitter controversy in Britain about the doctrine of the Trinity, a controversy that followed the flow and counterflow of ideas and people between core and periphery fashioned by empire.

John Stuart Mill and India.

Beginning as a junior clerk in 1823, John Stuart Mill spent thirty-five years as a colonial administrator in India House, the London headquarters of the East India Company, which dominated the Indian subcontinent. In his Autobiography, Mill paid scant attention to his long imperial career, and following his lead, later commentators have concluded that Indian administration was insignificant for Mills intellectual development. Rejecting the long-accepted interpretation, this book suggests that important parallels exist between Mills development as a thinker and his neglected India House career.

J. S. Mill and Indian Education

J. S. Mills role in the Indian education controversy is well known, but scarcely well understood. That he drafted, in 1836, a despatch sharply critical of Macaulays infamous Minute on Indian Education, is general knowledge now. That in drafting the despatch Mill drew upon the ideas of H. H. Wilson, a noted Orientalist and sharp critic of Macaulay and the Anglicists, has been adequately demonstrated. That the despatch was never sent to India, because of the objections of the President of the Board of Trade, John Hobhouse, a Whig with some utilitarian connections, has been common knowledge for several decades.