Ideas of India
A website curated by Rahul Sagar seeks to further the study of modern Indian political thought by drawing attention to the vibrant public sphere that took shape in the century prior to independence.
Research
Current Research
I am interested in a very old question in politics: what makes leaders and officials behave well? The prevailing view is that good behavior is likeliest under a liberal democratic regime. But this confidence ought to be shaken when we consider how easily wily politicians and experienced bureaucrats can dodge democratic oversight and public accountability. So, the question persists: what makes leaders and officials behave well?
My first book, Secrets and Leaks, examined this question in the American context. It shed light on the norms and practices that shape what leaders and officials can do when they act in secret. Praised as “a shining deed in a naughty world”, Secrets and Leaks received the National Academy of Public Administration’s 2014 Louis Brownlow Award, the Society for the Policy Sciences’ 2015 Myres S. McDougal Prize, and was designated a 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Title.
Subsequently, I began investigating norms about executive power in the “Asian” context, focusing on India and Singapore. Noticing the paucity of primary sources on India, in 2015 I began building a searchable database, Ideas of India, which indexes every English-language periodical published in India between 1800-1947. Praised as “an astonishing act of public service”, this pioneering database, which now receives upwards of 2,000 visitors a month, features more than 340,000 entries from 450 periodicals.
In the course of building Ideas of India, I was able to track down the first English-language treatise on government written in modern India. This treatise, which was prepared by Madhava Rao, the most celebrated statesman in 19th century India, has been published as The Progressive Maharaja. It has been lauded as “a riveting act of retrieval”.
As I became adept at mining the archives, I gradually unearthed an array of long-lost essays by India’s metropolitan elite articulating competing visions of India’s place in the world. Since these worldviews continue to influence Indian decision-makers, these essays have now been published as To Raise a Fallen People, which has been praised as “a must read for scholars and practitioners”.
More recently, I uncovered the first English-language play written in modern India. Penned by English Subba Rao, one of the first Indians to be schooled in English, Krishna Kumari dramatizes the tragic events that led to the subjugation of the Rajputs. It has been commended as a “fascinating and wholly original study of the beginnings of political thought in modern India”.
My latest book is The Birth of Indian Liberalism, which it recovers and restores “Letters to an Indian Raja by a Political Recluse”, the first work of political theory published in modern India. It has been described as “a remarkable achievement” that “revolutionises the history of South Asia’s political thinking.”
At present, I am halfway through From Swords to Words: The Making of Modern India. Drawing on hundreds of never-before-seen archival sources, this book is a sweeping intellectual history of 19th-century India that challenges prevailing conceptions about the ideas and personalities that shaped modern India.
Once From Swords to Words is complete, I will be focusing on two works-in-progress, The Last Great Man, an intellectual biography of Lee Kuan Yew, and Leaving the West, a travelogue and memoir that examines “Asian” challenges to “Western” ideals about good governance.