BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:talks.ox.ac.uk BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Radical Empire: Tilak\, Jinnah and Indian Home Rule - Amar Sohal DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20260202T160000Z DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20260202T173000Z UID:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/1e04f52e-b0bc-46c2-a0ab-48fc31ca9fff/ DESCRIPTION:This paper begins the work of reconstructing the ideological f oundations of India’s campaign for home rule during the First World War. It examines the ideas of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohammad Ali Jinnah—an d\, to a lesser extent\, Annie Besant—to uncover a shared argument for i mperial federation that cut across their otherwise disparate social and po litical origins.\n \nThese figures sought to preserve some of the most sig nificant products of colonial rule—namely constitutional law\, state aut hority\, and the protective shell and universal promise of crown and empir e. But they concurrently filled these old colonial containers with new con tent: representative democracy\, racial justice\, and economic freedom. Be cause racial hierarchy had so thoroughly diluted any imperial claim to uni versality\, their decision to reimagine empire for a federation of equal ( but internally hierarchical) nations amounted to an act of radical conserv atism. It would have been simpler\, at the theoretical though not practica l level\, to discard empire altogether\, rather than recast its entrenched system of racial inequality into a global democracy governed by local eli tes. By refusing a complete political and intellectual rupture\, these sti ll anticolonial leaders theorised a politics of freedom for India’s subj ect population which nevertheless worked with the conceptual terms of thei r foreign masters. This active negotiation with modernity was beset by anx ieties over the very mass democracy it tried to encourage. Tilak\, Jinnah\ , and Besant sought to manage this other conservative paradox through elit e trusteeship and gradual reform.\n \nThe exceptional success of the Home Rulers lay in overcoming institutionalised religious divisions to locate p olitical antagonism\, not in the communal other\, but in the colonial stat e itself. Therefore\, however counterintuitive it may sound\, the loyalist Home Rule Movement represented an uncommonly anticolonial moment in a fre edom struggle vexed by internal difference.\n \nBiography \nAmar Sohal is an intellectual historian of modern India and Pakistan. He is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at King’s College London and Koch Histo ry Centre Fellow\, Oxford. His research focuses on anticolonial nationalis m\, religious politics\, and the secular state. After completing his DPhil in History at Merton College\, Oxford\, Amar was elected Early-Career Res earch Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Corpus Christi Colle ge\, Cambridge. There he revised his DPhil dissertation for a monograph\, The Muslim Secular: Parity and the Politics of India’s Partition(Oxford University Press\, 2023)\, published in the Oxford Historical Monographs s eries. Amar’s academic articles and edited special issues on minorityhoo d and Kashmir have been published in leading journals: Global Intellectual History\, Modern Intellectual History\, and South Asia. His second resear ch project explores the political thought of Hindu and Muslim conservative s across the twentieth century. Surmounting institutional divisions\, thes e thinker-politicians collectively theorised ideas of state authority\, fr eedom\, (non)violence\, and national culture.\n\nSpeakers:\nAmar Sohal LOCATION:St Antony's College (Pavilion Room & Teams )\, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF TZID:Europe/London URL:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/1e04f52e-b0bc-46c2-a0ab-48fc31ca9fff/ BEGIN:VALARM ACTION:display DESCRIPTION:Talk:Radical Empire: Tilak\, Jinnah and Indian Home Rule - Ama r Sohal TRIGGER:-PT1H END:VALARM END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR