Given both a traditional Sanskrit and an English education in Gujarat, Shyamji Krishnavarma became known in India as a Sanskrit scholar at a young age, and this reputation eventually brought him to England. Yet Krishnavarma was no simple Anglophile: deeply committed to the reformist Hindu Arya Samaj movement, he became a radical voice for anti-colonialism through the pages of his journal The Indian Sociologist (1905-1922), which was published first in London to wide international circulation, before moving to Paris and eventually Geneva to avoid legal repercussions. As this chapter outlines, Krishnavarma scorned the passivity of India’s moderate nationalists in favour of violent opposition to British rule, yet he also avoided the spiritualism and romantic attachment to violence of many of India’s ‘extremist’ leaders. Krishnavarma turned, instead, to the social theory of Herbert Spencer as the inspiration for a cosmopolitan anti-colonialism. In his work, ones sees the uptake of Spencer’s British anti-colonialism for Indian purposes. But far from simply echoing Spencer or British liberalism, Krishnavarma was an active adapter and creator, with a particular goal of putting theoretical conceptions drawn from those sources into political practice.
Olaf KÜHNE & Laura LEONARDI, Ralf Dahrendorf: Between Social Theory and Political Practice
