Review essay: Gandhi and the guardians—Michael Edwardes and the apologetics of imperialism

Abstract

Gandhi and British India are dead but not forgotten. Since his assassination in early 1948, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi has continued to be analyzed, scrutinized, vilified, popularized, and sanitized. In fact, in recent years there appears to have been, if anything, an increase in interest in Gandhi's life and ideas at both the popular and academic levels. The British rulers of India have met a similar fate, and the past decade or so, especially, has seen the growth of both scholarly and popular interest in the British Raj. Part of the reason for this “return” of the Raj as a subject for novels, television, movies, and popular and academic history may have had to do with the rise of Thatcherism in Britain. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and the British Conservative Party were involved in an explicit attempt to resurrect what they understood as Victorian virtues and regain some of the lost glory of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Pax Britannica. Their project, to reassert Victorian values and resurrect imperial pride, not surprisingly, came at the very time when Britain was in the throes of national decline; in ethnic, racial, and economic terms, the empire on which the sun never set has come home to roost.

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Notes on contributors

Mark T. Berger

I would like to thank Max Harcourt of the School of History, University of New South Wales, and the anonymous BCAS readers who read an earlier draft of this article and inspired a number of improvements. However, any errors of fact or interpretation are, of course, the sole responsibility of the author.