This article reveals the Charter Act of 1833 as a turning point in the history of British-Indian political thought, which foreclosed, for a generation, liberal efforts to reform Britain's avowedly despotic regime in India. Anticipating a victory in their transmarine campaign to make the state accountable to an Indian ‘public’, reformers were disillusioned to find instead that the new Act was founded on enlightened despotism. Attempting to gather popular support for the authoritarian vision of reform espoused by Thomas Babington Macaulay and the other framers of the Act, Governor-General William Bentinck organized a grand fireworks display in Calcutta. The failure of this event, however, compounded the initial backlash against the Act, widening the rift between state and ‘public’, and precipitating the latter's decline as an effective political formation.