May 2026 · 6 Min Read · Society · Culture

The Presence of Power

Rammohun Roy's radical claim — that good governance must be close — and why it still matters in an age of abstraction.

Explore the Argument
Central Observation

The Argument in One Line

Rammohun Roy, the 19th-century Indian thinker and reformer, made a deceptively simple claim: power that operates at a distance becomes unjust by design — not by accident. Governance, to be legitimate, must be physically and morally close to the people it governs.

Distant Governance
  • Rules by abstraction
  • Language barriers
  • No local knowledge
Roy's Demand
ethical proximity
Proximate Governance
  • Local language courts
  • Stable administrators
  • Answerable to governed
The Context

What Made This Moment

By 1831, the British East India Company had been governing large parts of the subcontinent not as a sovereign state, but as a profit-driven corporation with a private military. Its administration was structured for extraction, not engagement — rules written in London were applied to populations the rule-makers had never met.

At the same time, the Mughal Empire, which had once defined political legitimacy across South Asia, had been reduced to a ceremonial court in Delhi, its emperor dependent on British pension. Roy arrived in England carrying the voice of both worlds — the declining old order and the rising, restless subject class.

His 1832 text, the Exposition of the Judicial and Revenue Systems of India, appeared as Britain was itself debating the limits of its representative institutions, making Roy's critique of unaccountable power resonant on both sides of the colonial equation.

The Argument — How the Case is Built

The Logic, Step by Step

1
The East India Company's governance was structurally alienated — courts operated in foreign languages, tax assessments were made without local knowledge, and administrators rotated before they could understand the territories they oversaw, making injustice not a matter of bad intent but of bad design.
2
Roy drew on his own years inside the colonial bureaucracy as a munshi, revenue officer, and translator to show that policy devised in distant boardrooms was implemented clumsily on the ground — the system's flaws were empirical, not theoretical.
3
He argued that distance was not simply inefficient but unethical — when a farmer loses land due to a mistaken tax assessment made by someone who never visited his village, the violence is quiet and cumulative, not dramatic, but real.
4
Roy fused Enlightenment liberalism (Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone) with Persianate ethical traditions (akhlaq) and Hindu philosophical concepts (dharma) to argue that rulers are moral stewards, not just administrators — their legitimacy derives from ethical nearness, not military reach.
5
His specific proposals — Indian judges, trials in local languages, longer administrative tenures — were grounded in moral reasoning: a law that cannot be understood by those it governs is not merely inaccessible, it is unjust.
6
Roy also indicted Indian elites, arguing that collaboration without critique was a form of moral abdication — reform required pressure from within, using the tools of reason, law, and moral persuasion.
7
By carrying the Mughal emperor's voice to London, Roy insisted that India's political traditions had not been erased — only sidelined — and that older norms of justice and public ethics could temper the utilitarian logic of the Company.
The Forces at Play

What Is Actually Driving This

Ethical Proximity POLITICAL ECONOMIC CULTURAL PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL
Political

A corporation-state structure (the East India Company) created governance without democratic accountability, separating decision-making from consequence by design.

Economic

Revenue extraction required treating people as taxable units rather than subjects of governance, incentivising distance and abstraction over engagement and understanding.

Cultural

A deep assumption of civilisational hierarchy allowed British officials to govern India without learning its languages, histories, or moral frameworks — ignorance was institutionalised.

Philosophical

The conflict between utilitarian administrative logic (efficiency, uniformity) and ethical traditions that demanded rulers be morally present to those they governed.

Psychological

Bureaucratic distance numbs moral imagination — officials insulated from the consequences of their decisions can perpetuate harm without ever experiencing it as harm.

Who It Affects & How

Impact Across Groups

Ordinary Subjects
Farmers faced land loss from misread assessments; litigants waited months in courts where proceedings were conducted in languages they didn't speak. The system's incomprehensibility was itself a form of violence.
Indian Elites
Roy challenged the collaborating class directly — those who accepted colonial rewards without exercising moral critique were complicit in perpetuating the system's injustices, regardless of their personal benefits.
British Institutions
Roy's arrival in England unsettled the assumption that critique of empire could only come from within it — he appeared as a reasoning, comparative, universalist voice that used the British language of rights and reform against British governance itself.
Future Reformers
Roy's framework — proximate, ethical, linguistically grounded governance — directly influenced thinkers from Naoroji's economic critique to Gokhale's moral reformism, and echoed in Gandhi's insistence on decentralisation and civic nearness.
The Uncomfortable Truth

What Most Would Rather Not Confront

The violence of distant governance is not a product of malice — it is a product of structure. A system that separates decision-makers from the consequences of their decisions will produce injustice routinely, quietly, and without a villain. Roy's critique applies not only to colonial empires but to every modern bureaucracy, democratic or otherwise, that governs through data instead of presence.

The Takeaway

What to Walk Away With

Roy's central insight — that proximity is not a logistical preference but an ethical requirement of governance — is more urgent now than in 1832. As power becomes more automated, centralised, and statistically mediated, the question he raised two centuries ago returns with full force: can a government be just if it does not, in some meaningful sense, live among the people it governs?