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

Abstract

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.

An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective

“…Political theorists have recently revised this narrative by recovering alternative models by anticolonial thinkers and activists like Walter Rodney, who argued that development could be grounded in the popular and democratic activities of the masses (Temin 2023a). But while many postcolonial leaders embraced developmentalism in their efforts to sidestep neocolonialism and dependency, their projects ended up prioritizing "economic growth," bourgeois empowerment, and nationalism over class, caste, ethnic, and other forms of equality (Getachew 2019;2023). This article contributes to these recent accounts, but also shows how development preceded the Cold War and how attending to its material implementations can give us a critical perspective on anticolonial developmental alternatives.…”

“…But developmental ideologies and projects were not imposed on blank slates; they were reworked and refracted as they came into contact with specific actors and their priorities in their diffusions at home and abroad. Anticolonial thinkers and activists themselves deployed the language of development without resorting to idioms of racial inferiority, a point that I will return to in the last section (Getachew 2019;Marwah 2023;Temin 2023a).…”