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In early autumn in 1869 in British India, two men were born who devoted their lives to the articulation of emergent political subjectivities in what would become, in 1947, independent India. The story of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the political agitator credited with having brought the British Raj to its knees through satyagraha, has been immortalized, inspiring 20th century civil rights movements around the world. The story of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, diplomat, renowned writer and orator, leader of the Indian Liberal Party, and, at ten days his senior, Gandhi’s “conscience-keeper” (Ramanan 24), is largely forgotten.1 If Gandhi, known as the “Mahatma,” is the epic revolutionary hero of India’s anticolonial resistance, then Sastri is the moderate footnote who countered the romance of Gandhian civil disobedience with the civility and pragmatics of reform. Whose story is better suited to “the politicohistorical presents within which we now live and write” (Scott 57)? This essay returns to David Scott’s 2004 argument that postcolonialists have for too long uncritically utilized a Fanonian “longing for total revolution” (6) as the template through which to evaluate all forms of anticolonial political practice. In Scott’s telling, assumptions regarding the fundamentally “negative structure” of colonial occupation and the priority of “the colonized’s agency in resisting or overcoming” colonialism have delimited the writing of postcolonial histories (6). I propose that the critical sidelining of Sastri, “a moderate in revolutionary times” (Hand 162), results from just such a preoccupation with conventionally narratable forms of radical politics. For instance, the introduction to a recent volume on Revolutionary Lives in South Asia begins with the familiar Marxist-Leninist account of revolutionaries as those who “catalyse the transition from capitalism to socialism” (Maclean and Elam, 1). Discussed revolutionaries, like M.N. Roy, were interested not in “social reform but an aggressive political rejection of . . . cultural conventions” (Manjapra 68). There is no place here—nor in any major history of South Asian anticolonialism to date—for Sastri, who rejected aggression and opposed non-cooperation, who described himself as “a lover of the golden mean” (“Confession” 5), and who was “an unflinching proponent” of anglophone education as a tool for nation-building in India (Bayly 2011, 15).