In the wake of the Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 and the subsequent transfer of the Mughal right to administer and tax (diwani) to the East India Company in 1765, the political and economic bases to Muslims’ marginalisation were spatially correlated in a general shift whereby major foci of power and learning followed the gravitation of economic activity to the British centre.^[35] The formative years of the British regime saw Muslims generally left out of the economic, political and cultural boardrooms of the colonial interchange. As a Hindu bhadralok (member of the urban elite) steeped in Muslim culture, Rammohun is, therefore, a transitional figure who still evinces a confluence that would be emphatically undone in later colonial discourse.

Born into a Mughal court and dying in England, Rammohun even exceeded at being transitional. In between, his career encapsulated the sea-change going on around him. After a period of youthful travelling which seems to have included some formal Islamic training at Patna,^[36] he accumulated considerable wealth through commercial dealings with British interests and took on a number of financial and estate management posts with British employers, in particular John Digby. In 1815, more than ten years after the publication of the Tuhfat, he settled in Calcutta, where he took up the tireless and multilingual public attack on corruptions and abuses for which he was to become renowned, rapidly antagonising Hindu orthodoxy by translating sacred writ into popular and even foreign languages. On the basis of his reading of the Hindu (which, for him, meant Vedantic) canon – a monotheistic, rationalist and socially reformist construction of sacred writ that strikingly resembled that of the European Orientalists – he launched a campaign to clean up Hinduism, singling out polytheism, idolatry and sati (burning widows alive) for particular attention. In contrast to European critics of contemporary Hinduism, however, Rammohun was even-handed in his denunciations, applying the same standards to Christian practices as he did to Hindu or Muslim ones. In my view, the adroit switch whereby he repeatedly held British institutions accountable on their own terms represents one of the formative moments of Indian nationalism. Accordingly, while he so admired Christian teachings that he learned Greek and Hebrew in order to translate the Gospel, his resultant Precepts of Jesus contained only the moral and social teachings, omitting the miracles, divine incarnation and other supernatural machinations that he regarded as irrational and absurd in popular Hinduism. Consistently, rejecting the Christian Trinity and Hindu polytheism alike, he set up the first public unitarian association in the world (the Atmiya Sabha, soon to develop into the Brahmo Samaj, whose influence on the nationalist movement would be disproportionate to its numbers,^[37]) to which he attracted, among others, the Scottish evangelist William Adam (who thereby became known among the European community as the second fallen Adam!). In this and many other regards, Rammohun’s public career articulated the characteristically nationalist demand for Indians and Europeans to be subject to a common set of rational universal conditions.^[38]

The decade that intervened between the appearance of the Tuhfat and the commencement of that public career has led to the Tuhfat’s being seen as disconnected from Rammohun’s historical mission. In consequence – and much more significantly – the genealogy of Indian nationalism is disconnected from the Indian Islamic tradition. As we shall see, however, there was no rupture between the Tuhfat and Rammohun’s later programme. The decade in question was probably taken up with such mundane but demanding distractions as the making of money and the learning of English. Thus we turn to the Tuhfat.