Indian Liberals

Periodicals

Most of this archive was not published as one-off books. It came out in runs: a fortnightly journal, a booklet series that lasted fifty years, a budget analysis every spring, a memorial lecture every autumn. Read in sequence they show an argument being made and remade over decades. Choose a run to browse it; every item links its original PDF.

1775 works · 15 runs

Booklets, papers and lectures

655 works · 5 runs

Booklet series
Forum of Free Enterprise Booklets

618 works · 1956–2019 · 5 sub-series

The longest continuous run in the archive. Founded in Bombay in 1956 by A. D. Shroff, the Forum of Free Enterprise argued the case for the market economy to a country then settling into planning, and it did so chiefly through a stream of slim saddle-stitched booklets — a lecture, a budget analysis, a panel discussion — printed cheaply and posted to members and student associates for a few rupees a year. Between 1956 and 2019 the Forum issued hundreds of them, drawing in Palkhivala, Masani, B. R. Shenoy, Colin Clark, Hayek and Friedman alongside bankers, industrialists and civil servants. The booklets are not serially numbered: the colophon on the back page carries the printing date rather than a booklet number, so the run is ordered chronologically.
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Booklet series
Swatantra Party

14 works · 1959–1973

The pamphlet output of India's first liberal party. Founded in 1959 by C. Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and N. G. Ranga against the Nagpur resolution on cooperative farming, the Swatantra Party fought four general elections and argued its case chiefly in cheap pamphlets sold at meetings and posted to members: the Statement of Principles of 1959, the election manifestos, the annual answer to the Union Budget, and a run of short polemics on land reform, devaluation, planning and poverty. Read in sequence they are the closest thing India has to a sustained liberal opposition programme, written while the argument was still live.
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Booklet series
Indian Liberal Group

11 works · 1985–2007 · 1 sub-series

What the organised liberal tradition became after the Swatantra Party wound up. The Indian Liberal Group, sustained from Mumbai largely by S. V. Raju, kept liberals meeting and publishing: a manifesto in 1985, the Basic Principles and the Constitution of the Group in 2000, an annual Liberal Budget through the mid-2000s, and the papers and convention reports in between. Its newsletter, The Liberal Position, is indexed issue by issue under Magazines and journals.
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Occasional papers
CCS Publications

9 works · 2000–2022

Books and pamphlets from the Centre for Civil Society in New Delhi. The run began in 1997 with the numbered Viewpoint pamphlets, each making a single contrarian case at essay length: that population causes prosperity, that Peter Bauer was a true friend of the world's poor. It has since widened into fuller volumes, among them Milton Friedman's two pieces on Indian planning recovered from the 1950s, the S. V. Raju festschrift, and an anthology of essays by young Indians on what it means to be a liberal here. Written for circulation rather than the seminar room, they mark the arrival of a younger, campaigning liberalism after 1991.
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Occasional papers
Liberty Institute Occasional Paper

3 works · 2003–2008

Occasional papers from the Liberty Institute, New Delhi, applying market reasoning to concrete Indian policy questions — urban land and housing, automobility, the effect of globalisation on the poor. Longer and more research-shaped than a pamphlet, shorter than a book.
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Magazines & journals

1118 issues · 9 runs, indexed issue by issue