30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST general in 1823, the response of the intelligentsia was not merely of disapproval; they were more concerned with their own position within the scheme of the Empire. A memorandum submitted to the Supreme. Court by Rammohun Roy and five others underlined this anxiety: ... the inhabitants of Calcutta would be no longer justified in boasting, that they are fortunately placed by Providence under the protection of the whole British Nation, or that the king of England and his Lords and Commons are their legislators, and that they are secured in the enjoyment of the same civil and religious privileges that every Briton is entitled to in England.3 Whenever administrative practices became discriminatory and authoritarian, the intelligentsia registered their protest, invoking British commitment to liberal principles. But they hardly influenced the way in which the administration was actually run, for to the British India was not a field for liberal practice, but a colony to be held in subjection. Subsequently the sense of affinity slowly gave way to alienation. Within the parameters of liberal premises and inherent in the above process was another stream of consciousness which tried to realise, in critical terms, the colonial character of British rule. Despite the intellectual influences of the West filtered through the colonial agency, and perhaps partly because of that, the intelligentsia was able to sense the significance of the qualitatively different polity evolving around them. Some of them like Akshay Kumar Dutt speculated about the implications of dependence, particularly in the light of the ideas thrown up by the French Revolution. Rammohun tried to assess what India was loosing in material terms due to the British connection. He calculated the annual drain of wealth from India to England since the battle of Plassy. Gopal Hari Deshmukh located the reason for India's poverty in the nature of British trade which exploited the natural resources of India. That the British connection, contrary to the liberal assumption, was in reality detrimental to the political progress and economic prosperity of the country slowly dawned on the intelligentsia. An early articulation of this was by Prasanna Kumar Tagore, one of the signatories to the memorandum on press regulation, in 1831: Without her (India) dependence on England as her conqueror and possessor, her political situation would be more respectable and her inhabitants would be more wealthy and prosperous. The example of America which shows what she was when subject to