“Political Deadness”: Raj Intellectuals, Geographical Imagination, and the Denial of Indian Sovereignty

Abstract Drawing upon critical perspectives that conceptualize geopolitics as a discourse, this paper shows how Raj intellectuals fashioned a practice of sovereignty denial in late-colonial South Asia. The colonial discourse erased pre-colonial Hindustan and replaced it with an “India” whose ontology was geographical. Command of India’s geographical ontology allowed Raj intellectuals to narrate and historicize India as a place that had periodically become politically dead, that is, reduced to a geography of anarchy and violence. In this telling, Pax Britannica was transforming India’s ontology from a geography to a polity, and India could not be given sovereignty until the project was complete. The spectre of India’s relapse into a violent geography upon British withdrawal was raised to deny the sovereignty that Indians asked for. This discursive practice of denying sovereignty—which entails systematic investments in anti-geographical as well as ahistorical characterizations of spaces which are lived social and historical realities—has survived decolonization. It has thrived on the subcontinent in the form of the Akhand Bharat revisionist project. As it adds a new chapter to the story of modern international thought, the paper also brings out previously unexamined affinities in the geographical imagination of writers, scholars, ideologues, and administrators such as John Robert Seeley, Henry George Keene, Lord Curzon, Alfred Lyall, Vincent Smith, V.D. Savarkar, and V.S. Naipaul.