'The Starched Boundaries of Civilization': Sympathetic Allegiance and the Subversive Politics of Affect in Colonial India

Abstract

The nature of sympathy, especially as it applied to the subjects of the newly designated Empress of India, was of some concern for Victorian Britons.1 An article in The Spectator on 6 January 1877 neatly encapsulated the question of the limits of sympathy—‘What are the causes of the breaks, or hiatuses, or failures in the human capacity of sympathy?’ Sympathy, as political scientist Sharon R. Krause argues, is of course limited by our capacity to be aware of other peoples’ sentiments, and the more powerful are generally less cognisant of the lives of the powerless.2 Krause addresses the role of affect in combating unjust laws in her argument for the proper role of the passions in moral judge..