Vernacular English: reading the anglophone in postcolonial India

their own respective contexts, the extent to which each concentrated on or privileged violence over their brethren in the pursuit of sovereignty is surely up for debate. Fratricide may well have been a means to the end of sovereignty during the violence which followed partition in 1947, but the relevance of fratricide specifically, as opposed to mere enmity and anti-imperial resentment, to discourses of sovereignty in the decades which came before could perhaps be developed further. Furthermore, there remains a jarring absence in the book of South Indian contribution to the ‘Indian Age’ that lies at the bedrock of Kapila’s thesis. While a small piece on Tamil revolutionary VVS Aiyar features in the second chapter, the focus on actors and regions attached to the northern expanses of the subcontinent does seem to somewhat weaken the general geographical applicability of what is otherwise a novel, hard-hitting thesis. Drawing inspiration from recent histories of the British Empire and from a wide variety of source material, Kapila’s wide-ranging exploration nonetheless makes for a gripping historical account of Indian intellectual thought during the later colonial period. Presenting and comparing the ideas of political figures from Tilak to Ambedkar to Patel, Kapila highlights the need to journey beyond the discourses of liberalism, socialism, and Marxism to understand how Indian political thought came to be preoccupied by questions of fraternity, violence, and sovereignty. Turning these political actors of the age into political thinkers, Kapila demonstrates how the protagonists of her work moved in and engaged with both Indian and global political circles and so calls attention to the intricacies of political thought within a subcontinental context. Background knowledge of the developments in India’s transition to independence is a prerequisite for those who seek to engage with Kapila’s argument. Nevertheless, Kapila’s book will be of interest to scholars interested in exploring alternatives to traditional accounts of modern Indian history.