Radical Empire: Tilak, Jinnah and Indian Home Rule
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This paper begins the work of reconstructing the ideological foundations of India’s campaign for home rule during the First World War. It examines the ideas of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohammad Ali Jinnah—and, to a lesser extent, Annie Besant—to uncover a shared argument for imperial federation that cut across their otherwise disparate social and political origins.

These figures sought to preserve some of the most significant products of colonial rule—namely constitutional law, state authority, and the protective shell and universal promise of crown and empire. But they concurrently filled these old colonial containers with new content: representative democracy, racial justice, and economic freedom. Because racial hierarchy had so thoroughly diluted any imperial claim to universality, their decision to reimagine empire for a federation of equal (but internally hierarchical) nations amounted to an act of radical conservatism. It would have been simpler, at the theoretical though not practical level, to discard empire altogether, rather than recast its entrenched system of racial inequality into a global democracy governed by local elites. By refusing a complete political and intellectual rupture, these still anticolonial leaders theorised a politics of freedom for India’s subject population which nevertheless worked with the conceptual terms of their foreign masters. This active negotiation with modernity was beset by anxieties over the very mass democracy it tried to encourage. Tilak, Jinnah, and Besant sought to manage this other conservative paradox through elite trusteeship and gradual reform.

The exceptional success of the Home Rulers lay in overcoming institutionalised religious divisions to locate political antagonism, not in the communal other, but in the colonial state itself. Therefore, however counterintuitive it may sound, the loyalist Home Rule Movement represented an uncommonly anticolonial moment in a freedom struggle vexed by internal difference.

Biography
Amar 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 History Centre Fellow, Oxford. His research focuses on anticolonial nationalism, religious politics, and the secular state. After completing his DPhil in History at Merton College, Oxford, Amar was elected Early-Career Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies at Corpus Christi College, 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 series. Amar’s academic articles and edited special issues on minorityhood and Kashmir have been published in leading journals: Global Intellectual History, Modern Intellectual History, and South Asia. His second research project explores the political thought of Hindu and Muslim conservatives across the twentieth century. Surmounting institutional divisions, these thinker-politicians collectively theorised ideas of state authority, freedom, (non)violence, and national culture.
Date: 2 February 2026, 16:00
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Pavilion Room
Speaker: Amar Sohal
Organising department: Asian Studies Centre
Organisers: Abraham Murad (University of Oxford), Jack Jacobs (Oriel College)
Organiser contact email address: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of: South Asian Intellectual History Seminars
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Booking email: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk
Audience: Public
Editor: Clare Salter