Sedition, Law, and the British Empire in India: The Trial of Tilak (1908)

This article is a historical inquiry into the sedition trial in 1908 of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the most important anticolonial leaders in twentieth-century India. It argues that Tilak, in the grand spectacle of this political trial, rejected the British discourse of imperial justice that had served as the ground of the British Empire until then, and claimed a new discourse of legislative freedom for the people of India. The trial thus marked a fundamental discursive rupture in the history of empire and paved the way for mass anticolonial movements under the leadership of Gandhi.