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Mama Parmanand: The Forgotten Architect of Indian Liberalism
Rahul Sagar's new book unearths the letters of Mama Parmanand, a forgotten liberal who proposed co-adjudicators, strict public-private finance, and a 'permanent aristocracy of intellect'.
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A new book by Rahul Sagar recovers the intellectual legacy of a 19th-century thinker who shaped liberal ideas in India outside the British Raj. The volume, reviewed this week by a senior journalist and author, focuses on the letters of Narayan Mahadev Parmanand, known as Mama Parmanand, to an unnamed Indian ruler.
Mama Parmanand was born in 1838 in the Konkan region and educated at Elphinstone College in Bombay. He worked as a journalist and corresponded with figures such as M.G. Ranade, Badruddin Tyabji and Pherozeshah Mehta. The reviewer writes that Sagar's book "straddles political theory and history" and that the introduction alone runs 120 pages.
The reviewer argues that decades of left-leaning historiography have erased figures like Parmanand from the mainstream record. Historians trained after independence focused overwhelmingly on Mughal court politics or the Congress-led freedom struggle, leaving little room for thinkers who operated in the princely states. Sagar's work aims to correct that imbalance.
Parmanand's core concern was governance in the princely states, territories where the British ruled indirectly. His central problem, the reviewer notes, was the role of the British Resident, the central government's representative in each state. Residents controlled all communication between the ruler and Calcutta, and Parmanand believed they used that gatekeeping power to undermine local authority.
His proposed solution was to make the ruler and the Resident "co-adjudicators" – partners in administration rather than one supervising the other. The idea, the reviewer writes, was to turn Residents into "partners rather than mere censors."